(an ealier version of the upper page)
Too many governments:
From the Canadian citizens perspective (and I believe an American's too) we have too many levels of government and they are managed in precisely the wrong order.
So what levels are unnecessary and what should the management structure be?
First of all , the National Government.
We need the National Government.
It send us off to die in wars (we wouldn't want to miss that), prints our money, including a new coin-of-the-week, gives us a reason to have a national airline of which we re all so proud, gives us a really cool flag, is available to blame for almost every disaster, gives us a not-too-bad national anthem, gives our money to foreign dictators, and gives us some identification other than American so we can safely travel abroad and not get stoned by angry mobs
At the other end of the spectrum is our municipal government.
We need that too.
Our municipal government is actually the most important government in our day to day lives.
It sweeps our streets, gives our clean drinking water (with some exceptions), gets rid of all of our waste from the most innocuous to the most disgusting and dangerous (except nuclear but some day the municipalities will be left holding the bag there too.). It runs our schools (or should), it plows our streets, it digs our ditches, allows gravel pits to be opened next to our homes, allows slum landlords to dun crack houses, provides us with a police force or imitation thereof, plans (hah!) our communities, and legislates some of the silliest laws known to man, and last but not least provides us with the longest running sitcom on TV if the council meetings get broadcast.
So guess which level of government we could live without?
The oldest one. The leftover from another era of Lords and Barons and privilege and bondage. The Provincial (in US read: State) government.
Most provincial governments can’t make up their mind whether they want to be municipal governments micro-managing every school principal's print budget or National governments establishing their own embassies; complete with redundant pomp and expense.
There are some areas that do need to be managed on a scale between municipal/regional and federal. In most cases however, these do not fit well within provincial boundaries.
The best example of this is fisheries. The problems in the Bay of Fundy are of little concern to the people in the Gulf of St Lawrence, and the BC/Alaska fishing disputes beg for the local communities to act together instead of ripping each other off. Similarly the Great Lakes and Red River basin requires the communities affected by it’s flooding and pirating problems to work in a common empowered structure to solve their problems with both the people and THE MONEY coming from the communities themselves not shovelled from on high by some Federal Fisheries God. (He can go chase the Spanish outside the 200 mile limit if she wants.)