Ontario transfers $1 billion a year to the Yukon for exactly the kind of Development you're talking about. It's growing and expanding just as the government wants it to.

You mean Ottawa? Because the province of Ontario is not contributing to the territory of Yukon.

Equalization payments:

"do not, technically, involve wealthy provinces making payments to poor provinces, although in practice this is what happens, via the federal treasury."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments

This is NOT in practice what happens. This way of framing it is popular by separatist segments in Alberta, but it's bullshit. Transfer payments come out of federal tax levies. No province is being targeted for levies. If one province has richer people and thus pay more in federal tax, then yes they will likely have a net loss in transfer payments. But this is no different than ANY federal service, whether it comes to military bases, natural resources, child care benefits, etc. It's simply how taxes work. If you're a poor person in Alberta you're paying less into equalization than a rich person in Quebec.

Except that Quebec has additional social services that are being paid for by these levies. Child care for example. Also revenue from high income taxes often come with increased prices for residents so while two people may pay similar taxes between the provinces they can have vastly different standards of living. Not unlike here in SF where you can easily pay $35k/year in taxes and you’re barely getting by while people in other cities are paying far less taxes and they own their own homes.

That's exactly what happens via the unequal distribution of federal income to the provinces.

We can argue that it's a good thing the program works the way it does and I'd argue, for the most part, that's true [0]. But all the programs you listed and the eq. program are net transfers from rich (and less politically powerful [1]) to poorer provinces.

It's akin to when coastal Americans bemoan that fly over Americans get net transfer of wealth from them.

[0]having lived in many US states, I kinda like knowing that NL, or NB is taken care of when they're in the dumps

[1] Being a 905er myself, let's be honest here! Quebec, between separatism and as a battleground province, can throw a hissy fit and get whatever they want (and good for them! Hate the game, not the player.)

> But all the programs you listed and the eq. program are net transfers from rich (and less politically powerful [1]) to poorer provinces.

Provinces don't pay tax. People do. They're net transfers from rich people (regardless of where they live) to poorer provinces. It just so happens that Alberta has a high per-capita income these days (not always the case). That's not a bad problem to have.

Better not use that $1B to buy Huawei stuff.

Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality that has settled in people due to the amount of repetition that Huawei somehow is doing something bad yet no single piece of evidence has come out to support those claims.

Restricting competition by using FUD is nothing new to the Linux community, but seeing this being done at the govt level and people buying into this whole tribal mentality is astonishing. I have more issues with some monopolistic tendencies that companies like Google or Microsoft in the 90s had, especially with how Android is effectively becoming closed source through the Play Store and Services, yet you do not see that level of collective paranoia going on.

>Why? I'm honestly bothered by this Cold War mentality...

You should direct this question to China instead.

A lot of our north is what is known as the Canadian Shield. It's very bad to develop on, and global warming will only do a little bit to improve that.

I just read the Wikipedia article on the Canadian Shield but it’s not immediately obvious to me why it would be bad to develop on. Is it the thin topsoil basically?

Yes, I think the "heats up" in the title was very inappropriate. The humanity will likely collapse within 10 years and all we worry about is our internet speeds.

Don't you mean "appropriate"? If global climate is heating up, people will naturally move northwards in Canada and Siberia to take advantage of newly fertile farmland and moderate temps.

> people will naturally move northwards in Canada and Siberia to take advantage of newly fertile farmland

Is this the early 1900's? Farming these days doesn't require a large population - the day of family farms are few and far between. You need comparatively few people to farm an extraordinarily large area of land, so I can't see a reason why people would want to all move there for an industry they largely won't take part in.

I also doubt the moderate temperatures bit - while the average temperature will go up it will be subject to all sorts of radical weather, made more extreme by the atmospheres additional energy, and without the oceans to try and mitigate the temperature. I'm sure there will still be cold winters - moving the dial up an average of 5 C still sees the average January Fort McMurray day with a high of -5 C and a low of -17 C.

Also, Fort McMurray isn't North - it's 10 degrees latitude south and twenty degrees C warmer than Ilaquit.

That too - people think of the oil being in the "north", but it's not, if you look at the map, it's only a 3rd of the way north of the US/Canada border.