Joe Flaherty announced that Ontario will be getting $347 Billion the first year it receives funds in the equalization program.

While the province has technically qualified for assistance from the 51-year-old equalization program in the past, Ontario has never actually received funds.
[...]
Total equalization transfers in the next fiscal year will be $14.2-billion, Mr. Flaherty said.

Quebec will be the biggest recipient, drawing $8.3-billion, an increase from this year’s allotment of $8-billion.

Manitoba will receive $2.1-billion, the same as this year. New Brunswick is set to get $1.7-billion and Nova Scotia will get $1.6-billion. PEI’s share of the equalization pot will be $340-million.

Equalization payments, which are enshrined in the Constitution, have grown 56 per cent since the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2004, according to the Finance Department.
– Ontario to collect $347-million payout TGAM 3 Nov 2008

I need to actually look up what the law says about equalization, because I don’t think newspaper reporter understand it and I don’t think politicians are motivated to talk about it accurately. For example when Ontario complains about not receiving fair payments for programs, they don’t account for ancillary money that comes to the province through things like federal procurement.

Canadian Tire ‘Money’ turned fifty years old this year.

I learned that from the column by Colbert-looking Doug Steiner in TGAM’s Report on Business.

Steiner was writing about Canadian Tire Bank with its pioneering store Mastercard, its CT Money, and its more recent One and Only account (I wrote about CanTire’s One and Only account along with Manulife’s One account and Virgin RBOS The One Account before).

This is what Steiner has to say:
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The yellow Waterloo banners have been up around town for months. They are like lines from a university resume opening with active verbs and putting the most positive spin on things — trying to appear as employable, or in this case, hmm I don’t know . . . attendable, reputable, respectable as possible.

• CONNECTS with business
• LEADS co-op education
• CREATES leaders of tomorrow
• INSPIRES visionaries
• IGNITES social innovation
• EXPLORES healthier living
• INNOVATES in green energy
• RESEARCHES water quality
• DISCOVERS quantum computing
• EXCITES children about math

Actually maybe they are more like a superhero descriptions:

• FASTER than a speeding bullet
• MATCHES wits with racketeers and saboteurs

The DB says that they banners went up in June.
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I earlier posted about how the U.S. presidential election highlights the social cleavage in America and included a paragraph from a book by Richard Florida.

Florida had a piece in The Globe and Mail on Saturday on the same topic.

As it grew and became more concentrated in locations such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston and Washington D.C. - what we now know as blue America - the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization shipped jobs overseas, while institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s - powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions - were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of former Bush political strategist Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans and to use it to his political organizational advantage.
– The new politics of class war point to a frightening future TGAM 1 Nov 2008