Which is why healthcare - and transfer funds to the provinces to pay for healthcare - are entirely voluntary by the federal government. It's traditionally an area that's 100% provincial responsibility.
However Canada has long-since decided that Health Care was important enough that it become a federal issue, with federal funding. The same could happen to Transit.
And what are the transfer payments for? Canadians forget their purpose so easily. The entire purpose of transfer payments is to prevent a large disparity in the quality of public services from province to province, that might result in large migrations by people seeking to access said services. ie. If Ontario had the best health care, we would end up drawing every person with a long term illness in the country. There's a purpose, rationale and national objective in funding health care across the country. And that too, all the feds do is equalize services across the board. The bulk of funding for health care still comes from the provinces.
What is the national imperative in public transit? Is somebody going to move to Toronto from Moncton because there's more subways or LRTs in Toronto?
Though the opposite might also happen. The Conservatives have long wanted (well, since they stopped being Progressive) to get the federal government out of the areas where they have no requirement to be in - I'd expect that if they were elected to a majority there's be a big push to eliminate federal funding for health care, and end the requirement that it be universal (the only stick they really have to enforce this is $).
The Liberals talk a big game. But they weren't that far off the Conservatives in practice either. And this goes back to the argument I'm making. The Canadian context is vastly different. Our government structures are different from say those in Europe. See below.
Also, once you let in federal dollars, you will have to accept federal input. You could well have bureaucrats raised in Wawa, ON, working in Ottawa, deciding where new subway lines will go and which contractor in Fredricton will get the rail ties contract. There is no way the federal government can just turn over funds. If they get that involved in transit, the are legally mandated to be that intrusive. Just look at defence projects for example.
Saying that the federal government has no obligation to fund transit (ie. infrastructure) is true technically, but the reality is that they DO fund infrastructure projects. They just do so on a complete ad-hoc basis and in ways geared toward gaining political support in certain areas.
Around the world, federal governments are involved in funding transit projects. We've fallen behind at least partially because ours doesn't.
Except that government structures are different around the world. There is no real equivalent to our provincial level of government in the UK or France for example. So in reality, their federal governments tend to fulfill roles undertaken by both our provincial and federal governments. They don't have the same constitutional (or traditional) division of responsbilities like we do.
Also, it's not like the feds don't fund infrastructure development. They just fund projects which are politically convenient (which by the way is a practice of both the Liberals and the Conservatives). And this is exactly why they shouldn't be in the infrastructure business to begin with. Because they are involved, provinces take a back seat and abdicate their infrastructure responsibilities. So now you have the federal government building daycares, highway off-ramps and subway lines. Ridiculous. They should be out of this business, vacate the tax room from their reduced involvement and give the provinces the room to raise the necessary revenue and tackle infrastructure as a core priority. This is why I argued that the provinces should have the testicular fortitude to take up the 2% in sales tax room vacated by Ottawa.
What makes a mess of things, is having bureaucrats in Ottawa having to decide the relatives merits of a daycare in Flin-Flon over platform upgrades at a Toronto Subway station. And there's no way to get around this. Transit maybe important to urban geeks on UT. But it's not the only priority for the general public. Who's to say that a new hospital in Kamloops, is less important than one more subway stop on Sheppard? This is why infrastructure concerns should be handled by governments lower down the food chain.