It's a difficult thing to amend the constitution to eliminate federal control of spending in areas outside federal jurisdiction, especially since in the constitution as it stands there is no such federal control and no possibility of any such control. The federal spending power as we know and love it is entirely illegal and unconstitutional. Sadly, that matters nothing to the Liberal judiciary, nor will any change to our meaningless sham constitution.

Posted by: ebt at November 25, 2006 06:45 PM

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I hope Harper can get an ammendment to the consititution to get out of equalisation payments. The payments should be made province to province instead of throught the federal government. It's the provinces that do the paying but it's Ottawa that gets the credit.

Posted by: Fiumara at November 25, 2006 11:48 PM

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You're on the right track Steve, but I don't think you've thought this one all the way through yet.

certain responsibilities that are most closely tied to regional variations -- education, natural resource management, and such -- are left to the regions to manage.

Quite right. Things like these should be devolved to the regional level. But at what "regional level" is the power mostly rightfully exercised?

If you think that tens of thousands of overeducated and overpaid bureaucrats in Toronto, controlling tens of thousands more pencil pushers working in regional provincial government offices across the province, who control thousands more municipal or county-level bureaucrats, who control vast systems of schools and hospitals, each with their own overhead fat of managers, assistant managers, secretaries, counsellors, psychologists, union flacks, etc. is the most efficient way to prescribe Tylenol #3 to people with headaches and teach their kiddies how to read and do sums, then dream on. In fact the best devolution of power is right to the level where that power will be used most effectively - to the individual.

The reason why you're discussing how to give power "back to where it belongs", at the provincial government level (allegedly), is really nothing but the result of how placing power into the wrong hands in the first place inevitably resulted in inefficiency, waste and corruption. Governments fail upwards. When municipal governments tried to provide roads, schools, economic development, etc. in the early 19th century they failed - because communism always fails. By the time of the BNA, these failures had been passed on upwards to the next level of government, which was at that time the capitals of British provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. So that's where the BNA assigned the power, where it was already at. But a hundred years later the various provincial governments' communistic failures were finally becoming too big to ignore. The failure was manifested in exactly the same way at the provincial level as the failures had been at the the municipal level in the good olde days - most of the governments could no longer raise additional tax revenues, and no one would lend them money any more for their bogus, wealth-killing boondoggles. Fortunately (for the nitwits and fuckups working in municipal and provincial governments), along came Lester B. And Pierre E., with the next and most obvious solution to their dilemma - expand the tax base, and present an even bigger and more polished face to the big banks and moneylenders, and tell them how this time, all of the stupid government megaprojects and welfare programs were not just political pork and corrupt vote buying, but were investments in the future.

But like I said, communism always fails, and until it runs out of steam (in bankruptcy or occasionally in a world war), people will always try to help it fail upwards. The creation of the EU and its recent expansion to the east is a recent example of this. So are institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and God forbid it should come into being, the Kyoto Protocol. Bigger and bigger bureaucracies and legal/regulatory bodies are the classic commie response to the inherent and inevitable failures of commie powergrabs and money grabs. Expand the net. Expand control. Nothing's wrong with socialism, it's these damn provincial bumpkins that just don't get it!

That's what you're up against, bro. The problem is not that a piece of paper sitting in a glass box in Ottawa called The Constitution has been "violated". It's still sitting there, it's still as good as the day it was written, and it's still as completely useless as it ever was. The problem is that your own unwritten, unconquerable rights were surrendered, voluntarily, to a bunch of con men selling phoney bottles of freedom and prosperity labelled "Trust Me I Know What's Best For You".

Posted by: at November 26, 2006 12:35 AM

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Anonymous at Nov 26, 12:35am: I don't quite understand your vision. Do you see any role for government at all?

Posted by: A at November 26, 2006 12:05 PM

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Preston Manning and Michael Enright were discussing this tightening and efficiency direction with a lot of very good sounding logic this morning.

Encouraging that the Fraser Institute is dreaming up ways to incorporate environmental resposibility into our economic mix.

Manning makes sense too, when he suggests measuring public and private medicine side by side and using the results to get the BALANCED mix.

Canadians like balance. The days of all left OR all right are gone. Nothing is a simple black or white. There has to be a careful balance of what works for best results.

