Quote:
Originally Posted by P'tit Renard
If anything we should be encouraging provinces to merge so that we can get rid of excess bureaucratic structures, in parallel with stripping down the federal government to only dabble in its core competencies.
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I agree. Our decentralized federation where most power, and certainly most of the services that people and firms rely on, lies in the hands of provinces is what we have to work with and, frankly, it's probably the reason Canada survives at all.
But not all provinces are created equally, and Ontario succeeds because it actually has the population and economic heft to function like a midsized country. I feel like we're the only province that actually thinks about things like industrial strategy or diversifying our economy. We do things like build and refurbish nuclear plants. If we were a bunch of provinces of 3 million people or less, with our topography, we'd probably still be burning coal. We have 3 of the Maple 8, largely because hundreds of thousands of public sector workers can support centi-billion dollar funds and these funds can hire leaders from Wall Street and the City to move to Toronto.
We need more Ontario-sized provinces, not less.
Perhaps a good counter-example is Winnipeg, which is the largest Canadian city that's not in a "big" province. Big cities need big infrastructure investments, and I feel like they're really kneecapped by what Manitoba can deliver.