Canada is not a country with a reputation for bold experimentation. However, Canadian experience demonstrates conclusively that an invoice-credit, destination-based value-added tax (VAT) is workable at the subnational level, with both federal and provincial governments retaining full control...

This paper presents an unusual inter-governmental financial arrangement: a payment by constituent units of a federation to the federal government to keep it out of a fiscal field and thus gain sole occupancy for themselves. This paper thus presents the history of the federal/provincial...

Regional diversity may influence the nature and effectiveness of public sector activities through many economic and political channels. The most important and prominent manifestation of diversity in Canada has been the rise to dominance in the largely francophone province of Quebec of a...

In this paper, following an introductory section setting out some salient characteristics of the country and its key institutions, we examine three aspects of Canada’s federal arrangements over the last half century. We have chosen these three examples to illustrate, first, an instance in...

Recently many commentators have expressed concern about the fiscal health of Toronto and, more generally, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Such concern is puzzling because most of the available evidence suggests that municipalities in the GTA are fiscally healthy. Over the past decade, for...

In this paper, we examine the issue of the incidence of central government budgets in federal countries. In Section 1, we discuss a number of reasons why the picture painted of reality by even the best fiscal flow analysis is inevitably partial and hence inherently flawed to an unknowable...