Often, the government's argument, for the provinces, is that the cupboard is bare, so there's nothing for long-term care and so on. That is not the case any longer. The cupboard is stuffed with cash. A lot of it is federal cash, incidentally.
I think this puts the provinces in a good position to spend on their priorities. Hopefully, those are the priorities the pandemic attempted to teach us: that we have woefully inadequate long-term care, that our health care systems simply are not resilient enough, and that we've left some big issues, like climate change, on the back burner for two years. We've certainly seen a push towards tax cuts instead of those priorities. I hope that's not what's going to continue in how those surpluses will be spent.
But it's not for lack of money, at this point, that we're making particular policy choices. The money is there for most of the provinces. Now it's a question of what the priorities are.