Over Harper’s seven years in power, his management of the federation has come to feature a command-and-control approach that leaves less room for consultation and cooperation with the provinces than at any time in the recent past.
The latest example is the current suggestion that the upcoming 2013 budget could see the federal government claw back billions of dollars in job training money from the provinces.
While federal insiders caution that the budget is not yet cast in stone, enough details are coming to the fore to surmise that this is a conversation that is well advanced within the Harper government.
Judging from the reaction in the provincial capitals on Tuesday, most premiers have either not been privy to that conversation, or are not onside with the plan.
Not that it necessarily matters to Harper and his government. Over the past few years, unilateral federal action has become par for the course for the current regime.
Under Harper, the First Ministers no longer gather and the unsolicited input of the premiers usually falls on deaf ears.
The adoption without compensation to the provinces of a potentially costly law-and-order agenda; the imposition of a new funding formula for medicare and the implementation of an EI reform that stands to transform the seasonal economies of parts of Quebec and Atlantic Canada are all cases in point.
The claw-back move — should it materialized in the budget — would be a major reversal of recent Conservative budget policy.
As recently as 2007 the same government transferred the bulk of its job training dollars to the provinces.
Someone unfamiliar with Canadian politics would be hard-pressed to believe that the authors of that six-year old budget — which was heralded as a fix for the fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces — are the same people who are now contemplating taking the provinces out of the leading role on the jobs training front with a stroke of the pen.
The delegation to the provinces of most of the previously federal task of job training took place in tandem with the negotiation of a landmark social union agreement in the late 1990s.
At the time, it amounted to a major shift in federal policy that required equally major adjustments to various provincial programs.
Quebec spear-headed the battle for the devolution of the job training file to the provinces.
Since the 1960s, its governments had argued that responsibility for the language-distinct Quebec labour market should rest with the national assembly and not Parliament.
Then-prime minister Jean Chrétien conceded the point only in the heat of the 1995 referendum campaign.
Voters do not usually rush to the barricades over federal-provincial jurisdictional feuds — even in Quebec, where such matters have always had more resonance than average.
But this comes at a sensitive juncture — with the Parti Québécois in power but also against at a time when a major backlash against the latest EI reform has been gathering steam.
The issue is gaining traction weekly in Quebec and mobilizing opponents right across the political spectrum in a way not seen since the 2008 culture cuts.
In the House of Commons on Monday, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion read out a list of former Quebec Conservative candidates who have added their voices to the chorus that is calling on the government to rethink its EI reform.
For now, the EI backlash is largely contained within Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
A federal move to claw back billions of jobs training money from the provinces could change that.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Chantal Hébert
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