http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/10/17/fiscal_imbalance_051017.html?ref=rss
Um, yet again, another example of the failure of any and all socialism no matter the supposed positive intent. The only thing wrong with the article is that the guy that did the study doesn't point out that transfer payments are evil. Instead it treats it as an axiom that Ontarioians should be helping the poorer provinces. Hello! It doesn't work because you're handing people money and they haven't earned it!
Federalism didn't work in the 17 and 1800s and it wasn't until the 1900s, when the United States really came into it's own that the standard of living significantly increased on the backs of great men who were for the first time in history largely free to invent and reap the benefits of their inventions. It is telling that in the period ending the civil war to the beginning of WW1 the population of the United States more than doubled while simultaneously the amount of money versus the cost of goods (i.e. the true definition of standard of living) increased by a factor of almost 1000. Every time previously in the history of man that the population increased at anywhere near that pace, the result has been destitution and a lower standard of living not a higher one.
The natural state of capitalism is deflation. Goods get cheaper. Reciprocally while the goods get cheaper, the workers get paid more (all of the stats over the period from 1804 (~end of the Napoleonic wars) to the beginning of WW1 (minus the years of civil war bare out everything I'm about to say and is well footnoted in "The Capitalist Manifesto" by Andrew Bernstein) because they are more productive. For instance it was no coincidence that during the Factory building industrial revolution in Britain people moved from rural areas to the cities in search of jobs in the factories. They did so, because people made more money working in a factory than they did in the rural communities. What you have to keep in mind is that pre-industrialization fully 40% of Europe didn't make enough money a day to pay for a crust of bread, little own a whole loaf. The salaries in the factories were on average 3 times what the same people working in rural areas could have made, and in the span of less than 50 years the kind of poverty that was the norm under feudalism and later federalism was almost completely abolished. In the same time period child labour went from the norm to something that was virtually unheard of.
Leave people alone to live their own lives and reap the benefits of their own actions. The results are proven and historical fact. The same thing will happen in Canada if it's allowed to happen. Federalism is a disease killing the spirits of men. It's time to excise it.