Province

While some provinces were produced artificially by colonial powers, others were formed around local groups with their own ethnic identities.

In fact, the word province is an ancient term from public law, which means: "office belonging to a magistrate".

Before the French Revolution, France comprised a variety of jurisdictions (built around the early Capetian royal demesne), some being considered "provinces", though the term was also used colloquially for territories as small as a manor (châtellenie).

Most commonly referred to as "provinces", however, were the Grands Gouvernements, generally former medieval feudal principalities, or agglomerations of such.

For the United Kingdom use of the word is often pejorative, assuming a stereotype of the denizens of the provinces to be less culturally aware than those in the capital.

[1] The historic European provinces—built up of many small regions, called pays by the French and "cantons" by the Swiss, each with a local cultural identity and focused upon a market town—have been depicted by Fernand Braudel as the optimum-size political unit in pre-industrial Early Modern Europe.

"[2] Even centrally-organized France, an early nation-state, could collapse into autonomous provincial worlds under pressure, as during the sustained crisis of the French Wars of Religion (1562–98).

The British colonies further north, which remained loyal to Britain and later confederated to form the original Canada, retained the title of "province" and are still known as such to the present day.

Spain after Francisco Franco has been a "State of Autonomies", formally unitary but in fact functioning as a federation of Autonomous Communities, each exercising different powers.

While Serbia, the rump of former Yugoslavia, fought the separatists in the province of Kosovo, the United Kingdom, under the political principle of "devolution", produced (1998) local parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

For example, Canadian provinces are sovereign in regard to such important matters as property, civil rights, education, social welfare and medical services.

[citation needed] Canada's status as a federation of provinces under the Dominion of the British Empire rather than an independent country also had certain legal implications.

The Canadian Supreme Court tended to support the view that the Canadian Constitution was intended to create a powerful central government, but the Privy Council in London held the distinctly opposite view that the Constitution provided for stronger provincial powers.

For example, when central governments, responsible for foreign policy, enter into international agreements in areas where the state or province is sovereign, such as the environment or health standards, agreements made at the national level can create jurisdictional overlap and conflicting laws.

This overlap creates the potential for internal disputes that lead to constitutional amendments and judicial decisions that alter the balance of powers.

Other provinces have arbitrarily merged and annexed independent suburbs to major Canadian cities such as Toronto or Montreal without the approval of local voters.

Over the years, when the central Government has created special-purpose agencies at a sub-national level, these have often tended to follow or approximate the old provincial boundaries.

In many countries, a province is a relatively small non-constituent level of sub-national government, such as a county in the United Kingdom.

In some nations, a province (or its equivalent) is a first-level administrative unit of sub-national government—as in the Netherlands—and a large constituent autonomous area, as in Argentina, Canada, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Italian provinces are mainly named after their principal town and comprise several administrative sub-divisions called comuni (communes).

Six provinces, including five of the oldest Canadian provinces—Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island—have "counties" as administrative sub-divisions.

For instance, Sherwood Park is an unincorporated "urban service area" of 72,017 within Strathcona County, which has most of the oil refining capacity in Western Canada; Fort McMurray was once a city but dissolved itself and became an "urban service area" of 70,964 people within the Regional Municipality (R.M.)

of Wood Buffalo, which has several multibillion-dollar oil sands plants; and Lloydminster, a city of 31,483 which sits directly astride the provincial border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.