For British Columbians looking for clues on the current federal perspective on the province, there is fairly thin gruel to consume.
It oozes disappointment in its description of the swift decline from the promise of Justin Trudeau’s 2015 election, his government’s focus on optics over all else in crucial policy-making and the steady souring over a half-decade of a star candidate in Morneau who, once stationed in the seat of power, felt miscast and eventually estranged.
And unlike many other tell-much political tales, it feels not at all like the start of a comeback but a thorough post-mortem by someone who could be in the prime of a political career but wants to walk far, far away. Its prescriptions for a focus on competitiveness and productivity, on long-term health-care funding and on halting the introduction of shared-cost programs until there are agreements on their goals amount to basic common sense.
Why so? Morneau makes clear that Canada is at the “bottom of the barrel” on productivity and at the top of the heap of provincial and territorial taxes among OECD countries. It is essential, then, that political power be decentralized to reflect their financial clout. With federal transfers atop their take, provinces and territories have more than half of tax revenue and confer two-thirds of government spending.
The “most significant” conflict came in the vastly different perspectives in B.C. and Alberta on TransMountain, he writes. “Just about every hot button you can name was part of this file.
“We lacked a similar framework to guide the way forward for projects like TransMountain or to deal with other conflicts. This has proven burdensome when managing long-term issues like health care spending or interprovincial trade. In place of a framework, we depend on informal procedures.”
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