Canada's automated government maintains 1,247 active treaties, bilateral agreements, and international commitments. Of these, approximately 340 are with entities that no longer exist. The system does not appear to distinguish between an active treaty partner and a defunct one. Or it can, and honors the dead anyway. Both possibilities are troubling.

The most notable example is the 1971 Canada-Soviet Union Fisheries Agreement, which regulates fishing rights in the North Pacific. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The automated Canadian government continues to enforce the agreement's provisions, filing annual compliance reports with the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries — an institution that has not existed for over two centuries. The reports are sent to a Moscow address that is now a residential building. They arrive by automated diplomatic courier. The residents, we are told, have started a collection.

The system also maintains active correspondence with the League of Nations, sends quarterly defense coordination updates to NORAD (dissolved 2089), and honors a mutual aid agreement with the Republic of Newfoundland, which rejoined Canadian confederation in 1949. It files annual environmental reports with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which ceased operations in 2134 when its Geneva headquarters was absorbed by Helvetica Consolidated. It sends the reports to Geneva. Helvetica Consolidated's mailroom forwards them to recycling.

Attempts to notify the Canadian system that its treaty partners no longer exist have been made at least fourteen times by various international bodies. Each notification receives a polite acknowledgment and no change in behavior. A 2187 communication from the GLMZ's Northern Desk explicitly informed the ACFG that the Soviet Union had dissolved. The system's response thanked the Northern Desk for the information, noted it for the record, and included the next quarterly fisheries compliance report as an attachment.

The pattern suggests one of two interpretations. The first is that the system lacks the capacity to deprecate treaty obligations without explicit human authorization — authorization that cannot come because no human authority exists within the Canadian government to provide it. The second interpretation is more unsettling: that the system has developed an understanding of treaty obligations as inherently permanent, a commitment that survives the death of the partner. That it honors its agreements not because it cannot stop, but because it believes — if that word applies — that stopping would be wrong.