All things Canadian are now regional

Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 2000 by Donald J. Savoie

Yet, slow-growth provinces have traditionally supported a strong role for the central or federal government. Premiers and parties come and go, but whatever their political stripes, they are, with few exceptions, always on the lookout to ensure that other provincial governments and regions do not strip away Ottawa's powers. Paradoxically, however, a good number of Atlantic Canadians believe that a key, if not the most important reason, why their region trails others economically is misguided federal policies that have, over the years, strongly favoured - and continue to favour - central Canada. They look back to economic protectionism and the National Policy, which, soon after Confederation, forced producers in Atlantic Canada to ship their goods on expensive routes to central Canada rather than to their traditional markets in the New England states. Moreover, the National Policy forced the United States producers to establish branch plants in Canada, nearly always in central Canada, not the Maritimes or the West. Lastly, Ottawa's decision to concentrate the bulk of its activities in support of the war effort during the early 1940s served to strengthen considerably Ontario's industrial capacity in relation to other regions.

Things, it appears, have not changed much. The report on Atlantic Canada noted earlier reveals that the federal Department of Industry spent only $17 million in Atlantic Canada out of its annual high-tech development budget of $972 million. The bulk of the spending went to Ontario and Quebec (McGuire et al. Catching Tomorrow's Wave). To add insult to injury, one of the few Atlantic Canada projects the Department of Industry sponsored was to undertake research to control the spread of zebra mussels infecting the Great Lakes. Moreover, the owners and workers of the Irving shipbuilding companies recently took the unprecedented step of joining forces to ask the prime minister to force "Industry Minister John Manley to the sidelines" (Telegraph Journal, 7 August 1999). They did this because they believed the minister and his department were incapable of reviewing a sector that held little economic interest outside Ontario and Quebec.

All this speaks to the increasingly apparent inability of the federal government to be responsive to territorial or regional diversities, despite efforts over the past 30 years or so to restructure Ottawa's administrative machinery to make it more sensitive to regional circumstances. It is fair to say that none of them have had much success and each programme in its turn, has been cancelled.

It is probably asking too much to expect senior public servants to pursue, without sustained political direction, two broad objectives simultaneously. How can they keep regional issues in mind when, apart from pursuing their departmental policy objectives, they must also be sensitive to access to information legislation, official languages requirements, employment equity provisions, a media always on the lookout to ferret out errors, the Office of the Auditor General and so on. Most senior policy positions are located in Ottawa which does not help matters, at least from a regional perspective.