I'm only going to respond to couple of points I disagree with you about, much of what you wrote I think is correct as well.
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Originally Posted by Makarov
(2) Inconvenient Fact #2: Public services are often more generous in havenot provinces;
In support of this "inconvenient fact", the article relies on the following evidence:
As has already been pointed out in this thread, this is simply incorrect. The natural resource rich provinces of Newfoundland, Alberta, Saskatchewan, ec. all spend more on social programs than the other provinces. Cherry-picking particular programs is incomplete, incorrect, and totally misleading.
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Spending more doesn't equal better outcomes, ask anyone who has been to a hospital in the past 10 years. Spending has more than doubled, has nyone seen a 100% increase in service or outcomes? The Author of the other study noted that as well and cautied that comparing spending doesn't accurately reflect outcomes either.
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It sounds like a plausible argument. Unfortunately, a real estate price survey from Royal LePage has exactly nothing to do with the cost of delivering public services in different provinces. A much more relevant statistic (although surely not the only one) would be average public sector wages in each province. Curiously, those statistics do not support the authors' argument. For example, PEI, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick (all havenot provinces) have the third, fourth, and fifth highest average public sector wages. BC and Ontario (traditionally have provinces) have the two lowest (Alberta is fourth lowest.) [Source (not the best source but I don't have time to look for anything more authoritative.] Therefore there does not appear to be any correlation between equalization status and the cost of delivering public services.
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Average public sector wages has no greater representation of cost of delivering public services than real estate surveys.
We could compare combined tax rates across provinces, assuming that it should cost more to live in jurisdictions where it would cost more to deliver servies. Curiously, and as demonstated in the UofA study (pg 10), there is an inverse relationship to tax rates and equalization payments. The more you tax the more likely you are to recieve (or to need to recieve) equalization. Even more curiously is that the high average public wages and high tax rates seem correlate....