An end to principle

Remember back when Dalton McGuinty was leading the charge for a thorough review of federal/provincial funding rather than looking simply to maximize the amount paid out to his province in the short term? I ask because judging from Ian Urquhart's latest column, McGuinty apparently doesn't:

Premier Dalton McGuinty has narrowed down his federal-provincial fiscal agenda to a single core issue: that help from Ottawa for the have-not provinces should be confined to the equalization program...

(In a preview of a letter to Harper, McGuinty) says that Ontario supports equalization "as part of our historic commitment to ensuring quality services across Canada," but opposes expanding the principle to other programs.

In this respect, McGuinty focuses on two major federal programs that provide funding for all the provinces, not just the have-nots: the Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer.

Urquhart's article goes on to note that the effective question will now come down to whether Harper chooses to put a very limited amount of funding toward ending "backdoor equalization" as argued by McGuinty, or adding to equalization as requested by Quebec. Utterly ignored are not only the foundational questions of the purpose of federal funding, but even more technical questions such as how fiscal capacity is to be calculated, and whether McGuinty's new enemy in "backdoor equalization" merely reflects actual costs of service delivery due to greater buying power held by the larger, wealthier provinces.

McGuinty's transformation may be only the most obvious about-face in the question of whether to genuinely seek a renewed federal vision, or merely to turn the "fiscal imbalance" into a one-time fight between the provinces for slight increases in federal funding. But it appears plain that any sense of principle or fairness (however often the term is used by premiers) has now been eliminated from federal/provincial talks. And with so many provinces plainly looking out only for number one, few if any will have a reasonable basis to criticize Harper for imposing a solution based on his own political gain.