> What the hell gives one place the right, particularly when it consistently votes down the desired values of the other, to prevent it from leaving and going its own way? Self-determination as a principle isn't magically restricted to national borders only. That would be a ridiculous assertion.

How granular does this asserted right go? Should Edmonton be able to secede from Alberta? Can I run outside and put up a flag on my front lawn?

It goes pretty granular. I don't really like secession in concept, in this case it's a manifestation that governments like to steal more power than they absolutely must hold at that level instead of leaving it at lower ones. This gives someone in BC a hell of a lot too much influence on how someone in Alberta lives and vice-versa when really not much besides border, military, and treaties/diplomacy needs to be handled nationally. Things should be made as local as possible. I would prefer municipal or neighborhood-level decision making for a lot of things because it's actually really hard to scale democracy well and because the losing minority grows as you make decisions at higher levels.

There are practical limits to this principle, very hard for a landlocked city to secede, but at least in principle it seems morally correct if not practically possible. But I struggle to see how someone can conceivably oppose colonialism and also oppose secession.

Is it actually morally correct? Philosophically, this ends up with the ideal government being every single person determining their own rules, doesn't it? The ideal state of things would be to reject democracy and move to libertarianism? I'd argue that such a society does not function, and having a functional society is also a moral good.

On a more practical note, the Alberta government is currently actively meddling in municipal politics and policies, so in the currently discussed application it seems more of a "I want to have a government that's as large as possible that I can still have power over".

No, it's fine for governments to fix externalities. I just believe they should do it at low levels.

I don't support Alberta meddling in local politics. I don't support the US federal or state governments doing this. If cities or neighborhoods want to come together and say "we want a blue community in this red state" or vice versa that's a just form of self-governance.

I actually believe this is how we make democracy work better. It has scale problems but remains the least-bad form of government so we should work to design systems that make it function well.

Letting people self-assort to live with others with their values under rules that reflect those within reason is good.

How do you address issues where tragedy of the commons comes into play? Every individual neighbourhood/smallest unit of government would (rightly) pick the best option for themselves.

Having a large representative base is the easiest way to prevent that.

Can you give me examples of situations like this?

I am perfectly fine with something like the clean air and water acts (in principle if not implementation). Obviously people in an upstream town aren't allowed to dump pollution in the river to save money.

But why would the upstream town be interested in governing what they dump?

Clearly someone/something has to assert the value that downstream towns have the right to unpolluted water. And won't that be the higher level government preventing the upstream town from asserting their rules and values?

Yes actually. I'm not opposed to any government above a highly-local level. The point of government is basically to fix externalities and run defense/diplomacy. For rivers we do in fact need co-ordinated governance to prevent people from polluting others' water downstream.

>How granular does this asserted right go? Should Edmonton be able to secede from Alberta?

Yes

>Can I run outside and put up a flag on my front lawn?

Yes, but the overhead burden of running a municipality even if it only has a population of 1 would likely quickly make you reconsider

Well-put thank you. I think the end state that makes this not a slippery slope is that there are certain practicalities that make some responsibilities impractical beyond a certain scale. Where it is correct in its maximalist form though is that we should relegate the most possible freedom to the individual.

I hope more people can embrace this way of thinking. It's not really partisan. If anything it lets people operate more democratically where voices and engagement mean more. It lets people live how they want in communities with shared values. It lets us run many different policy experiments across many different places to develop better policies.

On the second point it should be noted that the awful FPTP system creates the regional distortions that make it appear that the regions are more divided than they really are. One looks on the map and it seems like Alberta is near uniform blue but that's because of FPTP. The reality is that ~64% voted one way and a sizeable amount of Alberta voted in opposition.

If we fixed our voting system to be more truly representative I think some of these divisions would go away.

See also: California

When Quebec held a referendum in 1995 on separation (not secession), the Cree nation in northern Quebec held its own referendum on what to do if Quebec separates, and voted 96% to separate from Quebec and remain in Canada. The Parti Québécois, the provincial gov't of Quebec at the time, sputtered "Quebec is not divisible!" which created a lot of awkwardness around the whole question of Quebec leaving Canada.