{"id":58668,"date":"2025-09-15T01:00:01","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T05:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=58668"},"modified":"2025-09-14T09:52:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T13:52:32","slug":"qotd-federal-equalization-payments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/09\/15\/qotd-federal-equalization-payments\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Federal equalization payments"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Perhaps the most fascinating component of [Prof. Thomas] Courchene&#8217;s paper is his subtle discussion of what, precisely, equalization is for. Is it meant to render every province in Canada equally well off in general? Or is it meant only to correct inequities introduced by the provinces&#8217; different geographic and natural circumstances? Or is it meant even more narrowly, as a scheme to ensure that the federal government doesn&#8217;t accidentally worsen those inequities? Or it is meant merely to discourage culturally harmful labour migration?<\/p>\n<p>There is no official answer to this question, and all the possible answers lead to moral and mathematical absurdities. It&#8217;s not just that we don&#8217;t know whether equalization works, as Terence Corcoran observed in the <em>Financial Post<\/em> yesterday. We literally don&#8217;t even know what it&#8217;s meant to accomplish<\/p>\n<p>Colby Cosh, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.canada.com\/national\/nationalpost\/news\/issuesideas\/story.html?id=a9efb4cc-29c3-44b8-bbf3-245f0f524ed9&#038;page=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8220;Economist plays ethicist&#8221;, <em>National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2005-09-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps the most fascinating component of [Prof. Thomas] Courchene&#8217;s paper is his subtle discussion of what, precisely, equalization is for. Is it meant to render every province in Canada equally well off in general? Or is it meant only to correct inequities introduced by the provinces&#8217; different geographic and natural circumstances? Or is it meant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,84,41],"tags":[986,793,118],"class_list":["post-58668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-government","category-quotations","tag-confederation","tag-subsidies","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fgg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58668"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97881,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58668\/revisions\/97881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}