Comment by verandaguy
2 days ago
> Every country believes its laws apply universally
This is simply untrue and absurd at face value.
Canada has the Canada Health Act, which describes the specifics of what provinces and territories must provide in terms of public health services, and how, and how those health services are funded, how the money gets disbursed, and how the money gets reimbursed by various parties within the system. It would be absurd to think that the expectation of anyone in the Canadian government is that this should apply worldwide.
The UK has the Highway Code, which describes a number of driving laws, restrictions, conventions, and requirements of drivers, among them, their (at this point rare) left-hand drive rule. Do they expect that to be enforced universally? Do they have some kind of plan to power-project onto the rest of the world with that by having agents of their government travel abroad to, say, France, Mexico, or South Korea, and ticket people for driving on the right?
Your first example fits what I said. Notice it specifies what Canadian provinces should do. That's a clear geographic restriction, isn't it? But yes, the moment Canada were to become able to enforce it upon some other territory, it'd do so. The only limitation is that it cannot, not that it wouldn't. We'd then say those territories came under Canadian jurisdiction.
The same goes, I suppose, for the UK code you refer to. I imagine the British legislators specified clearly what roads are under its control. If not, then yes, that's the expectation, exactly like is happening right now with their censorship laws.
To learn more on this Google for the quite famous phrase "Parliament can criminalize smoking on the streets of Paris”. You're going to either double facepalm, or be horrified, if not both.