July 10, 2003
Premiers meeting all huff, puff and bluff
By NEIL WAUGH -- Edmonton Sun

CHARLOTTETOWN -- Sometime in the middle of the night HMCS Halifax pulled up to the federal government wharf. Jean Chretien needn't have bothered. Anchoring a gunboat in the harbour - symbolic or otherwise - was clearly overkill on the part of the Ottawa Liberal government.

Because while the provincial leaders gathering here for their annual meeting say that they are mad as heck with the present federal government, none of them appear to have any stomach for not taking it anymore.

And that includes Premier Ralph Klein, who has come to the conference armed with a seven-point agenda to make Canada better.

Klein repeated his belief that Canada is a country where the tail wags the dog. He said Canada was "born out of the provinces"- right up the road and around the corner from the convention hotel, to be precise.

"There is no better place than Charlottetown where the Fathers of Confederation first met to bring about the country," Klein said. "Yes, there is a way to go back to that concept if the federal government wants to do it."

There's only one problem with that: the feds don't.

And the beat goes on and on.

"There is no doubt a level of frustration and tension in provincial-federal relations," blasted New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord, who knows a lot about frustration. His electorate came within a whisker of dumping him over auto insurance rates.

"But I'm not here to change the Constitution," Lord continued. "We have a good thing going. We live in a great country."

"I'm not bluffing," Lord said.

Of course, the prime minister knows that's exactly what this annual huff-and-puff exercise is really all about.

Just ask Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

He's not about to march up to the Charlottetown Legislature with his fellow premiers and start from scratch either. Although the Council of Federations proposal that he has come here to pitch sounds like he might be.

"There is now a government in Quebec that will defend with a great deal of firmness the interests of Quebec," said Charest, who tried to talk a political tightrope. "But our view is that our interests are not in contradiction with the interests of Canada."

At least when the Parti Quebecois was around, these conferences had an edge to them.

"We believe that the Canadian federation has arrived at a point that now must move beyond the mechanisms that we have had in the past," Charest said.

"This offers the opportunity for us to change the dynamics of the federation."

Wanna bet, Jean?

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell is also a big fan of Charest's idea of making the premiers club a national government institution.

"The power comes from people working together and learning from each other," Campbell beamed.

In other words, it's nothing more than a semi-exclusive Rotary Club with no hammer to force the feds to do anything.

At least Ernie Eves is a realist.

"There is no way to force the federal government to do something it doesn't want to do," the Ontario premier sighed. "Other than public opinion, I suppose, and appealing to one's sense of fairness and decency.

"There can't be this attitude in Ottawa that we hold all the marbles and we will tell you how many of them you can play with because we know better than you do."

For his part, Newfoundland Premier Roger Grimes appears to have backed away from his threat to renegotiate the Rock's terms of union with Canada - a threat made after Ottawa unilaterally shut down the last of the cod fishery. "We're not talking about changing the union," Grimes gulped. "That's never been in our dialogue."

Then Manitoba Premier Gary Doer piped up and accused Ottawa of "crying wolf when it comes to the fiscal arrangement."

Wrong, Gary. The only folks issuing idle threats that they have no intention of backing up are the premiers.

These guys are not the father's of the new confederation. And the navy frigate in the harbour will not be needed. By the way, Parks Canada manages the P.E.I. Legislature building.