On the federal government, the premiers can all agree

They can’t fix issues within their own jurisdictions but have demands for others

It is possible to imagine a situation in which it would be useful for the premiers to meet, just as it is possible to conceive of a reason why anyone should pay them the slightest attention.

Suppose the premiers agreed, at one of their preposterous annual costume balls (“First Ministers” was pompous enough, but with “The Council of the Federation” we are in the realm of fan fiction), to eliminate all of the hundreds of inter-provincial trade barriers that still disfigure the landscape, a century and a half after Confederation. Suppose they agreed to eliminate any of them. OK, suppose they started with one — say, regulations some provinces impose barring citizens from ordering wine from out-ofprovince vineyards.

That would be worth a self-congratulatory communiqué or two.

Suppose, in the same fantastic vein, they agreed to stop their professional bodies from discriminating against those who have received their training elsewhere. Never mind grandiose national energy strategies: Suppose they just agreed to allow each other’s oil and hydroelectricity to cross their soil without being held to ransom. Suppose, with regard to health care, they agreed to collect and adopt each other’s best practices — not one or two, here and there, but comprehensively, for savings that have been estimated in the billions, not the millions of which the provinces now boast.

Suppose they agreed to reform the Sen — nah, I can’t even say it. Oh hell: Suppose they simply agreed to put their budgets on the same system of accounts, so the public could have some idea of how much they were spending, relative to each other. These would all justify the premiers meeting.

Certainly there is nothing to prevent the premiers from doing any of these. Because, you see, they all have the inestimable advantage of being within the premiers’ jurisdiction. And yet somehow that is never the order of business at any of their meetings. It isn’t just that they hardly ever agree to anything that is in their power to do — no, not even the one about the wine. They barely even talk about it.

Instead, they talk about the feds: what Ottawa should do, how much money it should spend, and on what. On this, let it be said, they have no trouble agreeing. The tone of this week’s meeting — or of any previous — can be gathered from the headlines: Premiers to press for new federal funding model for infrastructure projects. Premiers seek new train safety rules. Premiers urge Ottawa to consult them on jobs training, energy. Premiers urge Stephen Harper to improve disaster relief. Premiers urge cyberbullying to be included in Criminal Code. (That’s a lot of urging for one meeting. Premiers, it seems, have an irresistible urge to urge.)

Some of these are squarely within federal jurisdiction, as for example when the premiers demand a role in international trade negotiations, or when they issue edicts on how the federal employment insurance or the federal old age security programs should be designed. Certainly they all involve federal cash. And, of all the things the premiers might think to suggest the federal government spend more on, what do you suppose tops their list? Why yes: themselves.

What the federal government trumpeted in this year’s budget as a major new infrastructure commitment was dismissed by the premiers as penny ante, on the way to demanding more of it — more, that is, than the $14-billion already earmarked for provincial projects. Accordingly, the premiers announced the formation of a “working group” on “strategic infrastructure investment,” or as the Maclean’s website headlined it, “Provinces make late push for federal infrastructure money.” Oh, and the provinces, not the feds, would decide where and how it was spent. That’s the “new funding model.”

Yet as eager as the premiers are to assert control over an ever-larger share of federal spending in areas of federal jurisdiction, they are no less insistent that the feds spend more in their own fields as well, as in the perennial demands for more federal transfers for health care. “More” here

What the federal government trumpeted in this year’s budget as a major new infrastructure commitment was dismissed by the premiers as penny ante.

means over and above the $30 billion Ottawa already provides them every year (plus another $30 billion in other transfers, separately labelled, though in fact they all go into general revenues and can be spent any way the provinces like), a number the feds have promised will grow no slower than the economy, more or less in perpetuity.

And when they have finished all this — when they are done writing Ottawa’s budget, and amending the Criminal Code, and drafting federal safety regulations, and demanding to be consulted on everything under the sun — the premiers use whatever time they have left to complain about federal interference.

This is particularly incoherent when it comes to health care, where the premiers are also accustomed to demanding federal “leadership.” But as that game seems to have played itself out, the focus this year was on stopping the new Canada Job Grant, with its promise of $300 million in federal funding to help employers train skilled workers, before it gets started.

Why would the premiers want to do this? Because the money is conditional on the provinces (and employers) matching the federal contribution. They don’t have to, you understand: It’s just that if they don’t, their workers and employers won’t get any of the federal cash. Whereas the feds used to just hand the money over to the provinces to spend, gratis.

Spending 33-cent dollars? With no right to “opt out, with full compensation,” i.e., do nothing and still get the cash? Why, it’s intolerable. Same time next year, everyone.