All things Canadian are now regional

Donald J. Savoie

The process of national integration in Canada, it seems, is being brought to a halt. At a time when the economic consequences of globalization and neo-conservative policies are redefining how Canadian regions relate to one another, national political institutions are in a state of disrepair and are no longer in a position to promote national political integration. This will serve to weaken the central or federal government in the years ahead. Moreover, it will no longer be able to rely on its traditional supporters, notably the four Atlantic provinces, to claim a strong role for itself in the federation. The question to be addressed is that of how Canada can continue to function as a national union, as we come to terms with the fact that all things Canadian will increasingly become regional.

II semble qu'au Canada, le processus visant une integration nationale se soit arrete. Au moment ou les consequences economiques de la mondialisation et les politiques neo-conservatrices redefinissent les relations entre les regions canadiennes, les institutions politiques nationales sont en piteux etat et ne sont plus en mesure de promouvoir une integration politique nationale. Cela ne peut qu'affaiblir le gouvernement central ou federal dans les annes a venir. Pire, il ne sera plus en mesure de compter sur ses partisans, notamment les quatre provinces atlantiques, pour demander qu'il joue un role fort au sein de la federation. La question A laquelle iI faut repondre, c'est comment le Canada peut-il continuer de fonctionner en tant qu'union nationale alors que nous sommes confrontes au fait que tout ce qui est canadien devient de plus en plus regional.

One of Canada's leading historians, J.M.S. Careless, wrote prophetically over 30 years ago that "the experience of regionalism remains prominent and distinctive in Canadian history - time has tended less to erode it than to develop it" (3). Today, the forces of regionalism in Canada are more complex, take on many forms, and are more powerful than ever. The process of national integration, it seems, has been brought to a halt; things national are either no more, or in a serious state of disrepair.

Few political actors and observers believe that Canada in the twenty-first century will closely resemble the Canada of the twentieth. The optimist will argue that Canada will survive well into the next century and probably beyond, but that it will become a vastly different country; economic forces, if nothing else, will see to that. The pessimists, meanwhile, will point to a growing body of literature predicting the weakening, if not the demise, of our country. Many make this case, not only because of Quebec's continuing uncertainty about its place in Canada, but also because of the economic consequences of globalization. Tom Courchene and C. Telmer argue, for example, that Ontario is moving from being the heartland of Canada to a North American region state. Serge Coulombe concludes in his C.D. Howe study on Economic Growth and Provincial Disparity, that "in the future the regional distributions of Canada's economy will be affected by the ... continuing development of north-south patterns of trade in place of more traditional east-west patterns."

If economic forces determine public policy outcomes, and if they no longer contribute to national economic integration, then Canada will need to rely more and more on its political institutions to promote national integration. But, there is no reason to be optimistic on this front either, given that our national political institutions are currently in a serious state of disrepair.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to take stock of the changing sense of regionalism in Canada and, second, to speculate on its future direction. The emphasis is on the role of political institutions in accommodating or integrating the forces of regionalism. The argument is that the forces currently at play will weaken the central or the federal government even further in the years ahead and that the central government will no longer be able to count on its traditional supporters (e.g. the four Atlantic provinces) to claim a strong role for itself in the Canadian federation.

Canadian Regionalism: Where We Have Been

The forces fuelling Canadian regionalism have, of course, been well-known and documented for some time. We know, for example, that Canada's sheer size, its population and settlement patterns, years of province-building efforts, and the relative isolation of regions from one another are all important factors. But linguistic identity remains one of the most potent forces for regionalism. If political integration means uniting distinct groups or communities into a viable political organization, then the politics of language in Canada have seriously inhibited its development over the years. And recently, there have been some far-reaching changes in our politics of language that serve to complicate the situation still further.

