Transfer Wealth from Ontario or Transfer Wealth to Ontario

Confederation made a nationalist of Macdonald. Perennially weak in Ontario, he won a plurality of votes there in 1867, only to lose it again in 1872 as the renewed Liberal complaints of fiscal transfers won back voters. In political exile from 1872 to 1878, Macdonald mused on that lesson. Perhaps he was going about things wrongly. Perhaps, instead of using the state to transfer wealth from Ontario, he should transfer wealth to Ontario.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 119.