EDMONTON—Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government has heard “loud and clear from Albertans that the federal equalization program is unfair and must be changed or abolished.”
In a April 21 news release accompanying a position paper title Responding to Canada’s Growth Challenge – Options to Reform Equalization, Smith suggests that the current program “creates barriers to regional economic growth and gives excessive transfers to recipient provinces.”
The equalization program is a federal government transfer payment program that sends money from wealthier provinces to provinces with less capacity to raise revenue. This is to “ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation,” states the Constitution Act, 1982….