of an exact division of tax fields. We would do well to remember that it is as difficult to predict what technological or social or international changes will have increased the role of the provincial or federal governments in 30 years as it would have been to predict the changes between 1938 and 1968.
The fourth generalization we would advance concerning the division of powers has to do with the effect each government’s activities inevitably will have upon the activities of the others. This applies both to individual programmes and to the totality of government activity. For example, federal income redistribution measures inevitably have an effect upon provincial social welfare programmes and provincial resource development policies inevitably affect the rate of growth of the nation’s economy. Similarly the aggregate use by the provinces of their spending and borrowing powers inevitably affects federal fiscal, and monetary and balance of payments policies, and the use of the federal spending power affects provincial policies in different ways. Obviously the total volume of spending by each order of government affects the priorities of the other.
We question whether it is any longer realistic to expect that some neat compartmentalization of powers can be found to avoid this. Instead we suspect that the answer is to be found in the processes by which governments consult one another and by which they seek to influence each other before decisions are finally taken. This remedy has been prescribed so often as to appear commonplace. But there is much to be done even in coming to understand the processes of intergovernmental influence, to say nothing of perfecting the machinery by which intergovernmental consultation takes place. Nor will we find the “participation” of provincial governments in federal government decisions, and vice versa, to be an easy answer to the problems of consultation. The federal government must remain responsible to Parliament, and the provincial governments to their legislatures: federal-provincial conferences must, it seems to us, occupy themselves with the art of influence rather than the power of decision-making.
Both federal and provincial governments will recognize, too, the unresolved question as to whether there should be a federal government role when there is a “national interest” in provincial programmes (or the lack of them), or whether there should be a provincial government role when there is a “provincial interest” in national programmes (or the lack of them). Examples abound: What the provinces do or do not do about urban development unquestionably affects the national interest, and what the federal government does or does not do about tariff policy affects the
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