Excerpts:
Pathways Within Existing Structures
An alternative approach is to consider new institutions that open spaces for policy innovation and that strengthen egalitarian-minded actors within both the federal and provincial governments. Social and economic policy-making has been concentrated in federal and provincial ministries of finance in an unprecedented fashion over the past twenty years, leaving social policy and labour ministries with little policy-making leeway. This leeway is further constrained when federal transfers come with conditions, be they national standards or the responsibility to report on results, so energies are diverted to jurisdictional wrangling rather than policy content.
One way forward would be to create institutions outside of the direct purview of either the federal or provincial governments to develop social policy agendas, share experiences and discuss results. These kind of "meeting places" (as the Canadian Policy Research Networks called them; the Canadian Council on Social Development and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives developed similar ideas for Social Councils) would take policy discussion somewhat outside of jurisdictional battles. They would include policy advocates and stakeholders so as to improve supportive linkages in bringing reform projects through the bureaucracy and through partisan politics.
There may still be cases where using policy-specific federal transfers makes sense to bring about projects developed in these meeting places, but the development of meeting spaces takes the weight off the federal government in terms of trying to set and police standards. Given the accountability provided by provincial budgetary and auditing practices, the most the federal government should ask of provinces is the creation of an action plan in concert with their citizens. Such transfers should also involve a real openness to asymmetrical solutions, particularly in terms of Quebec doing its own thing, but also to allow provincial pioneers on given policies to use anyadditional money from transfer to try new things.
In sum, Towards a More Equal Canada provides a blueprint to bypass frustrations with federalism. The big pieces of "fair taxes" and "good jobs" require relatively minimal federal-provincial coordination. In areas where federal-provincial coordination is more necessary, such as around rebuilding public services or aspects of income security, the partisans of equality might do better to build institutions of policy consensus formation, such as Social Councils or "meeting places" than to search for some fleeting "federal leadership." We will have a more equal Canada when citizens and their organizations make equality a goal that no party and no government can downgrade to secondary status. Expectations of creating more equality by trampling on the regional and national equalities bound up in federalism are likely to be dashed by heightening the very same intergovernmental axe-grinding that they perceive as the barrier.