municipal. As the scale of government has increased, the tendency of governments to propose policies or undertake measures which affect the policies or measures of other governments also has increased. Concern as to whether governments’ taxing powers match their spending responsibilities has increased correspondingly. And as the range of government activities and programme planning has widened, there has been a growing tendency on the part of governments to extend their planning to cover the activities of other governments operating in the same area.
It is important that the federal and provincial governments review seriously the consequences of proposed constitutional adjustments in this field, in view of the differences which currently divide them. We should be frank about these differences. The governments of the provinces believe that their powers of taxation are too limited; the federal government believes that provincial taxing powers are virtually as great as its own. The governments of some provinces do not believe the Parliament of Canada should use the spending power in the way it has; but in fact, the use of this power has been responsible for much of Canada’s social and economic progress. There have been demands for wholesale transfers of taxing and spending powers from the Parliament of Canada; the federal government has replied that transfers to the provinces of powers of such magnitudes would make it impossible for it to discharge its responsibilities for the whole country.
All of those differences are serious. And all of them stem from genuine differences of opinion over how the powers of government are or ought to be divided between the Parliament of Canada and the legislative assemblies of the provinces. The Government of Canada has concluded that the point has been reached where the federal and provincial governments should meet to discuss, formally and fully, the whole question as to how the powers of government should be divided in Canada. We should examine the claims that are made for the transfer or the clarification of powers, and the consequences of these claims. These meetings would, of course, involve difficult discussions of complex and sensitive questions, including the division of powers, the spending power, the residual power, and the power of delegation. But meetings on these questions would be preferable, in our opinion, to dealing with forever recurring disputes over particular powers, in a partial or a piecemeal fashion.
Discussions on the division of powers should take place, in the opinion of the Government of Canada, after the constitutional conferences have considered the other principal elements of the Constitution — the rights of individual Canadians, including linguistic rights, and the central institu-
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