If Quebec wants to inhibit businesses and reduce its taxable community, why should the rest of Canada have to subsidize it? Its language laws inhibit many companies from staying in Quebec or coming to Quebec. It passes bills that limit the language rights of its citizens.
Why is Quebec considered a “have-not” province? It prefers to buy foreign oil rather than allowing Canadian oil to flow to Quebec. I am not from Alberta but I understand Albertans’ frustration with the equalization payments. Indeed, the Alberta referendum initiative on equalization could provide a national forum for a long overdue national debate on rethinking Canada’s Robin Hood equalization subsidization regime.
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” No doubt, George Bernard Shaw had those all-important electoral politics of “equalization” in mind when he said: Originally designed to make government services available to Canadians equally across the country, not even the most rationally convincing statistics on regional economic performance have been able to subdue the passionate backlash that has dogged all efforts to reform a system that has long been hijacked by the political clout of provincial demographics and the partisan dictates of electoral politics. In what has by now deteriorated into a national “free-for-all” of runaway provincial “entitlement,” our myopic preoccupation with all manners of redistributing Canada’s national wealth base merely continues to “equalize” the whole country to the lowest common denominator of the economic welfare state, leaving “have-not” provinces in a perpetual state of economic dependence … while “have” provinces, like Alberta, somehow become charity cases. If nothing else, the growing impasse between so-called “have and have-not” provinces points yet again to the need to get serious about reforming Canada’s terminally broken “Robin Hood” system of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.