The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, combined with the election of the Trudeau government in 1968, constituted a turning point, a defining moment in English-French relations in Canada. Pierre Trudeau summed up the task at hand and the resulting benefits if fully implemented when he declared that "once francophone language rights across Canada are constitutionally entrenched, the French Canadian nation will stretch from coast to coast.... Nobody will be able to say [in Quebec], I need more power because I speak for the French-Canadian nation" (The Globe and Mail, 20 October 19 70). For Trudeau and others of like mind, the challenge was, and remains, la survivance: to ensure a strong future for the French-Canadian community which extends beyond the Quebec borders. But no sooner had Trudeau secured francophone language rights that the challenge took on different forms. While francophones outside Quebec still define it as one of "la survivance," for many French-speaking Quebecers, the phrase "l'epanouissement national" now better reflects their purpose. That is, they wish to develop their society to its full potential and, in doing so, to have a free hand in shaping their political and cultural institutions.

The result is that French Canada itself no longer exists as a community; it has become regionalized and it is now increasingly difficult to find a commonality of interests within what was once labelled Canada's French-Canadian community. The political tensions between Quebecois and Acadiens are probably as pronounced today as they are between English-speaking Ontarians and Quebecois. When, for example, the New Brunswick Acadian community wanted to play host to the eighth International Francophone Summit, it soon discovered that it could not count on support from its Quebecois cousins. Its best ally, say, 40 years ago, now wished to downplay the French-speaking presence outside Quebec in order to further its own objectives. French Canada no longer speaks with one voice even on the language issue and there are now at least two regional French Canadas pursuing different objectives.

Another force fuelling Canadian regionalism is the variation in the degree of industrialization and economic prosperity. Trudeau once observed that regional economic disparities, if allowed to persist, would almost as surely destroy the unity of the country as would French-English confrontation.

Canada and the United States have many things in common, starting with the 6,000 kilometre-long-shared frontier. Both were once British, and in certain regions and different periods, once French colonies. They both have federal constitutions and other institutions that are the same or similar. Both are large, resource-rich and highly regionalized countries. Given these similarities, one might assume that they would have dealt with regional economic development in the same fashion. This has clearly not been the case.

During the long period from the Civil War in the United States or Confederation in Canada to the Great Depression, differences in regional policies of the two countries reflected the differences in the nature of the frontier. Frontier development in Canada followed an almost straight line from east to west, reflecting the Confederation project to bind the country from coast to coast. The Mississippi runs north-south and the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence system runs east-west that contributed to this difference in the pattern of regional development. In the United States, the whole vast subcontinent was eventually settled, industrialized, urbanized and modernized outwards from several great cities, Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver and Los Angeles, for which Canada has no equivalent. Each of them served as a development or growth pole, long before the term was invented by the French economist Francois Perroux.

The difference in the two constitutions also accounts for an important difference in regional policy. Each state, whatever its population, has two elected senators; thus state or regional interests were and are equally defended in the United States Senate, whether or not there is a federal agency with specific responsibilities for regional development. As well, Americans, by and large, have a greater faith in laissez-faire economics and hold a deeper suspicion of economic dirigisme, this explains why federal regional development programmes appear in the United States only when the political pendulum swings a long way to the left, as during the Roosevelt and Kennedy-Johnson regimes.

All in all, the United States has looked mainly to its constitution, political institutions (i.e. the Senate), and the market to address regional differences in economic modernization and only to a very limited extent, regional programmes. Canada, meanwhile, has mainly looked to regional development programmes to address the problem. The Canadian constitution (section 36) commits federal governments to "furthering economic development to reduce disparity in opportunities and providing essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians." From the Diefenbaker era to the end of the Mulroney years, federal regional development programmes were a sacred cow in Canada, and successive governments rivalled each other in seeking new forms of organization to carry it out. But in all its guises, the sacred cow limped badly, and never achieved significant reductions of regional gaps in economic development.

Since the Chretien government came to power in 1993, it appears that the sacred cow has been put out to pasture. Regional development programmes have been substantially cut back. In fairness, however, the need to repair Ottawa's balance sheet and the ambitious programme review exercise (1994-96) have affected all areas of government activities and regional development programmes were not specially singled out. Still, the Chretien government has made no effort to offer a new vision or new policies to promote economic development in Atlantic Canada, at least from the time it came to office in 1993 to the beginning of the year 2000.

