Ms. Wasylycia-Leis, because we live in a federation and it's with us every day, we sometimes forget how our federal structure influences how we think about these things. If we were a unitary state, then the services you were speaking about would be provided by a central government and be funded by a central government. We wouldn't have disparities between parts of the country. It just wouldn't take place.
But because we're a federation and because certain responsibilities are assigned to the federal level and certain ones to the provincial level, we have this decentralization. Just because we have this decentralization, there's no reason why we should not still have roughly equivalent capacity to fund those services.
Do you see what I'm saying? We forget that we're a federation. We think there's something wrong or something we should worry about in terms of the transfer of resources, when it is in fact the normal thing that happens in our country. If you look at other modern federations, with the exception of the United States—they have their own ways of redistributing—whether it's Australia or Germany, Austria or Switzerland, they all have equalization programs. Frankly, most of them do a better job at equalizing than we do in Canada.
We don't equalize in Canada. All we do is bring the lower revenue up to a certain national average, or try to. In Australia and Germany, they equalize and it's not a problem. I don't know why we have such difficulty in Canada today, agonizing over something that is a normal function of a federation.