Alberta awash in health dollars

OTTAWA — As Alberta awaits a massive windfall of extra health cash from Ottawa, a new report shows the province is already best able to pay for its health-care system.

Alberta will receive an extra $1 billion per year from Ottawa starting in 2014-15, shrinking the pot for the other provinces. But Alberta already has the lowest health-costs-to-GDP ratio in the country, a new report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows.

No extra cash for greying issue

Atlantic Canada faces higher costs due to demographics

OTTAWA — The federal government is looking at tweaking the equalization formula but will not give Atlantic Canada extra money for its aging population, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Thursday.

Flaherty confirmed his department is doing a technical review of equalization. But he said this is done regularly and will not result in a major shakeup akin to last year’s reform of health transfers.

Harper has changed both the process and agenda of federal-provincial relations

Whatever happened to those first ministers' conferences, so entertaining for their fed-bashing and back-biting by provincial premiers?

Under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, the prime minister, premiers and territorial leaders would face off about medicare, social assistance financing or patriation and reform of Canada's Constitution.

Aboriginal groups would get into the act, expressing outrage at their habitual exclusion.

And the various participants sporadically would appear before microphones to spew invective that would make for pretty good headlines.

Equalization Payments In Canada Need To Be De-Politicized, Analysts Urge

OTTAWA - The inner workings of one of the country's biggest government programs need to be de-politicized and handed over to an arm's-length group of neutral technocrats, a new study suggests.

The politics of the $15-billion-a-year equalization program have become destructive over the last 10 years, say political scientists Daniel Beland and Andre Lecours.

As provincial and federal governments prepare for a new agreement on distributing equalization payments, they should be thinking about ways to cool the political heat the subject generates, the two argue in an essay for the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation.

"Reducing toxic political dramas like the ones witnessed over the past decade is most certainly a good thing for the country and its unity," they wrote.

The current equalization formula expires in 2014. Federal and provincial governments need to know soon how transfers will work after that, in order to budget accordingly.

Don't balance federal budget on our backs, Ontario and Quebec warn

Battered by weak economies and weighted down with debt, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec have united to accuse the Harper government of putting its own fiscal house in order at the expense of the provinces.

With a new federal budget to be tabled in just over three weeks, tensions between Ottawa and many provinces are building as fiscally challenged premiers fret about further erosion in transfer payments for health care and other programs.

Visiting Toronto Monday, Quebec Premier Jean Charest joined his Ontario counterpart Dalton McGuinty in warning Ottawa not to balance its books by downloading costs onto cash-strapped provinces. He also offered a history lecture to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, saying that in times of strong majority government in Ottawa, the provinces can offer an effective check on federal power.

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who is to table his budget on March 29, showed little patience for arguments that Central Canada is a special case.

Canada’s wealth-sharing plan is unconstitutional, study says

Canada’s national wealth-sharing scheme violates the Constitution with a half-baked equalization formula that shortchanges provinces like Ontario, a major new study has found.

In a 41-page paper to be released Monday by the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto, equalization expert Peter Gusen said the status quo is unconstitutional.

And that costs Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick billions of dollars annually that go instead to Quebec, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island.

“If equalization continues to ignore differences in expenditure need it will not be treating provinces fairly and it will not be fulfilling its constitutional mandate,” writes Gusen.

When dispensing equalization payouts from the taxpayer-funded $15.4 billion pool, Ottawa doesn’t take into account that wages and cost-of-living expenses are higher in Ontario and B.C. than in much of the country.

“Provinces … differ in their ability ‘to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services’ because they have to spend different amounts to offer similar services; in other words, because they have different expenditure needs,” he writes, quoting Section 36.2 of the Constitution Act.