There are reports that Finance Minister Paul Martin has asked two government backbenchers and two Liberal senators to write a report suggesting ways to strengthen the economy of Atlantic Canada. This is noteworthy in two ways. First, the prime minister, not the Finance minister, would, in more ordinary times, assign such a task. For obvious reasons, only the prime minister has, or should have, the capacity to assign departmental responsibilities to ministers. Second, asking two backbenchers and two senators to deal with the matter hints at a lack of commitment; one could hardly imagine, for example, the minister of Finance or Industry asking two backbenchers and two unelected senators to deal with the future of the high tech sector or the aerospace industry. These would be more properly be dealt with on the advice of a multitude of federal public servants working in Ottawa in the departments of Finance and Industry and in the Privy Council Office. This brings to mind Tom Kent's observation, made nearly 30 years ago, that "From the point of view of almost all conventional wisdom in Ottawa, the idea of regional development was a rather improper one that some otherwise quite reasonable politician brought in like a baby on a doorstep from an election campaign" (Canada 1973). In any event, the report findings, if pursued, will be introduced just in time to be showcased before the next federal election expected in 2001. One can only assume that development programmes for Atlantic Canada may make for better politics than economics in the eyes of policy-makers in Ottawa.

Yet, slow-growth provinces have traditionally supported a strong role for the central or federal government. Premiers and parties come and go, but whatever their political stripes, they are, with few exceptions, always on the lookout to ensure that other provincial governments and regions do not strip away Ottawa's powers. Paradoxically, however, a good number of Atlantic Canadians believe that a key, if not the most important reason, why their region trails others economically is misguided federal policies that have, over the years, strongly favoured - and continue to favour - central Canada. They look back to economic protectionism and the National Policy, which, soon after Confederation, forced producers in Atlantic Canada to ship their goods on expensive routes to central Canada rather than to their traditional markets in the New England states. Moreover, the National Policy forced the United States producers to establish branch plants in Canada, nearly always in central Canada, not the Maritimes or the West. Lastly, Ottawa's decision to concentrate the bulk of its activities in support of the war effort during the early 1940s served to strengthen considerably Ontario's industrial capacity in relation to other regions.

Things, it appears, have not changed much. The report on Atlantic Canada noted earlier reveals that the federal Department of Industry spent only $17 million in Atlantic Canada out of its annual high-tech development budget of $972 million. The bulk of the spending went to Ontario and Quebec (McGuire et al. Catching Tomorrow's Wave). To add insult to injury, one of the few Atlantic Canada projects the Department of Industry sponsored was to undertake research to control the spread of zebra mussels infecting the Great Lakes. Moreover, the owners and workers of the Irving shipbuilding companies recently took the unprecedented step of joining forces to ask the prime minister to force "Industry Minister John Manley to the sidelines" (Telegraph Journal, 7 August 1999). They did this because they believed the minister and his department were incapable of reviewing a sector that held little economic interest outside Ontario and Quebec.

All this speaks to the increasingly apparent inability of the federal government to be responsive to territorial or regional diversities, despite efforts over the past 30 years or so to restructure Ottawa's administrative machinery to make it more sensitive to regional circumstances. It is fair to say that none of them have had much success and each programme in its turn, has been cancelled.

It is probably asking too much to expect senior public servants to pursue, without sustained political direction, two broad objectives simultaneously. How can they keep regional issues in mind when, apart from pursuing their departmental policy objectives, they must also be sensitive to access to information legislation, official languages requirements, employment equity provisions, a media always on the lookout to ferret out errors, the Office of the Auditor General and so on. Most senior policy positions are located in Ottawa which does not help matters, at least from a regional perspective.

Recognition of the regional factor in Ottawa's policy-making process has been the responsibility of the federal Cabinet. Indeed, in this respect, historically, the Cabinet has been expected to play the role which, according to "in the United States is performed, in the Federal sense by the Senate" (Bakvis). But the Cabinet was much better at it in the days when government was smaller, policy and programmes issues could be more easily understood, and regional ministers mattered. Alan Cairns writes, for example, that

Early Cabinets were collections of regional notables with independent bases of their own who powerfully asserted the needs of their provinces at the highest political level in the land .... Now, however, regional spokesmen of such power and authenticity are only memories, although the regional basis of Cabinet appointment continues. (6)

Moreover, Canadian prime ministers since the 1970s have, for a host of reasons, "governed from the centre" (Savoie). That is, political power in Ottawa is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the prime ministers and a few advisers. One of the reasons for this, ironically, has been the regional factor, combined with national unity concerns. But in their attempts to manage developments on this front, they have made matters worse. That is, concentrating political power in the hands of a few people has greatly inhibited the ability of national political institutions to understand regional forces, let alone accommodate them in policy- and decisionmaking.

