Big Daddy to kids: "Go ask your mother"

Stephen Harper has declared his plan for helping cities, which consists entirely of making the issue the provinces' problem:

The federal government's commitment to tackle the fiscal imbalance with the provinces will ease the financial burden faced by municipalities, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says...

Harper has vowed to make solving the fiscal imbalance with provinces one of his key priorities. The provinces complain Ottawa retains too many tax dollars, leaving them struggling to provide services.

Harper said municipal and local officials must then work with their respective provinces on new funding deals...

Big city mayors arrived at the meeting armed with a report they issued on Thursday containing a number of recommendations, including (that) (t)he federal government should share revenue that grows with the economy, such as income tax and the federal goods and services tax.

It's questionable already whether whatever money gets handed back to the provinces through equalization increases will make up for funding lost on Kyoto, child care and other programs where planned federal inputs will no longer flow to the provinces. Now, Harper has made clear that the problem of municipal funding will also be left solely to the provinces to address from a pool of money that doesn't yet exist, and has largely already been spent to the extent that provinces follow through on their earlier plans.

Harper is quoted as criticizing the Libs' downloading as the reason why municipalities' debt and infrastructure difficulties. But it seems a rather curious response to the downloading problem to engage in yet another wave of it. And if the responsibilities downloaded exceed the resources provided by as wide a gap as appears likely, it won't be long before provinces recognize that any current imbalance has only become worse.