Think nationally, act provincially?
When you spend a chunk of your career working on intergovernmental relations, it sticks with you longer than you might expect. Call it getting “federalism pilled.” It does not make you popular at parties, but it’s a good defence against a common frustration — asking the federal government to fix problems in provincial jurisdiction.
Canada is arguably the most decentralized federation in the world. But that’s a fact that often gets lost in policy conversations and policy advocacy. There are at least hundreds of national associations and other organizations with national mandates on issues that fit mostly in provincial jurisdiction but whose attention and energy are mostly focused on Ottawa.
This can lead to some awkward contortions to try to make the case to pull levers in Ottawa that lead to changes in provincial government action. That can at best mean a lot of very indirect approaches to the change you’re trying to make happen, like using the Criminal Code to end “blind bidding” practices in real estate (which made the 2021 Liberal Party of Canada platform).
More often this impulse pushes towards asks that are unlikely, unworkable, and sometimes unconstitutional. One example is the regular chorus of calls to make the federal-provincial Canada Social Transfer conditional on provinces meeting the policy preferences of whoever’s asking. Sure, there’s $17 billion in federal spending there, but looking to add conditions 30 years later for a fund covering a small fraction of social assistance, post-secondary education, and childcare is unlikely to go very far.
There’s both strategic and practical reasons for this federal fixation. The strategic reason is that frankly it’s a gambit that often works, even if there’s grumbling in a Premiers’ meeting communique. For a long time the federal government had more than enough fiscal capacity to meet its obligations while provinces didn’t. That has led to developments like the Housing Accelerator Fund where the federal government effectively pays provincial, territorial, or local governments to change their policies. (Sometimes the federal spending power is more subtle.)
The practical reasons have more to do with mandate. Federalism isn’t just for governments; many organizations with national mandates have formal or informal relationships with provincial ones on the same file. This means that talking about provincial government roles can be seen as stepping on toes. We also hear organizations with national focus worry that they can’t justify working on some provinces unless they can do all, a self-imposed moat they’re unlikely to clear.
This dynamic can lead to missed opportunities to think about looking at provincial policy as a wedge to make change nationally — not about getting the federal government to pick up the baton but to have other provincial governments jump on board. If you want to see change nationally, your best bet might be finding an early adopter province to carry the torch.
Looking at “abundance” policy agendas in the US, Dylan Matthews has a useful take on how “policy diffusion” studies can show us how policy ideas take hold. Drawing on the State Policy Innovation and Diffusion database and research that builds on it, he show that policies are getting more likely to be picked up by other states. There are plenty of ifs and buts but it points to efforts to influence policy at a state level often being a better bet for national (not federal) influence than looking for federal policy or legislation.
We don’t have anything like the SPID database in Canada to measure the spread of policy ideas between provinces and territories systematically. But case studies and research going back decades, for example in public health, has found similar dynamics.
That points to an underrated strategy for national policy change, especially at this moment. That “fiscal imbalance” between provinces and the federal government has decreased at least to the point where subnational governments are in less dire shape. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer :“for the subnational government sector, which includes provincial-territorial, local and Indigenous governments, current fiscal policy is sustainable over the long term.” The Carney government is famously focused on a more narrow set of priorities and is practicing its own “asymmetric” federalism. With at least one quasi referendum coming up this fall, we’re unlikely to see a federal government throwing its weight around in the same way on provincial issues.
All of that means that more national voices should be looking at the provinces and where there might be openings for their work.
