Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadians have created a radical fiscal federation.According to 2014 data compiled by the OECD, 78 per cent of spending in Canada happens at subnational levels of government.In the United States, it's 48 per cent.Across the OECD, the average is just 32 per cent. 2 Canada is a radical outlier.In this essay, I start by exploring how we have become fiscally radical.I introduce and dismiss three possible explanations for the source of our status as a fiscal outlier: our constitution, our arguably weak sense of national common purpose, and our systems of political accountability.I then argue that economic efficiency is the source of our radical fiscal federation.Last, I consider how our fiscal federation should evolve to meet the principal fiscal challenge for the next fifty years: rising provincial health expenditures.How is it that Canada alone among OECD countries can maintain a modern welfare state mostly run by provinces, some with only a few hundred thousand people?How can we raise the taxes to do so?There are several usual answers to these questions, but they provide incomplete and unsatisfactory explanations.Is it our constitution?Sections 92 and 93 of the 1867 British North America Act assigned responsibility for hospitals, schools, and education to the provinces.Moreover, public insurance funds (such as for unemployment) were considered provincial jurisdiction under the "property and civil rights" heading of Section 92. 3 This constitutional division of powers set the initial conditions, but it insufficiently explains Canada's current radical decentralization.It is hard to argue that constitutional divisions of power have provided an insuperable impediment to centralization, as economic forces have frequently overcome those 10 Canada's Radical Fiscal Federation:The Next Fifty Years 1 kevin milligan
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".