You touch on the issue of fungibility, which is to say that it's hard to know where a dollar goes when it's transferred from one level of government to another. When you pour a glass of water into a swimming pool, you can't then go and take the glass and pull the same water out of that pool. It's now part of that pool. I often wonder where all these federal transfers end up.
We've been, again, massively increasing federal transfer payments now for over a decade and a half. It's true that there were some cutbacks in the 1990s, but that's two decades ago. Since the early 2000s, every single year the federal government has increased transfers to the provinces faster than the combined rate of inflation and population growth, yet the needs of provincially financed programs seems to grow and grow and grow. Every time there's a shortage, politicians from various levels of government just point at each other and say, “Oh, you know, you're not giving me enough” or “There were cuts 25 years ago, and that's the reason we don't have enough money today”.
Mr. Whittle raised an interesting point when he talked about the complexity of multi levels of government involved in the same project. Napoleon used to say that he'd rather have one incompetent general than two competent ones, because at least he'd know who was responsible for leading the troops. Do you think there's a problem with that? Are there too many levels of government involved in the same thing, and as a result of that multitude of complication, we fail to deliver the results that people in need deserve?