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Hourglass Federalism
Hourglass Federalism is a theory about Canadian economic geography and political economy that has been promoted by Professor Thomas J. Courchene of Queen’s University. The thesis he proposes is that federal cutbacks of provincial transfers to social services since 1995 has caused significant fiscal imbalances. These funding cuts forced the provinces to make cutbacks in nearly every provincial jurisdiction, except healthcare because cutting healthcare funding would be political suicide, but this left almost every other provincial jurisdiction, including cities which are creations of the provinces, with reduced and often insufficient funding.〔Courchene, T.J. (2004, April). Hourglass Federalism – How the Feds got the Provinces to Run out of Money in a Decade of Liberal Budgets. Institute for Research on Public Policy. Retrieved October 5, 2009, from http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/apr04/courchene.pdf〕 However, in the meantime, the federal government has been providing greater funds to social programs but they have been bypassing the provinces and giving the money directly to cities and/or citizens. This allows the federal government to fund provincial jurisdictions directly causing the provinces to become “the squeezed middle of the division-of-powers hourglass”.〔Courchene, T.J. (2004, April 21). Senate Committee on National Finance: Opening Statement. Institute for Research on Public Policy. Retrieved October 5, 2009, from ()〕
Courchene defines Hourglass Federalism as “Ottawa’s use of the spending power and other instruments to fiscally starve the provinces and then to make an end run around them to deal directly with cities and citizens alike, leaving the provinces of the squeezed middle of the division-of-powers hourglass”.〔Courchene, T.J. (2005, May 4). Vertical and Horizontal Fiscal Imbalances: An Ontario Perspective. Institute for Research on Public Policy. Retrieved October 5, 2009, from http://www.irpp.org/miscpubs/archive/tjc_050504.pdf〕
==Making Inroads into Provincial Jurisdictions==
The 1995 federal budget “folded the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) and Established Program Financing (EPF) into the new Canada Social Transfer (CST) and proceeded to pare the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) cash transfers from $18 billion to $11 billion”.〔 With these cuts, the federal government essentially “starved the provinces fiscally”.〔 Courchene notes that in an intriguing twist “these CHST cuts compromised virtually every provincial program except Medicare, since gutting medicare would mean certain electoral defeat for provincial governments. Hence, the provinces diverted money from everywhere else to medicare”.〔 Nevertheless, even though healthcare funding remained mostly unchanged “the inevitable result was that the provinces had to starve other policy areas, so much so that citizens and cities alike welcomed federal funding in these cash-starved areas”.〔 This is what provided the inroad for the federal government to take a more direct role in funding provincial jurisdictions. Whereas previously the federal government would mostly establish conditional transfer funds for social programs to the provinces to distribute to their citizens and cities, where the federal government could attach conditions the provinces would have to meet to receive the funding, providing a round about way for the federal government to influence provincial jurisdictions. Now under this proposed hourglass federalism model the federal government is taking a more direct route and directly dealing with citizens and cities and transferring the funds for provincial programs directly to them.
What drives this trend of hourglass federalism according to Courchene is “Ottawa’s superior fiscal position and its creative exercise of the federal spending power”.〔 This fiscal superiority stems from the fact that “Ottawa draws in way more in taxes from Canadians than it spends on programs that fall under federal jurisdiction”.〔 Since federal government balanced their books in 1997, they have since then had many years of surpluse, “Ottawa has used the fiscal dividend to move into areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction, such as cities and education, while the cash-starved provinces look on, helpless to spend any new money in their own constitutional domains”.〔
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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