The only economist to ever fully decipher Canada's mass of federal-provincial transfers
National Post, 25 March 2026
Thomas Courchene was happy to defy the consensus on whatever issue caught his attention
More than 30 years ago I was a student of Professor Thomas Courchene, who died last November, one of the great Canadian economists of his generation, an example of how rigorous research is beneficial for public policy. On Thursday his grateful colleagues and students will gather at Queen’s University to honour a lifetime of work accomplished with good cheer and in good company.
Some 10 years after I was in his class, Courchene published his 2004 paper, “Confiscatory Equalization,” demonstrating that his home province of Saskatchewan had been shortchanged in the equalization formula. Saskatchewan got a $120-million “refund” from the federal government due to his work, making the province even more grateful to him than his former students.
He was awarded the Saskatchewan Distinguished Service Award in 2005, which caused many to quip that he had truly earned it. Such awards, usually considered priceless, had a specific value in this case! Courchene would collect nearly all the national and provincial honours he was eligible for — both professional and civic — and wore them lightly.
He won the inaugural Donner Prize in 1999 for the best book on public policy, From Heartland to North American Region State: The Social, Fiscal and Federal Evolution of Ontario.
Despite the gripping title, I never read that book, but did read his 2018 Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens: From First Contact to Canada 150 and Beyond, for which he won the prestigious Donner Prize again, no mean achievement. He had a special heart for Indigenous Canadians, arguing that sound economic policy would open paths to opportunity and agency for First Nations that had uniquely suffered an enervating dependency wrought by malign public policy.
More than 20 years ago I wrote here that Courchene “may be the only man in Canada who really understands the federal-provincial transfer system; at any rate, he is the only man who has the stomach to digest the figures, year in and year out.”
Guts is another word for stomach, and Courchene had that in spades, quite happy to defy the consensus on whatever issue caught his attention. In academia it takes courage to stand outside the consensus. Courage he had, as well as the stamina needed to get into the weeds of public policy, which is why Courchene figured out what Saskatchewan’s own bean counters did not.
At his retirement dinner in 2012, he invited me to give the invocation before the meal, and a few prefatory remarks. I noted that a tribute earlier in the day called Courchene’s friends and admirers a “gathering of heretics.” Theologically I avoid such company, but in economics it means thinking outside the box.
When I started teaching economics and philosophy at Queen’s in 2006, Courchene was generous enough to say that we were now colleagues, which was an embarrassing extravagance for me. He was generous with his counsel, as I shared my distress that economics too often neglected not only the more intriguing policy questions, but also the deeper human questions that are the heritage of our discipline. He gave me confidence that those questions could still be addressed with students. Twenty years later I am still at it, and grateful that he was there to encourage me at the beginning.
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