The Art of Sharing: The Richer and Poorer Provinces since Confederation by Mary Janigan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Art of Sharing: The Richer and Poorer Provinces since Confederation by Mary Janigan David Tough Janigan, Mary – The Art of Sharing: The Richer and Poorer Provinces since Confederation. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. 496 p. Historians who study the apparatus of formal democratic participation—the ballot, elections, political parties and the party system, taxes and the welfare state—walk a fine line. Do we engage with the public’s often hazy or heated understanding of the material, in recognition of the importance of democracy as a social practice and in keeping with socio-cultural history’s dictum of meaning-making from below, or with other disciplines’ more technical work on these topics, where an instrumental orientation privileges the perspective of the expert? It’s not our job to fact check our sources. On the subject of provincial equalization, though, most scholars would appreciate the first few pointed paragraphs of Mary Janigan’s The Art of Sharing. She bluntly states that Premier Jason Kenney—an avid proponent of the idea that the province of Alberta whose budgets for which he is responsible suffers unfairly from equalization—knowingly misrepresents the nature of the program as part of a “gospel of grievance” (p. 3). It is an exceedingly well written and carefully argued account of the emergence of equalization over several decades leading to 1957, focusing in particular on the issues arising out of the Great Depression of the 1930s and underlining the instructive role played by early Australian innovations. [End Page 687] Much of the narrative is dominated by the drama and the intellectual heft of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations—the Rowell-Sirois Commission—that was appointed in response to several provincial loan defaults in 1937 and reported in 1940. It proposed introducing a significantly strengthened federal income tax, which was rejected by three provinces. While this is a somewhat obvious place to focus, and has been a touchstone of political history since the report was released, Janigan’s account is resolutely transnational, opening with the presentation of L. F. Giblin, architect of Australia’s Commonwealth Grants Commission, established in 1933, to the Rowell-Sirois Commission in the summer of 1938. From there, she goes back to Confederation, underlining the role of Nova Scotia in particular, both in the 1860s and in the 1920s, in forcing a reluctant federal government to develop a piecemeal system of fiscal transfers to the provinces. What emerges slowly is a more formalized system, free of the vagaries of personality clashes and political vigour, for transferring money to provinces on the basis of need, as determined by an assessment of their ability to raise revenue by way of provincial taxation. (Parenthetically, this is where Alberta, rich in resources and in high incomes, loses out: its governments opt not to use much of its vast fiscal capacity, effectively declining to tax enough to fund adequate public services, while its residents’ contribution to federal taxation go to provinces with legitimate revenue challenges.) Australia, with a comparable historical tension between wealthy and poorer states, is shown throughout as an interested neighbour, comparing notes on how to address issues of fiscal inequality in a federation. Janigan’s prose is forceful yet breezy, and displays the writerly confidence of someone who trusts that her book might be read by people other than professional historians. A lot of research clearly went into the book. Its detailed tracing of the complicated negotiations that led to the establishment of equalization in the 1950s and of the connections between the Rowell-Sirois Commission and the establishment of equalization—not to mention the insistence on the Australian connection—are all markers of an important contribution to an understudied area of political history. Janigan arguably is too fascinated with the character and thoughts of individuals involved in the history, relying a lot on biographies and diaries of Prime Ministers, even ones like Mackenzie King, whose primary contribution to the development of equalization appears to have been delaying it. (Will historiography ever exceed the simple brilliance of F. R. Scott’s poem describing King’s political style: “Do nothing by halves/Which can be done in quarters...