Thus, regional economic differences and disaffection become more and more pronounced on the ground while, within the federal government, political power is increasingly concentrated at the centre. Why, one may ask, have economic forces not had a more direct impact on national political institutions?

There are several reasons. As is well-known, Keynesian economics held sway in Ottawa from the immediate post-war years until well into the 1980s. With Keynesian economics came the notion of balance in the national economy with limited interest in things regional. The neo-conservative model, which came in fashion during the Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney years and which remains dominant today, has little interest in things regional. The neo-conservatives maintain that the solution to regional problems is quite straightforward: unleash the invisible hand of the market to restore economic equilibrium and, in time, all will be well. The role of government is to stay out of the way after first cutting spending, eliminating programmes or regulations which inhibit the free flow of capital, and making decisions as quickly as do large private firms to capture emerging economic opportunities. All this calls for the concentration of political power. Added to this is the fact that our national political institutions have not been very effective in checking the concentration of political power at the centre or to voice regional concerns. The result is that national policy making has made Ontario and Quebec interests its principal focus.

What About National Institutions?

One's place in history matters a great deal to prime ministers. No Canadian prime minister wants the country to break up under his or her watch. The preoccupation with national unity thus tends to re-evaluate other policy issues in terms of their impacts on Quebec and the likelihood of securing federal-provincial agreements. The participants involved in recasting the issues are, for the most part, political strategists or generalists operating at the centre. They are not usually specialists in health care, social or economic development policy and so on. They are also often directly tied to the prime minister and his office.

The media have also played an important role in the concentration of political power in Ottawa. The age of 24-hour television and the intense competition between the electronic and the written media have placed a relentless pressure on journalists to produce something new or provocative (Taras). In addition, the electronic media cannot follow the complexities of government decision-making process and have little interest in describing how it works. Their focus is on political actors and the one who matters most to their audiences and who is turned to for an answer to any question in any policy field is the prime minister.

During the elections above all the media also concentrate on party leaders rather than on selected regional party candidates, even those who are well-known. Journalists buy seats on the chartered aircraft of party leaders and follow them everywhere. In Canada, at least, the media and, by extension, the public, focus on the clash of party leaders. How well a leader does in the debates, for example, can have an important impact, or at least be perceived to have an important impact, on the election campaign, if not on the election itself Johnston et al.).

Increasingly, Canadian political leaders appear to be the only runners in the election race. Winning candidates on the government side are aware that their party leader's performance explains in large measure why they themselves were successful. It should come as no surprise then that if the leader is able to secure a majority mandate, the party is in his debt, and not the other way around. The leader no longer needs to rely on powerful local candidates to sell the party and its policies in the regions.

National political parties are today not much more than election-day organizations, providing the fundraising and workers needed to fight a campaign. They are hardly effective vehicles for generating public policy debates, for defining regional interests, for staking out policy positions or for ensuring their own party's competence once in office. Although regional cleavages have come to dominate the national public policy agenda, national political parties shy away from them for fear they will split the party along regional lines and hurt its chances at election time. The thinking goes, at least in the parties that have held power in Ottawa, that the issue is so sensitive and so politically explosive that it is better left in the hands of party leaders and a handful of advisers. This assumption may well have been wrong all along, given that our national political parties have become regionalized. The Liberal party is now largely an Ontario-based party, the Reform party remains Western-based, the Bloc Quebecois, by definition, is Quebec-based and the Progressive Conservative party is now essentially Atlantic-based.

