Featuring insights from some of the top specialists in the country, Fiscal Federalism in Canada unpacks numerous complexities of fiscal federalism in Canada. The book features key regional and provincial perspectives, while taking into account Indigenous realities, the three territories, and municipal affairs. The contributing authors go beyond the major federal transfers to examine the financing of education, cities, infrastructure, and housing. This volume shows that fiscal federalism is much more than simply an aggregate of individual programs and transfers. It highlights the role of actors other than the federal and provincial governments and recalls the importance of territoriality. The book pays close attention to the political dimension of fiscal federalism in Canada, which is at the heart of how the federation functions and is essential to its governance. Fiscal federalism is at the heart of the funding of critical programs through intergovernmental transfers, but it is also the focus of political debates on territorial redistribution. In tackling all these questions, Fiscal Federalism in Canada contributes to the so-called second-generation fiscal federalism literature, taking stock of the critical sociological and political issues at its core.

Featuring insights from some of the top specialists in the country, Fiscal Federalism in Canada unpacks numerous complexities of fiscal federalism in Canada. The book features key regional and provincial perspectives, while taking into account Indigenous realities, the three territories, and municipal affairs. The contributing authors go beyond the major federal transfers to examine the financing of education, cities, infrastructure, and housing. This volume shows that fiscal federalism is much more than simply an aggregate of individual programs and transfers. It highlights the role of actors other than the federal and provincial governments and recalls the importance of territoriality. The book pays close attention to the political dimension of fiscal federalism in Canada, which is at the heart of how the federation functions and is essential to its governance. Fiscal federalism is at the heart of the funding of critical programs through intergovernmental transfers, but it is also the focus of political debates on territorial redistribution. In tackling all these questions, Fiscal Federalism in Canada contributes to the so-called second-generation fiscal federalism literature, taking stock of the critical sociological and political issues at its core.

What does federalism do to welfare states? This question arises in scholarly debates about policy design as well as in discussions about the right political institutions for a country. It has frustrated many, with federalism seeming to matter in all sorts of combinations with all sorts of issues, from nationalism to racism to intergovernmental competition. The diffuse federalism literature has not come to compelling answers for very basic questions. Scott L. Greer, Daniel Béland, André Lecours, and Kenneth A. Dubin argue for a new approach--one methodologically focused on configurations of variables within cases rather than a fruitless attempt to isolate "the" effect of federalism; and one that is substantively engaged with identifying key elements in configurations as well as with when and how their interactions matter. Born out of their work on a multi-year, eleven-country project (published as Federalism and Social Policy: Patterns of Redistribution in Eleven Countries, University of Michigan Press, 2019), this book comprises a methodological and substantive agenda. Methodologically, the authors shift to studies that embraced and understood the complexity within which federal political institutions operate. Substantively, they make an argument for the importance of plurinationalism, changing economic interests, and institutional legacies.