Finances of the Nation: "Final and Unalterable"--But Up for Negotiation: Federal-Provincial Transfers in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For almost 60 years, the Canadian Tax Foundation published an annual monograph, of the Nation, and its predecessor, The National Finances. In a change of format, the 2014 Canadian Tax Journal introduced a new Finances of the feature, which presents annual surveys of provincial and territorial budgets, and topical articles on taxation and public expenditures in Canada. In this article, Trevor Tombe explores the history of federal-provincial transfers in Canada. He compiles and analyzes uniquely detailed data from Confederation to the present showing that (1) explicit transfers to provincial governments are more equally distributed today than they have been throughout most of Canada's history, and (2) while overall federal tax and spending activities currently redistribute just under 2 percent of Canada's gross domestic product across provinces, this is the lowest level in the past six decades. Tombe proposes a uniform methodology to quantify and analyze explicit and implicit fiscal transfers, discusses the design of today's transfer programs and the pressures that they must withstand, and suggests some changes that might be considered in future reforms. The underlying data for the of the Nation monographs and the articles in this journal will be published online in the near future.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".