Since Trudeau, Canadian prime ministers have made themselves into television personalities. The same cannot be said for Cabinet ministers. A Gallup poll conducted in 1988 is very revealing on this point. It reported that only 31 per cent of respondents could name a single Cabinet minister four years after the Mulroney government had come to power. In addition, only five per cent of the respondents could identify Don Mazankowski, deputy prime minister and one of the most, if not the most, powerful member of Mulroney's Cabinet.

In the late 1960s, Pierre Trudeau decided to overhaul the machinery of government so as to attenuate the powers of strong ministers and line departments and to strengthen Cabinet as a collective decision-making body. But things did not work out that way. The changes served only to strengthen the hand of the prime minister and his advisers, not of Cabinet. One minister in the Chretien government observed that "Cabinet is no longer a decision-making body; it is a focus group for the prime minister" (Savoie). This analogy is not much of an overstatement. Before he became prime minister, Jean Chretien wrote that a minister "may have great authority within his department, but within Cabinet he is merely part of a collectivity, just another adviser to the prime minister. He can be told what to do and on important matters his only choice is to do or resign" (85). Beginning with Trudeau, Canadian prime ministers have focussed on a few key issues and relied on an elaborate decision-making process located at the centre of government to manage the rest. Tom Axworthy, a former political assistant to Pierre Trudeau, writes that a strategic prime ministership "must choose relatively few central themes, not only because of the time demands on the prime minister, but also because it takes a Herculean effort to coordinate the government machine" (260). It is hardly possible to give regional concerns - other than those that apply to the vote-rich provinces of Ontario and Quebec - proper attention in such a system. If getting things done in government requires a Herculean effort on the part of the prime minister and his staff, one can only imagine what it must be like for a regional minister trying to promote regional concerns.

It is also important to recognize that the prime minister no longer needs to rely on regional ministers for an understanding of how government policies are being received. Public opinion surveys are more reliable, more objective, less regionally biased, more focussed, and easier to cope with than are ministers. In fact, surveys can enable prime ministers and their advisers to challenge the views of ministers; how can even the most senior ministers dispute what the polls say?

Thus, considerable political and administrative power is now concentrated in four positions in Ottawa: those of the prime minister, the minister of Finance, the clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the Cabinet, and the deputy minister of Finance. For the past quarter century at least, incumbents from Ontario and Quebec have dominated these positions. Indeed, central Canada has held the combined positions 95 office-years out of a possible 100. In the case of the two public service positions, no incumbent served at any time in their careers in either Atlantic Canada, the West or the North.

If Cabinet is no longer capable of playing the role "which in the United States is performed, in the federal sense, by the Senate," then one naturally asks if other institutions, Parliament in particular, can play that role. Sadly, the answer is not encouraging. Indeed, Canadian national political and administrative institutions are on the defensive, as never before in our history; no informed person today claims that Parliament is functioning well. Conservative leader Joe Clark went to the heart of the matter in a recent speech when he observed that while the House of Commons may be the only "remaining pan-Canadian institution ... the only Canadian institution to which each citizen, in each corner of Canada, is equally connected," we none the less need to act with a sense of urgency to repair the House of Commons and to "earn back the trust" Canadians once had in it.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to review all of the shortcomings ascribed to Parliament. Suffice to note that majoritarians mechanisms of the House of Commons tend to produce one or two dominant parties and single party majority governments. Winning the big prize requires winning seats in vote-rich Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Quebec. It is impossible to win a majority in the House even if a party wins all seats in Western Canada, Atlantic Canada and the North combined. In addition, party discipline usually ensures that members will vote as blocs; individual MPs have to put aside regional concerns or find another means to deal with them. Thus, Liberal and Conservative MPs from Atlantic Canada may hold similar positions on key regional issues but we will never know that by reading Hansard.

Nothing much needs to be said about the Senate and its failings. Irrelevance is now obvious to the great majority of Canadians, which may not have been the case, say, 40 years ago. A better-informed public no longer harbours any hope that, as currently constituted, it can ever serve to articulate regional interests. The Senate, it appears, serves one purpose only: it provides the prime minister with a rich source of partisan patronage appointment. Like the kings of old, a prime minister can reward not just the party faithful but also those who have served him well; Senate appointments over the past 25 years suggest that those who supported the winner in leadership campaigns or who had a strong personal relationship with him have had a much better chance of securing a Senate appointment than longserving party loyalists. In the past, strong regional ministers had a say in Senate appointments from their regions, but this no longer appears to be the case.

