Dilemmas of Solidarity: Rethinking Redistribution in the Canadian Federation

Extract

Dilemmas of Solidarity: Rethinking Redistribution in the Canadian Federation, Sujit Choudhury, Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens and Lorne Sossin, eds., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 218.

Dilemmas of Solidarity: Rethinking Redistribution in the Canadian Federation, edited by Sujit Choudhury, Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens and Lorne Sossin, aims at broadening and deepening the Canadian debates about fiscal federalism and redistribution, which have often been framed in the narrow terms of “which order of government gets to raise/spend funds for what policies.” The 2002 report of the Séguin Commission (Quebec's Commission on Fiscal Imbalance, chaired by Yves Séguin) and, more specifically, its recommendation that steps be taken to address the vertical fiscal imbalance, or the “disjunction between revenue-raising capacity and expenditures involving different orders of government” (3) to ensure that provinces have the fiscal means commensurate with their policy jurisdictions is a case in point.