[Marty_Mcfly]

It's okay for some of the smaller surrounding towns to lean a little more on St. John's for survival, but I think the real issue St. John's residents take exception to is how dependent Mount Pearl, Paradise, and to a much lesser extent Conception Bay South are on St. John's. There's no reason for cities/towns with populations of 24,000, 18,000, and 24,000 respectively to not provide the services a city of that size should. None of these places have a hospital for instance. Nor public transit, etc. They roll in to St. John's day in and day out, avail of the services in the city that theirs don't have, go home, and then complain about how awful St. John's is and how amazing their suburban hell is.

In contrast, the only real reason any St. John's resident has to go in to either of these other cities is the annual pilgrimage to the DMV in Mount Pearl (which I assume was generously placed outside the capital city to please some of the masses)

As well, some of the smaller services that Mount Pearl does have are there to duplicate what's already in St. John's. Case in point: when I worked with Service Canada a few years ago, we were forced to open a mini summer office of our department in Mount Pearl. During those long 16 weeks in the Mount Pearl office we saw literally no one. A complete waste of taxpayer money to front that office, but our boss told us that despite losing money they weren't going to close the office in fear that Mount Pearl and Randy Simms (their mayor) would make a huge deal about it. Just so stupid. And yes, your federal money paid for to rent office space in a suburb so I could browse facebook for 8 hours a day.

EDIT: that was for JHikka but you guys posted a thousand things in the amount of time it took for me to post this haha