From the back cover: Can national financial institutions, such as banks, function in a country as regionally diverse as Canada without seeming to discriminate between the regions...This book...considera a very real and specific aspect of the sharing of regulatory power within Confederation. The results of Benson's study indicate that national policies, pursued either by governments or by private sector firms, may well produce different results in different regions. This regional dieversity is often interpreted as discrimination and because of it provincial governments are sometimes led to take countrevailling action. The concept of a provincial government is one such response.