Fiscal federalism: driving in the dark without lights or a map

Feds should make data a priority, tie it to new health funding.

Once we have standardized individual-level data on COVID cases, including factors like age, sex, neighbourhood, other diseases, the individual’s household composition, race, hospitalization rates, disease severity, and deaths, as the U.K. has been able to do for 17 million of its residents in near real time, then Canada will be able to support far more sophisticated analysis and projections to deal with the current top pandemic issues—not least, whether to open bars or schools, writes Michael Wolfson. Photograph courtesy of Pexels

Opinion

BY MICHAEL WOLFSON

August 17, 2020

OTTAWA—Yet again, the federal government looks like it is about to transfer tens of billions of dollars to the provinces with essentially no strings attached. We’ve seen this before. The 2004 First Ministers’ Health Accord transferred $40-billion to the provinces with homecare as one of the p...

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