- published: 14 Feb 2015
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A state government (provincial government in Canada) is the government of a subnational entity in a federal form of government, which shares political power with the federal or national government. A state government may have some level of political autonomy, or be subject to the direct control of the federal government. This relationship may be defined by a constitution.
The reference to "state" denotes subnational entities which are officially or widely known as "states", and should not be confused with a "sovereign state". Provinces are usually divisions of unitary states. Their governments, which are also provincial governments, are not the subject of this article.
The United States and Australia are the main examples of federal systems in which the term "state" is used for the subnational components of the federation. In addition, the Canadian provinces fulfil a similar role. The term for subnational units in non-English-speaking federal countries may also often be translated as "state", e.g. States of Germany (German Länder).
Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929) is a Canadian born, former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a former diplomat and a poet.
A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he has been critical of American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Scott was a signatory in 1968 of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He spent four years (1957–1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994.
In terms of poetry, he is best known for his book-length poem Coming to Jakarta (subtitled "a poem about terror"), which describes in measured, prosodically regular verse the 1965 crisis in Indonesia that resulted in the Indonesian Civil War and the deaths of as many as half a million people, in which he believed the CIA to have played a role.[citation needed]
Scott is far from a stridently political poet, working always to connect the polemical to the personal. In Coming to Jakarta he writes: