Old and New Money

Commentary: OldandNew Money DAVID ALEXANDER In a state with universal adult suffrage and representative institutions the spatial distribution of political power should broadly reflect population distribution and output, plus or minus regional differences in relative productivity. This we may call the customary basis for the spatial distribution of political power. But customary political power may be affected by other factors, such as strategic location, the endowment of public and private decision-making centres or control of a critical economic input. This we may call the incremental basis of political power. For example, London and the South East is the most powerful region in the United Kingdom mainly because of its population density and the relatively high productivity of its economy. But it also has the bulk of private, public and quasi-public decision-making institutions. As a result the region enjoys great customary power, as it should, but also exercises enormous incremental power which other regions may rightly dispute that it should have. In Canada regional power has reflected similar factors, and in Western and Atlantic Canada the power of the Central Provinces is regarded as excessive. It is particularly resented that these provinces have so great an impact upon the composition of the federal government , and that metropolitan centres like Toronto and Montreal should elect as many members or more than entire provinces in the West and East. But the presence of provincial governments and their Crown corporations as well as the enormous size of the country and its openness to foreign influences, has assured that the Central Provinces do not exercise the disproportionate power of the London and Paris regions in Britain and France. It is also true that relative power in this country has shifted in response to movements in the customary sources of power. The influence of the Atlantic Provinces has declined rapidly with the slow growth of population and earned incomes. The opposite has been true of the Western Provinces. In the Central Provinces since the War relative power has moved west from Quebec in response to realities similar to those long at work in Atlantic Canada. But if power has shifted between the Atlantic and the West and between Quebec and Ontario, the feeling runs strong in the peripheral regions that inordinate power still resides in the Central Provinces. Residents of the Atlantic and Western Provinces are inclined to argue that the enormous power of the Central Provinces is sufficient to retard through intention or neglect the potential growth and therefore the potential power of other regions. For example, I Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 15, No.3 (Automne J980Fall) have argued that federal indifference towards the overseas trading opportunities for the Atlantic fisheries in the postwar years, and exchange rate policies which reflected the foreign investment demands of other regions of Canada, were a cause of economic retardation and quite catastrophic social disruption in rural Newfoundland. A more serious charge than blind neglect , however, is that the enormous power of the Central Provinces provides a basis for them to transfer opportunities (and hence power) from where naturally they should be located. A classic example of this is the ability of Quebec business and government, with the acquiescence of the federal government, to transfer from Newfoundland most of the benefits of Labrador resource development. Westerners complain that federally regulated freight rates are used to transfer food processing from the Prairies to Central Canada, while federal Crown corporations expand the petrochemical industry in Southern Ontario rather than Alberta. Power in the Central Provinces, in other words, is used to augment their 'natural' endowment of customary power at the expense of regions where it should 'naturally' reside. The extent to which this is so, or is believed to be so, adds to the growth of regional identities at the expense of a national one. It also contributes to a regional politics of perpetual grievance which is familiar to us all in the undignified whine of the Atlantic Provinces and the nasty assertiveness of the Western. The most blatant example of using incremental power to generate a regionally more favourable equilibrium is the Quebec government's sovereignty-association proposal. By wielding assets such as the province's central...