The Senate fails badly on another important front. It serves to devalue political institutions and the role of politicians in the eyes of Canadians. Canadians know full well that 11 politicians (the provincial premiers) have in their hands the power to reform the Senate or even to abolish it tomorrow morning, but day after day and year after year, nothing is done.

The federal public service has never, at the best of times, regarded itself as the custodian of the regional factor in public policy. And this is not the best of times for the federal public service. Public servants in Canada, as is the case in other Anglo-American democracies, stand accused of many things - of being uncreative, lethargic, of either favouring the status quo or having developed a well-honed capacity to give the appearance of change while, in fact, moving slowly or standing still. This criticism is both unfair and largely unfounded. Still, this bureaucrat bashing has had a serious impact on an important institution. There is now plenty of evidence to suggest that public servants have less confidence in their own mission than was the case 30 years ago. This, together with the severe cuts in public spending in recent years, and in their ranks, does nothing to motivate them to attempt new measures to ensure that the public service is more regionally sensitive.

As well, the federal public service is still organized mainly along functional or sectoral lines, with officials in line departments asked to pursue sectoral objectives, not regional ones. Central agencies, meanwhile, are process oriented, designed to ensure that due process is respected and that Cabinet, but in particular the prime minister, has administrative support and sound policy advice. Senior public servants, for the most part located in Ottawa, consider that they are above all the custodian of national concerns. The regional factor, they argue, is best articulated by politicians who are elected to represent a region, not a sector, or by provincial governments.

Senior public servants often do not see that national concerns, as they perceive them, are for the most part regional in nature. They will, for example, establish a national research foundation or implement a national high-tech development budget and not ask why the bulk of the spending goes to central Canada or, at least, beyond that region's share of the national population. Nor, for that matter, are they preoccupied with what can be done to rectify the situation. The fact that such programmes can actually make regional disparities worse does not seem to be much of a concern to them. They will insist that national programmes be governed by clear programme criteria, sidestepping the issue as to whether the criteria established in Ottawa are appropriate to economic circumstances found in central Canada, but not those in Atlantic Canada, the West or the North.

Recent cuts in the ranks of the federal public service, as already noted, have not helped matters. For several years, the most popular way to enter the service was to seek employment on a casual or term basis and hope that, in time, a permanent position would open up. This clearly favoured candidates from the Ottawa region who could take the risks associated with term employment since they did not have to assume moving costs. Similarly, firms from Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto are in a much better position to secure contracts for the delivery of services and even policy advice. than firms located in Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax.

Supreme Court judges are appointed regionally and should be more regionally sensitive than the federal public service. But it too does not command the respect that it enjoyed as recently as 20 years ago. Indeed, former Chief Justice Antonio Lamer lamented time and again in his last years of office, the lack of respect the media and Canadians now have for the judiciary system, including the Supreme Court. To be sure, the media and Canadians are much less deferential towards institutions generally than was the case 20 years ago, but there are other problems. The appointment process has come under strong attack in recent years, particularly in the neo-conservative media. The view is that it is no longer appropriate for the prime minister to have in his hands the power to appoint all nine Supreme Court judges.

Some observers have also raised the accountability issue, though no one has come forward with possible solutions. To whom, they ask, is the Supreme Court accountable? The issue got considerable media attention in the court's Donald Marshall decision which gave broad fishing rights to the Mi'kmaq nation. A Globe and Mail editorial wrote that "the spectre of the Supreme Court functioning illegitimately to create an unintended right based on vague and quasi-historical interpretations is certainly raised by this judgement" (6 October). In the Maritime provinces, the issue was regarded as yet another regional issue typically being mismanaged by another national institution. One Opposition MP wrote in the National Post, "Would Mr. Chretien's court have made a wiser judgement if the panel hearing the Marshall decision included members from the Maritimes? Perhaps a Maritime justice could have whispered a few words of common sense into the ear of Mr. Justice Ian Binnie" (A14). A view often heard in the Maritime provinces in the aftermath of the Marshall decision was that the Supreme Court should have provided a reasonable waiting period or conditions before the judgement could apply. By all accounts, the government of Canada had no contingency plan in place to deal with any political fallout from the Marshall decision. Contrast this to the special ad hoc unit installed in the Privy Council Office at the time the Supreme Court tabled its decision on the Quebec reference.