Harper*s efficiencies and ethics will contribute to Canada*s true potential.

I remind you of the massive flood of public money syphoned off by the Liberal$.

** The 200 List ** There are many copies around the web. Scroll down 6 posts at:

http://Redpin.Anchorpin.com

Lots to work with there. = TG

Posted by: TG at November 26, 2006 01:53 PM

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Anonymous at Nov 26, 12:35am: I don't quite understand your vision. Do you see any role for government at all?

Frankly, no. But even if you find this too big of a fish to swallow all at once, then you should at least be able to see that practically every new task which government has taken for itself in the last century and a half or so - health, education and welfare being three of the biggest - has been done on utterly spurious grounds and with disasterous results. Throughout history people were able to provide for themselves perfectly well in these areas, as long as their own governments didn't interfere (which unfortunately they have a habit of doing, by destroying trade and commerce with taxes, inflation and wars). There was no "education crisis" in the 19th century which should have led to the creation of provincial departments of education. In Ontario what happened was that trade barriers prevented sensible and wealth-increasing trade with the USA, which led to lower prices for farm products and higher prices for imported goods. There were other governmental barriers against building mills and mines. Government caused the problem of slow or stagnant economic growth, but then tried to appear magnanimous by providing "free" schools. I'm sure it was very similar in the other future provinces of Canada. The "British Way" meant being forced to trade with British and British-owned companies, to the point of poverty. There was also a huge religious and ideological battle between Family Compact prigs like Bishop Strahan and the "evils" of republicanism, catholicism, you name it. Whatever endangered their special privileges and special power must be propagandized against, as a matter of life and death. That is the genesis of Canadian "public" (i.e. Protestant) schools.

Medicare sprang up in the 20th century in a similarly dubious way. First of all, doctors were handed government monopolies in the form of the officially sanctioned medical licensing boards. This is bad but it might not have been so bad, if governments had not embarked on disasterous policies of war, taxes and inflation through the whole period from WWI, the roaring 20s, the great depression, WWII, the cold war, and right up to the present day. As doctors were progressively able to price their services higher and higher, ordinary folks' paycheques were more and more ravaged so they were less and less able to pay for doctor's visits and medicines, that's when noisy and economically ignorant demagogues like Saint Tommy of Douglas were able to start singing about the eternal joys of "free" medical care.

The welfare industry also got going in the 20th century. Greater and greater government taxation and regulatory interference made it harder and harder to start a business and employ people. Society became split between those enjoying government jobs and government-protected or subsidized jobs, and "the rest". It was a simple matter to fire up the propaganda machine and blame "capitalists" for the growing unemployment lines, but in fact capitalism is what makes jobs and creates wealth - it's government that destroys capitalism and thus destroys the jobs and the wealth. But instead politicians and bureaucrats rode in on a white horse with "relief" for the poor ... and a new industry was born.

I'm not saying cut all these things overnight (though I would like to and it would be far less painful than most people think). I'm saying, wake up and start seeing what the growth of government really is: a boondoggle and not a boon.

Posted by: at November 26, 2006 08:11 PM

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Finally, some governmental recognition that "Fiscal Imbalance" is a myth.

As people like Andrew Coyne have shown repeatedly, among federations, Ottawa already keeps the smallest share of revenues of any central government in the world, and of the money they do transfer to the Provinces, they place the fewest strings.

About those transfer payments: federal transfers to the provinces is at an all-time high, despite the fact that 8 out of the 10 provinces are running surplus budgets.

The fact is, the provinces have always had the ability to reject any federal money for items under provincial jurisdiction; but, frankly, they have been all to happy to play along rather than fund their own programs through their own provincial taxes. The Federal Government has no means of raising capital that the Provinces don't have -- in fact, with respect to things like resource rights, the Provinces have more money streams from which to draw.

If the Feds want to limit their spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction -- it is NOT because of increasing federal encroachment, it is because of decreasing provincial accountability. This change is to protect the Federal government, not limit them, and it is welcome.

Posted by: Bob at November 27, 2006 05:02 AM

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ebt,

Please give me some examples of the "Liberal Judiciary" forcing a Province to accept the "illegal and unconstitutional" "federal control of spending in areas outside of federal jurisdiction." Any example will do.

