Canadian austerity in the '90s was largely a systematic shifting of financial burdens down to provinces and then many of those provinces them under-funding area

Canadian austerity in the '90s was largely a systematic shifting of financial burdens down to provinces and then many of those provinces them under-funding areas where local government would be forced to pick up the slack. I suspect the Europeans were guilty of this in many places in trying to meet the EU budget restrictions. Unlike Canada they did not get lucky, in Canada we were recovering from a recession and the real estate values that property taxes were based on were steady or rising and provided some cushion for the local governments. The EU municipalities find themselves in the opposite circumstance as the real estate markets are a disaster. They are being crushed from both sides.