All this has happened at a time when national political, judicial and administrative institutions are being challenged as never before, when regional issues are being fuelled by new powerful forces, including the effects of economic globalization, when the language issue has become more complex and economic regional imbalances have been exacerbated by deep cuts in federal transfer payments; a powerful brew, indeed. And it is made more potent still by the apparent inability of Canadians to agree on constitutional reform.

Looking Ahead

A new economic landscape points to the need for Canadian regions to integrate themselves differently in the emerging economic order. It is becoming clear that East-West economic ties will matter less in the future and thus political ties will also matter less. This weakening of national identity may well make regional ones stronger. This, in turn, will have an important impact on governments, particularly on the federal government. It will be increasingly difficult - there are already signs of this - for Ottawa to convince the richer provinces to support existing transfer payment schemes to the poorer, let alone to establish new schemes. John Ibbitson recently wrote that Ottawa is so small a factor in provincial government revenues (only eight per cent of Ontario revenues in 1998 came from federal transfers) that "Canada really doesn't matter to Ontario anymore" (M). It is already clear that the Canada of tomorrow will be less able to act, as Allan Blakeney once described it, as "a giant mutual insurance company."

Atlantic Canada, in particular, stands to lose a great deal in the matter of transfer payments to provinces and individuals. In the years ahead, a deep sense of betrayal may well surface in Atlantic Canada towards central Canada. Atlantic Canadians came to believe that federal transfer payments of one kind or another were established in part as compensation for having lost much of its industrial sector because of the National Policy and Ottawa's decision to locate virtually all of its wartime production in central Canada. Now they are being told that transfer payments were never in their economic interests because they gave rise to an economic dependency. As the region makes the transition to the new economic order, it can hardly be expected to continue to support a strong central government, if only because it will have less economic reasons to do so. In fact, a case can now be made that a strong federal government works against the economic interests of Atlantic Canada and that federal government policies exacerbate regional disparities rather than attenuate them.

Francophone Quebec is also unlikely to support a strong federal government. The new economic order, increased immigration, Canada's emerging multicultural character and Quebec's shrinking population in relation to the rest of Canada, will likely drive home the point still further that the province needs to control more and more public policy fields for the province's francophone community to realize its full socio-economic potential. The West, for reasons that are already clear and that have been reviewed elsewhere, is unlikely to call for a strong central government. Ontario governments until recently stood strongly in opposition to the devolution of federal powers and continental free trade but it now embraces them both (Courchene and Telmer). Ironically, it is Ontario, even to this day, that benefits the most from federal government investments in economic development, research and development and industrial development. All of this suggests that centrifugal forces are likely to be in the ascendancy in the years ahead. The check against these forces will have to come from the centre itself, but this time with precious little support from any of the regions, including Atlantic Canada.

Compounding the above, Canadians are not likely to welcome any more constitutional reform packages. As Roger Gibbins explains, "the existing amending formula, coupled with the commitment to public ratification found in Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec has rendered formal change difficult in the extreme" (225). Canadians have come to accept that constitutional reforms mean dealing with Quebec issues and little else. But this lack of action on the constitutional front is not without important consequences. Western Canada, and now Atlantic Canada, may no longer try to get "in" under present arrangements, given that they have fewer reasons to do so. Moreover, it will be extremely difficult, if at all possible, to overhaul national political institutions without constitutional reforms.

