Ontario - not Maritimes - getting the shaft
During one of his regular radio talks to the American people in October, 1939, then U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt said that, "Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth."

Which certainly hasn't stopped both Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams and Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald from regularly repeating an outright lie and presenting it to their constituents as the truth. What's more, judging by current public opinion polls in both provinces, it seems to be working - for them at least.

In case you've missed it, Williams and MacDonald - both Conservatives - have essentially launched a verbal war against Prime Minster Stephen Harper's changes to this country's federal-provincial fiscal arrangements.

Both claim - repeatedly - that their provinces have been "betrayed" by Harper's changes to the so-called Atlantic Accord, a sweetheart deal former prime minister Paul Martin, desperate for any votes he could muster, offered those provinces before the last election.

If any province is getting the shaft through the equalization process - and it has been for decades - it is Ontario.

Yet it is not Dalton McGuinty who is accusing Harper of betrayal, it is two fellow Tories who obviously care little about a)-the truth; b)-the rest of Canada and c)- long-term and short-term harm to the Confederation.

For his part, even though the facts are clearly on his side, Harper has been woefully weak in responding to the almost-daily charges against him flowing from the eastern portions of the country.

Who knows why?

Williams, the mouth that walks like a man, already badly hurt his own province by making such outrageous demands to oil companies who were considering further development of Hibernia that they simply packed up and left.

But rather than be criticized in his own province for betraying potential jobs and investment there, Williams has been lionized by Newfoundlanders who, it seems, would rather blame Ottawa - as well as Ontario and Quebec - than deal with the reality of their own blundering leadership.

For despite what these two premiers claim, Harper did not gut the Atlantic Accord. What he did do was give them the choice of keeping the current arrangement - which shield their new oil resource wealth from equalization calculations - or they could opt into a new higher equalization in the current budget which would mean that they would have to count half of their resource revenues in the overall calculation of their equalization payments.

Put simply, both provinces want to be able to continue being flooded with equalization payments - which come, for the most part, from Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia - while also being able to pocket all the money they will bring in from their offshore resources.

Nice work if you can get it. Kind of like being on welfare and winning the lottery, but still demanding that your welfare payments remain the same. Neat. That is exactly what Martin gave them, of course. And the fact is, Harper gave them the option of maintaining that system for the next few years, after which it would be revised.

Fifty years ago, the equalization system was devised as an economic tool to help the poorer or "have not" provinces provide roughly the same level of public services to their residents as the richer or "have" provinces provide to theirs. Fair enough. At that time, the per capital incomes in the Atlantic provinces were roughly twothirds the national average, compared to Ontario, which was about 25 percent above the national average, a gap of roughly 50 points.

But that was then. Today, that same gap is down below 10 points, as Atlantic incomes have grown much faster than Ontario incomes. Even so, about 60 per cent of Newfoundland's provincial budget and 40 per cent of Nova Scotia's budget comes from Ottawa. Ontario gets a paltry 16 per cent of its budget from Ottawa. We pay the rest. Indeed, we pay a large share of that 16 per cent as well.

For 2007-08, Newfoundland's per capita revenues, which include equalization, are $7,094, nearly $500-perperson AHEAD of Ontario's per capital revenues.

And Williams and MacDonald claim they're getting the shaft.

Not bloody likely. Ontario is.

It's really time for Harper to quit taking their cheap shots and hit back at what has to be one of the worst examples of provincial greed and downright misrepresentation in this country's history.

As things stand, the bloodsuckers are scoring points, and Ontarians are paying the price for it.