Why the Liberals are Still Popular
May 8, 2005 · By Peter Rempel
Political economists in Canada are always interested in Alberta, mostly because of the close relationship between the “provincial state� under Lougheed and the economic development of the province. This is why I thought the political economy approach was interesting for a few days, until I realized that it was boring and went back to playing video games.
But political economists haven’t paid enough attention to Ontario. It seems to me that if I had to describe Canada’s current political-economic state in high-falutin’ language, I’d say that the invasion of the Canadian state by the Liberal Party is sustained by the federal confiscation of wealth and redistribution in the form of economic development grants to Ontario. After all, perhaps the only reason that Ontario is not currently an economic backwater is because the government wills millions upon millions of dollars to foreign multinationals in order to keep manufacturing jobs in Ontario. Without such grants, these industries would move to Alabama. And the money from those grants, of course, comes from the federal government’s confiscation of wealth from the over provinces.
It is, of course, outrageous that the Liberal Party can invade the coercive and administrative capacities of the Canadian state, as they have demonstrably done in the case of AdScam. But Ontarians seem to be a-ok with this (my disbelief with this is well-documented on lefties’ blogs), at least as long as the Liberal Party will also use its control of the state to enrich them at the expense of the rest of the country. And so, we have the Liberal Party arbitrarily and unnecessarily tampering with the fiscal federal arrangements of Canada in order to, ta-da, transfer more wealth from the other provinces to Ontario.
Ontario doesn’t want to punish the Liberal Party for AdScam because the state powers that the Liberals used to perpetrate the excesses of the Sponsorship Program are the same state powers it uses to prop up Ontario’s economy with wealth from the other regions of the country.
Crossposted to Rempelia Prime
Good points, and an angle I hadn’t really thought of. I doubt there’s a *direct* link between these kinds of transfers and Ontarians’ preference for Liberals. Instead I’d expect the link to be a vague feeling of dependence, as well as a sense that the Liberals best represent their region (which of course they identify with the nation). When it comes down to it, I suspect Ontarians will vote Liberal with the attitude that even though the Liberals are crooks, “they’re our crooks.” They don’t want to cede power to a party with a deeper power base in the West.
Even so, I think the divide between the West, Alberta in particular, and Ontario will only deepen as more and more people move to the West and the West demands greater representation: “No taxation without representation,” to quote a slogan from that great revolution.
Peter – It might help your case if you found some statistics showing the amounts of dollars that flow into Ontario in the form of these kinds of transfers. Then compare them to statistics for money flowing out of the other have province, Alberta.