Have Not...What?

What a profound change. Unimaginable a year ago. In the fifty-one years since Canada's federal government initiated an equalization program - whose purpose was to ensure that Canadians could anticipate the same level of services and opportunities anywhere they lived in the country - through a plan to fund under-productive provincial governments, the Province of Ontario, once heralded as the engine of the country's prosperity, has contributed over $100-billion.

Ontario, chugging along with its high productivity rate, its manufacturing base, led the provinces in wealth production. Its contribution to the national plan enabled the Atlantic provinces, and the Western provinces - with the notable exception of Alberta, and generally speaking, British Columbia - to have sufficient liquid assets in their treasuries that their citizens lived as well as anywhere else in the country. That's a proud achievement.

And then, a strange thing happened. All those smoke-stack industries began to fade out. As one manufacturing company after another began to fail, with production going offshore to countries where wages were lower and unions non-existent. But Canadians - and Ontarians - are skilled, entrepreneurial and productive, capable of filling in the gaps here and there, establishing small businesses that produced other kinds of products.

Oops, products that were service-oriented in nature, in large part, offering part-time or low-paying employment. And of course there was also a growing contingent of IT start-ups, which skilled and technically-endowed futurists led to success, and employed a well educated workforce, parlaying the results into world class engineering and software companies attracting international attention.

(Meanwhile, other parts of the country began doing very well for themselves, finding ever greater sources of wealth through the mining of needed commodities like potash, and frantically drilling in petroleum-rich areas to make the most of the fossil fuels that lay handily - and, in Alberta - inconveniently in a morass of sand-and-pitch tarsands. Less said of the latter, the better.)

Still, those industrial jobs kept evaporating, and one factory after another, often the mainstays of scattered Ontario towns, kept closing, and those towns' futures contracted. Boarded up buildings, houses for sale, at fire-sale prices. Because of course, a factory closure contributes to failures of all other kinds of smaller businesses dependent upon the engine of their own prosperity.

Perhaps Ontario isn't such a well-run province, after all. It has long been criticized as being unfriendly to business, because of its high business taxation rate. Higher than other provinces'. Although the province's employment rate is still good, signs of a future struggle to maintain itself are on the horizon. We're being warned we will be going into deficit territory. In the short run, perhaps.

But good news. Kind of, by stretching things a mite. We've now achieved a favoured status - in a manner of speaking - having finally, and for the first time, made the list of equalization-requiring provinces for the coming year. Yes, Ontario will receive $347 million in equalization payments. We're not celebrating, we're kind of gloomy-and-dooming about this stringently unwelcome situation.

Mind, we're nothing like perpetually-equalized Quebec, and nor is it likely that Ontario will ever descend to that kind of hapless dependency. In the year that Ontario will receive $347 million, Quebec is set to be granted $8,355-billion in equalization payments. And Quebec Premier Jean Charest, facing an election, will have the wherewithal to cut taxes as a kind of return-incentive.

Quebec, taking in $1,028 per resident, exceeded only by Prince Edward Island's per capita boost of $2,310, is able to offer its people all manner of goodies not seen elsewhere in Canada. Like $6-a-day child care, like universal dental care, and other nice little fillips. So much for equalization permitting equal treatment across the country.

And who might ever have imagined in our darkest dreams that Ontario would be right there, alongside Quebec, hands out palm upward? It's a sad turn of events. Somewhat like the formerly well-off professional in the neighbourhood, charitably generous and criticized and admired in equal measure, losing his well-remunerated position, and visiting the community food bank for the first time.