The fact is, that the Federal government does NOT control spending outside of their jurisdiction, because the Provinces are, and always have been, free to reject any offers of Federal money. The fact that they consistently refuse to do so in order to avoid having to raise their own money through taxation is not a problem created by the "Liberal Judiciary" -- it is a problem created by the "Avoid-Taxes Conservative" Provincial Governments.

Posted by: bob at November 27, 2006 08:36 AM

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The federal government routinely places conditions on transfers to the provinces. (Consider the Canada Health Act.) Under the constitution Ottawa cannot put conditions on payments to provinces, or on any payment made for provincial purposes. It can contract with the provinces to discharge federal responsibilities, and impose conditions that way. Or it can turn money over to the province or any person, without condition, in the expectation that the desired result would occur anyway. But it certainly cannot constitutionally do what it openly does.

I am not bob's tutor and have no intention of spoonfeeding authorities to him.

Posted by: ebt at November 27, 2006 05:53 PM

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bob

how about the federal firearms registry. clearly registration is provincial, the SCOC let it through on the basis it was ment to fight crime but did not require that the feds prove it actually fought crime.

Posted by: Phil at November 27, 2006 10:42 PM

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ebt,

The irony must be lost on you, given that those dastardly liberal activist judges on the Supreme Court Bench recently overturned a Quebec Law preventing people from buying private health insurance (Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General).

You also entirely miss the point -- the Provinces are all free to ignore the CHA if they are willing to raise their own money -- an option that both Quebec and Alberta have recently considered. And frankly, given that the Provinces have the responsibility for running the programs, they should also have the responsibility of funding it. Perhaps Alberta could consider actually using the Healthcare Premiums it charges for . . .duh . . .health care, instead of simply putting the money into general revenue and using it to fund rebate cheques in election years.

Posted by: bob at November 28, 2006 05:16 AM

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As bob knows very well, the Chaoulli case had nothing to do with federal funding or with the federal government at all. Nor was it in any respect an "activist" decision. Very much the opposite.

Bob also knows that in law the provinces are free to take any money the federal government gives them and use it any way they see fit. Having once decided to give money to a province, the federal govermnment cannot put any condition on payment of the money.

Yes, the provinces are free to turn down conditional payments, because all such payments are illegal.

Posted by: ebt at November 28, 2006 05:11 PM

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Hey, you got the activist joke. Good on you.

However, I'm still waiting for you to show me the clause in the Constitution where it dictates that the Federal Government can't put strings on money for health care. As the Kirby report shows, it doesn't exist, since the Constitution is silent on the Federal goverment's mandate to raise money for Health Care.

Again, I'm confused why you are upset with the Federal Government rather than the Provincial Governments who whine about increasing Federal control while happily accepting their money. There's an old saying that the guy who pays the band can pick the songs. The Provinces can't have it both ways -- either pony up and take responsibility for your own programmes, or work within the constraints of accepting somebody else's money.

Posted by: bob at November 29, 2006 01:52 AM

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ebt, stop spouting nonsense.

There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- in ANY part of the Canadian Constitution dictating how Federal Funds should or should not be distributed to the Provinces, with the notable exception of the Constitution Act 1907.

Section 36(2) of the 1982 Constitution is the closest we get:

"Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making Equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation." (Subsection 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982)

Note, first of all, that this is talking about equalization payments and nothing else. Second, note that even in THIS context there is no discussion of whether the payments should or should not be unconditional. Certainly by convention equalization payments have always been, and continue to be, unconditional (as they most certainly should be); but this is NOT enshrined in the Constitution.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, note that any money transfered for social programs (e.g., Health, Education, etc.) is NOT part of the equalization program, and is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the Constitution.

To be specific, the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) and the Canada Social Transfer (CST) are acts of legislation -- not Constitutionalized laws.

So, please, on what basis are you justified in making your continued assertions that the Federal Goverment is acting illegally by placing conditions on such transfers? And how, with some examples please, have the liberal activist judges helped to further this? Please stick to the topic at hand and don't cite judicial activism in other spheres such as gay marriage, etc. I'm interested in your reasoning on the illegality of conditional transfer payments.

Posted by: bob at November 29, 2006 06:36 AM

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