Federal government has the means and responsiblity to persuade and cajole provinces in certain directions when it comes impacts of policies they are implementing.
I’m not going to defend Trudeau. Not on any front.
But this is a bad take. Any federal government taking a take-it-or-leave-it approach to the provinces is attempting to operate as a dictatorship, and it’s something that should be actively resisted or rejected.
The problem right now is that there are a lot of Conservative Premieres, and they can taste blood in the water, so they’re circling and stonewalling.
AFAICT the federal daycare deal, dental care, measures to address the housing crisis, and price on carbon were implemented by negotiating/cajoling the provinces. Generally speaking, I believe those were mostly successful initiatives that help Canadians.
Dental care, housing deals with cities and the fall back carbon pricing were all done dispite provincial pushback (as far as I’m aware).
The only one where they worked with the provinces was the daycare, and that took like 18 months for provinces to actually agree on and even today provinces like Ontario continue to drag their feet on.
From what I’ve seen over the last 3-5 years, the provinces have very little interest in actively working constructively with the feds.
I don’t know what the current status of the healthcare chats are, but a few years ago the feds were willing to help push additional funding into the provincial healthcare systems, but the provinces needed to agree to terms (I believe the terms were around the money needing to be spent on the public healthcare system and not working towards privatization). as far as I know the talks never went anywhere, and healthcare systems are still underfunded.
I’m not going to defend Trudeau. Not on any front.
But this is a bad take. Any federal government taking a take-it-or-leave-it approach to the provinces is attempting to operate as a dictatorship, and it’s something that should be actively resisted or rejected.
The problem right now is that there are a lot of Conservative Premieres, and they can taste blood in the water, so they’re circling and stonewalling.
AFAICT the federal daycare deal, dental care, measures to address the housing crisis, and price on carbon were implemented by negotiating/cajoling the provinces. Generally speaking, I believe those were mostly successful initiatives that help Canadians.
Dental care, housing deals with cities and the fall back carbon pricing were all done dispite provincial pushback (as far as I’m aware).
The only one where they worked with the provinces was the daycare, and that took like 18 months for provinces to actually agree on and even today provinces like Ontario continue to drag their feet on.
From what I’ve seen over the last 3-5 years, the provinces have very little interest in actively working constructively with the feds.
I don’t know what the current status of the healthcare chats are, but a few years ago the feds were willing to help push additional funding into the provincial healthcare systems, but the provinces needed to agree to terms (I believe the terms were around the money needing to be spent on the public healthcare system and not working towards privatization). as far as I know the talks never went anywhere, and healthcare systems are still underfunded.