Declining equalization payments and fiscal challenges in the small "have-not" provinces /

The authors of this study have worked independently and the opinions expressed are, therefore, their own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the board of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. [...] In addition, he is a member of the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Regional Science and former editor of the Atlantic Canada Economics Association Papers and Proceedings. [...] He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Windsor and Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, where he defended his thesis on the regulatory determinants of Iceland’s financial collapse in 2008. [...] Since fiscal year 2009/10, however, when Ontario became a “have-not” province, the share of equalization payments received collectively by Ontario and Quebec–the two largest provinces–has increased markedly, resulting in relatively sudden and steep reductions in equalization payments as a share of nominal GDP to each of the four provinces in our study. [...] In fact, although total federal transfers as a share of GDP dropped during the cost-cutting period of the 1990s, they have since increased and are now nearly equal to what they were in the high-spending period of the 1970s.