Not too sure about the US numbers, but up here...

Most of the population in Canada lives in urban centres. Between Montreal and environs, the Golden Horseshoe (Toronto to Hamilton along Lake Ontario), and Vancouver, you're looking at ~10 million out of a population of ~30 million. If you start adding in smaller centers like Winter^R^R^Rnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Ville de Quebec, and Halifax, you quickly run up over 50% of the population. So, how much weight should be given to the people that live in these cities vs the people that live in the rest of the country (which is vast and largely empty)? Weighing it strictly by population means that rural concerns will simply not be heard, but the current situation where a rural vote can be weighted up to eight times more heavily than an urban vote is not just.

The concerns are very different. For example, look at gun control. Of course, our attitudes about that sort of thing are quite different up here; there is no constitutional right to bear arms, and to be blunt, if you were a person who habitually carried a gun people would look at you funny. However, the kind of gun control regime that is appropriate for a large urban centre like Montreal or Toronto is hardly appropriate for Red Deer, Alberta. Complicating the issue is the problem of personal arms (ie- handguns) being smuggled from the US into Canada's major urban centres (which I think is already a much greater problem than any weed that might go the other way if we do legalise it up here).

Personally, I think the right thing to do is to devolve gun control to the municipality... however, under our constitution, it is firmly a federal responsibility. One possible way to handle that would be to create law that sets out several regimes, scaling from a useful minimum with loose restrictions on long guns (shotguns, rifles) with two or three levels up to a useful maximum requiring ironclad regulation, registration, and restriction on all firearms, and let the municipality decide which level they want to have. Under this model, there would be a minimum level of responsibility for dealing with firearms that would apply across the country, and municipalities could optionally select higher degrees of control (and the infrastructure to back them up) according to their particular context.

That's one area where the cities with their large population base are running over the concerns of the countryside. OTOH, let's take a look at the agricultural lobby, and what the policies that they have in place do to the price of food.

Milk and Eggs are handled via provincial marketing boards, that sell quotas to farmers. Farmers can buy and sell quotas among themselves as well. These quotas are firm; if a farm produces more than its quota, that excess must be destroyed, and certainly cannot be purchased by anyone. This serves to restrict supply, keeping prices high (eg- a typical price for a dozen eggs is ~2.50 and four litres of milk typically costs ~4.25). This allows farmers a handsome profit on these goods, out of the pocket of the people in the cities who have to buy these goods at the inflated prices.

So, what is the right balance? What is the right balance in your country? In many ways, the new schism is the urban/rural one, and handling it effectively may not be easy.

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------