SK down, QC up - ON... still paying the bill.

-
Harper's trial balloon for equalisation is peeking out and it looks like $1.5bn more for Quebec and $600 million less for Saskatchewan. This is achieved by only counting 50% of resource revenues. Now SK might complain that other provinces benefited more or less in the past but the 50% is ridiculous. Resource revenue should be counted the same as everything else. Transitional equalisation payments rather than immediate clawback should be a function of equalisation rather than of how provincial revenues are counted. The effect is the same but the sense of fiddling with the system is removed.

This is how structural funds work in the European Union. Ireland still managed to draw down quite a bit after we approached 100% of average EU GDP by use of regionalisation due to disproportionate economic growth in certain areas like the east coast.

Like the income trust tax, the 100% exemption for Saskatchewan was a bad promise but it's a pity the Tories couldn't be similarly daring in this volte face. As for Quebec, the least they could do is put signs with trilliums (the old ones not the Liberal ones) outside their $7/day daycares.

Comments

talk talk talk / Shireen said…
LOL @ trilliums! I second that, and also call for "this line courtesy of TTC users" signs in every Montreal subway station.
Thu Jan 18, 09:29:00 pm GMT-5
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remote Desktop Connection Manager - a boon for admins

-
I subscribe to a bunch of Microsoft blogs and one of them revealed a gem in the past month.  RDCMan, a tool which allows an admin to group together remote desktops, preset their username/password combos and connect to those groups with a right-click option, has been invaluable in my work lately which involves quickly jumping from server to server or from servers to a group of workstations.  The gorgeous thing about it is not merely a gallery of thumbnails of the connected sessions, but the ability to interact with the thumbnails with sufficiently accurate mouse clicks.  Heartily recommended. Here's the original post: Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.2 (You had me at EHLO - the Microsoft Exchange Team blog)
Read more

Chirac gets it right on Lebanon troops?

-
When you have bloggers such as Far and Wide's Steve V and Sicilian Notes' Richard Waghorne , the former a raging critic of Israeli operations in Lebanon and the latter a largely uncritical supporter, agreeing on something you can't help feeling like the unlikely has happened - France is doing something right. They have both criticised France's reluctance to increase UNIFIL troop numbers beyond a fairly token 400, up from their current commitment of 200. France's reluctance is mirrored by the Germans who have offered naval anti-smuggling patrols and perhaps border security, the UK and Denmark who have also offered ships, the Italians who are ready to send 3,000 but not yet and the Irish who have earmarked 200 (which would bring them up to the legal maximum of about 850 overseas at any time due to the Liberia mission) but who are also holding back . The reason is that which I posted on some days ago (albeit having taken a second swing at it) - Resolution 1701 does...
Read more

"Your request could not be completed. Please try again in a few minutes."

-
When setting automatic replies (Out of Office) via Exchange 2013 OWA on behalf of another user, the message in the title can be displayed when saving the text. If you look at the System Event Log on the Exchange Server, you may see the following event ID 4: Current user: '" (domain)/(OU)/(OU)/(administrator) " on behalf of " (domain)/(OU)/(OU)/(User) "' Request for URL ( long URL follows ) failed with the following error: Microsoft.Exchange.Management.ControlPanel.RegionalSettingsNotConfiguredException: We couldn't process the request because the user ' (domain)/(OU)/(OU)/(User) ' hasn't signed in to Outlook Web App and selected a language and a time zone. Ask the user to do this, or, if you are a member of the built-in Organization Management or Help Desk role group, you can use Window PowerShell to select a language and time zone for them. Cancel the Automatic Replies dialog and switch to Settings, which will display a Time Zone selecti...
Read more