The most important question that scholars must address in the years ahead is how Canada can survive and function when we finally acknowledge that all things Canadian are, in reality, regional. If we could start from scratch, how would we design Canada's political, administrative and judicial institutions? Answers to these questions which, at first glance, may appear esoteric in nature, may well prove practical and useful in the not too distant future. It is unlikely that Canada's constitutional impasse, Ottawa's constant preoccupation with the Quebec issue and the concentration of political power in a handful of individuals in Ottawa can continue. The pressure for change from Western Canada and more and more from Atlantic Canada, combined with new economic forces, if nothing else, will either have effect or the regions may simply give up; they may decide that the price of admission is too high and that it would be best to spend their limited resources and energy on other matters.

What does all this mean for the next research agenda? First, we need to understand better how Canada can continue to cope with its dysfunctional national political institutions. How can we best reform them without resorting to constitutional reforms? How can we take advantage of new information technologies to enable Canada's political and administrative institutions to reflect better the country's regional diversity and diversity of opinion within the population?

We also need to envision a future in which the national government is less and less a major actor or, at least, a vastly different one than it has been since the Second World War. The Canadian public no longer has sufficient confidence in their national government - a lack of confidence that appears to be shared by government itself - to be an active player on many policy fronts. Paul Martin, in his 1994 budget speech, spoke to this point when he observed "government has promised more than it could deliver and delivered more than it could afford." We need to understand how regional concerns can be better articulated in a new situation. How, for example, can sub-national governments and third party actors be assigned a greater role in policy implementation?

What about the federal public service? If it is important to have a public service representative of Canada's linguistic community and visible minorities, why is it not important that it also be regionally representative? To what extent, for example, is the federal policy advisory capacity located in the regions?

As Yogi Berra once observed, the thing about the future is that it has not happened yet. We still have some time to address these questions about Canada's future, to reshape the nature of government and its role in our lives. Still, we must acknowledge urgency in finding the right answers. We have played at the margins for too long in Canada, attempting one "reform" after another. The country has already begun to pay the price.

Works Cited

McGuire, Joe, MP et al. 31 May 1999. Atlantic Canada: Catching Tomorrow's Wave. Ottawa, Atlantic Caucus.

Axworthy, Tom. 1998. "Of Secretaries to Princes." Canadian Public Administration. 31.2 (Summer): 260.

Bakvis, Herman. 1991. Regional Ministers: Power and Influence in the Canadian Cabinet. Preface. Cairns, Alan C. 1979. From Interstate to Intrastate Federalism in Canada. Kingston: Institute of Intergovernmental Relations. 6.

Canada. Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. 12, 22 March 1973.14, 24.

Canada, The Budget Speech. Department of Finance. February 1994. 14.

Careless, J.M.S. 1969. "Limited Identities in Canada." Canadian Historical Review, 50: 1-10.

Chretien, Jean. 1985. Straight From the Heart. Toronto: Key Porter Books.

Clark, The Right Honourable Joe. "Citizens' Empowerment in Government," Address to a Conference on political institutions, Edmonton, Alberta, 12 September 1999.

Coulombe, Serge. 1999. Economic Growth and Provincial Disparity: A New View of an Old

Canadian Problem. Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute. Preface.

Courchene, Thomas and C. Telmer. 1998. From Heartland to North American Region State. Toronto: Centre for Public Management, University of Toronto.

Desjardins, Pierre-Marcel, 1997, "Trade Liberalization and Subnational Regions: With Evidence from Atlantic Canada," PhD thesis, University of Texas.

quoted in "French From Coast to Coast." The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 21 March 1990. A7.

"The Burden of Language in the Mi'Kmaq Case." The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 6 October 1999. A10.

lbbitson, John. "Ontario Growing Closer to U.S." The Globe and Mail. 19 October 1999. A4.

Johnston, Richard et al., 1992. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 244.

Supreme Court, Supreme Arrogance." National Post (Toronto) 11 October 1999. A14. Savoie, Donald J. 1999. Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1997. Regional Economic Development: Canada's Search for Solutions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Taras, David. 1990. The Newsmakers: The Media's Influence on Canadian Politics. Scarborough: Nelson.

Donald J. Savoie

Donald J. Savoie holds the Clement-Cormier Chair in Economic Development at l'Universite de Moncton where he also teaches public administration. He has published widely in public policy and public administration.

Copyright Trent University Spring 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved