 |
| … And in Sports... |
When I was a practicing “teacher,” I accumulated licenses to work in that capacity in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario. Not in BC nor in Quebec or the Maritimes or Newfoundland-Labrador. You see, Education is a provincial jurisdiction in our constitution and to be trained as a teacher in Saskatchewan might not make you competent enough to teach in Manitoba schools, so they’d let you work “on probation” for two years before you were eligible for a Manitoba permanent certificate. Needless to say, I taught in those four provinces at one time or another; I was not, as has been rumoured, running from the law.
Distributed governance by region makes sense; the tricky
part is the division of jurisdictions and taxing power. Educational priorities
could be different region to region, but different enough to prohibit education’s
placement in the national basket? And what about natural resources? Do
provinces with lots of these have any obligation to share that unmerited wealth
with Canadians living in other provinces? Or should Canada—as Pierre Trudeau
believed—have a National Energy Program (NEP)? [i]
Anyone following Alberta politics back since the Leduc oil strike knows that
the fight for revenues from the rich oil fields of that province has been an
ongoing battle for a long, long time.
Some of the jurisdictional divisions seem obvious: defense, waterways,
treaties with indigenous nations, border regulation, international relations
and others clearly don’t fit into provincial or municipal jurisdictions. But
what about day care? What about roadways? Airports? Medicine? Is it good to
have a national health program that pays medical costs out of general revenues while
hospitals and medical training are provincially/municipally governed?
The perception giving rise to Alberta’s Sovereignty Act
and the Saskatchewan First Act is that the lines between national and
provincial jurisdiction in those provinces are blurred, particularly on the
subject of natural resources. Well it would be, wouldn’t it, given the constant
provincial interest/national interest dilemma that’s unavoidable in any nation
that distributes jurisdiction as we do? The mining of fossil fuels falls under
provincial jurisdiction while international trade and climate-change-related
policy are primarily federal. To the Alberta government, the oily substance in the oil
sands looks like money they can’t get at because of environmental protection
policies.
The premiers of both provinces are banking on the flexing of
provincial jurisdictional muscle to change the application of the
constitutional powers, if not the constitution itself. In order to achieve
this, the recent actions have set up an adversarial approach, the outcome of which
will depend on continuing public support (Alberta has an election coming up in
Spring, 2023) and the interpretation placed on the constitution by the courts
in specific cases. In Saskatchewan, the premier enjoys a 56% approval rate and the main hurdle to the
effectiveness of the Act there will likely be the courts. In neither province
is it clear which specific issues the governments mean to act on/litigate.
First Nations are protesting provincial sovereignty acts, of
course. Their treaties are with the federal government, for one, and they see little
good coming their way from provinces overriding, for instance, federal obligations
to consult and to regulate environmental impacts of provincially initiated
projects. (Clearly, the whole question of whether the ceding of land in the
treaties included mineral rights might be an interesting debate now, but far
too late to revisit seriously.)
I’m in no position to know how this will all pan out. I
never learned water-witching nor the reading of the future in chicken guts. I
worry though, that sovereignty acts might become a tool for provinces more
generally, at least if the two mentioned achieve their stated goals. We don’t
need a constant, quarrelsome competitiveness among our provinces and/or between
provinces and our federal government. To ask citizens to choose between them
when all our interests are best served by their cooperation can turn out to
have been a “shooting ourselves in the foot” mistake.
I will predict, however, that I won’t be carrying a
Saskatchewan passport anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment