The Art of Sharing: The Richer Versus the Poorer Provinces Since Confederation

By Mary Janigan

McGill-Queen’s University Press/2020

Reviewed by Thomas S. Axworthy

September 24, 2025

Described by some as the “Grievance Tour”, Premier Danielle Smith’s “Alberta Next” panel has been on the road since July. One staple of the Premier’s litany of complaints about Confederation is the equalization program, whereby the Government of Canada applies a complicated formula to top-up the revenues of provinces with less fiscal capacity so they can provide health care or education roughly comparable to that available in the richer provinces.

Smith uses blunter language: she told a crowd in Lloydminster that “Alberta, year after year, has 20-25 billion that’s siphoned out of our system to go to Ottawa so it can be spent mostly in Quebec.” The province has even sponsored slick ads “to protect ourselves from Ottawa’s economic attacks,” with equalization featured prominently, promising a referendum on the panel’s conclusions in 2026.

Smith may not realize it, but her complaints have a long lineage. Conservative Premier Leslie Frost of Ontario campaigned against the new equalization program in the 1957 federal election. Liberal Premier Mitch Hepburn of Ontario, in 1938, had attacked the very principle of fiscal equity in testimony before the Rowell-Sirois Royal Commission, when it first considered National Adjustment Grants.

If Alberta grumbles that it sends too much to Ottawa, Newfoundland has argued the opposite. In 2024, it filed a claim challenging the constitutionality of equalization, asserting that transfers have failed to meet the constitutional standard of section 36(2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that residents should benefit from reasonably comparable public services. Alberta cries “too much,” Newfoundland replies “not enough.”

Joseph Howe, described as “not one of the Fathers of Confederation but one of the founders of equalization”, complained in 1868 that Nova Scotia had a bad deal in Confederation; Nova Scotia Premier Angus L. Macdonald spoke eloquently to Rowell-Sirois about the plight of the poorer provinces; and Tommy Douglas, after the Second World War, argued that a welfare state was impossible unless poorer provinces had the fiscal capacity to carry out their responsibilities.

Today’s demands for equity echo these historic debates within a 21st-century context of both economic transformation and economic warfare, the latter most vividly waged by Donald Trump in the form of weaponized tariffs.

Mary Janigan’s The Art of Sharing helps us understand what is at stake in our current debates over equalization, taking a subject often reduced to dry formulas and making it come alive by describing the lives of ordinary Canadians across eras: women in Montreal in the 1930s knitting mittens for 15 cents so their families could eat while their leaders played political games at conference after conference. Chapter 5, “King stalls as the Depression Continues,” sums up the times. Prime Minister Mackenzie King “never displayed much empathy for the individual victims of the Depression,” Janigan notes. Jack Pickersgill, who before his later senior policy and political roles, served as a senior advisor to King, confirmed this with his quip that in King’s office “there was plenty of industry but not much humanity.”

Janigan, a former longtime senior writer for Maclean’s, is at her best describing the vivid personalities around the Rowell-Sirois Commission.

But desperation forced King’s hand. Alberta defaulted on its debt in 1936, Manitoba and Saskatchewan were next, and the Bank of Canada warned of contagion. King responded with Rowell-Sirois, more formally the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, in 1937.

Janigan, a former longtime senior writer for Maclean’s, is at her best describing the vivid personalities around the Rowell-Sirois Commission. She makes Lyndhurst Giblin, an eccentric Australian mathematician who testified in 1938 with “dubbin-smeared boots,” memorable. Hepburn, who mocked the Prairie provinces’ claims of hardship, then hosted a drunken dinner that included an off-colour singalong. In Winnipeg, Commission research director Alex Skelton’s hotel room was one night the scene of a Marx Brothers imbroglio complete with assorted monetary cranks and a Swedish gymnast, whom Skelton eventually hurled across the room to dismount unceremoniously beside a startled University of Manitoba economist.

But the Commission’s three-volume report was seminal. It had held 85 days of hearings, received 427 briefs, and compiled 10,000 pages of evidence. The Commissioners were a remarkable and diverse group: Newton Rowell, Canada’s first Minister of Health; Joseph Sirois, law professor at Laval; John W Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press; and noted academics, including H.F. Angus and R.A. MacKay. The staff included W.A. Mackintosh, Donald Creighton, Carl Goldenberg, Robert Fowler, Wilfred Eggleston, and John J. Deutsch — names that would shape Canadian policy and scholarship for decades. Their 1940 report was a “breakthrough,” writes Janigan, recommending “lump-sum, annual, unconditional National Adjustment Grants.” The principle of equalization had been asserted.

The most important of the Commission’s alumni was Louis St Laurent. Francophone counsel to Rowell-Sirois, seventeen years after the Commission reported, Prime Minister St. Laurent carried its ideas into government. In 1956, his government introduced enabling legislation for equalization, and the first $139 million in payments flowed in 1957.

By the 1980s, equalization was entrenched, enshrined in section 36 (2) of the Constitution with broad support. Under Peter Lougheed, Alberta was a major proponent: its 1978 paper Harmony in Diversity called equalization “one of the most equitable methods of maintaining the economic well-being of Canadians.” At the September 1980 First Ministers’ Conference, Lougheed described equalization as “a crucial aspect of Canadian Confederation.” Later, Alberta’s deputy treasurer, Al O’Brien, chaired the 2005-06 federal expert panel on equalization; the last significant formula change was made under Stephen Harper’s government in 2009.

Yet, Janigan also explains why consensus has eroded. Lyndhurst Giblin warned the Rowell-Sirois Commission that while a neutral formula must appear fair, “you can go on almost indefinitely finding more and more difficult points in matters where the calculations are not quite convincing.”

Equalization was designed to aid poorer provinces, but today Premier Smith is not wrong to note distortions: Ontario, hardly a have-not province, receives more than $500 million, while Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia receive nothing. Newfoundland gets $412 per capita, while Prince Edward Island gets more than $3,700. Reform is not just a populist talking point; it is a genuine need that the Carney government must confront.

“Equalization,” Janigan concludes, “is a principle that should be cherished. It is a gift from the generation that came home from the Second World War to make a better world.” But it is a principle that must be continually adapted to meet the needs of a changing federation. That is the vital lesson of The Art of Sharing.

Policy Contributing Writer Thomas S Axworthy is Public Policy Chair at Massey College, University of Toronto. He was Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from 1981-84.