[thewave46]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

But isn't there a growing rural/urban divide everywhere else in the Western world? There might be some funny exceptions, like Southern Germany, where you can find a high-tech manufacturing plant in the middle of nowhere and young people with Masters degrees like living in little villages and don't see the big draw of moving to a metropolis.

In Canada, increasingly, we are moving from a federation of nation-style provinces to a federation of metropolitan city states, where the largest metro has north of 50% of the province's population, and growing, calls all the shots in the provincial legislature, and the depopulating rural areas basically either cater to metropolitan tourism or service formerly-metropolitan retirees.

So we might have to update our analogy of Canada from "being like the EU" to "being like the UAE".

I'm mostly speaking from a Canadian point-of-view, but many of the issues I've touched on are Western world issues at large. My main point was that these pan-Western problems are probably going to become more important than the more historical problems we've faced.