Yes, it was a hoot alright when Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas accused “a small minority of folk” of being fixated on former prime minister Justin Trudeau. Speaking in the comfortable company of the CBC’s David Cochrane and Edmonton Mayor Andrew Knack, he observed that Mr. Trudeau got blamed for “everything from why we lose our socks in the dryer, why we sell hot dog buns in packages of 12, but we sell hot dogs in packages of eight.”There stands a man of straw, indeed. But suppose there were such people; there is a far larger group of Albertans — a significant majority, in fact — who, if they think of Trudeau fils at all, have more robust complaints.How about the “No Pipeline bill” and the tanker ban? The relentless attacks upon the oil sands? The pious urgings to rely upon interruptible power from windmills and solar panels in a place where, for much of the year, the steady and uninterrupted supply of electricity is a matter of life and death? His ethical shortcomings, his love of posturing, and his dismissive attitude toward everything about Alberta? Any of the offensive offerings listed below? Nor was it just in Alberta. It was nationwide. By the time his party sacked him, Mr. Trudeau’s approval rating was down to 27%.Which brings us to the result of the provincial election in Quebec, where Mr. Trudeau was as unpopular as he was in Alberta, and the voters today are plainly no happier with Ottawa under Mr. Carney’s management than we are in Alberta.Indeed, Canada’s French-speakers have once more served notice that it isn’t just Alberta that doesn’t care for what the Liberal government in Ottawa is selling.And what is that?It is the old Liberal offer, freshly labelled by Prime Minister Mark Carney as “co-operative federalism.” He has used the phrase often enough that it now does duty as a policy..For example, at the July First Ministers’ meeting in Charlottetown, he cited the Alberta and BC agreements as clearing the path for projects he said would ‘catalyze’ well over $200 billion and almost 200,000 jobs, with benefits “shared with the Indigenous peoples as full partners … These are examples of cooperative federalism at work. And we are just getting started.”Indeed, he used the same argument again yesterday on the way into cabinet, after congratulating Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. Ottawa and the provinces would strike deals.So, housing, infrastructure, Churchill Falls, a pipeline that might one day go west, carbon capture, apprenticeships, and mutual recognition of credentials. indigenous peoples as “full partners.” A country renovated as we go. Don’t wait for a referendum a few years down the road. Build. It sounds like peace.But it is not the peace Quebec and Alberta are asking for.Co-operative federalism, as Mr. Carney practises it, is not a sharing of power. It is a method of collecting it. The federal government decides the national project — an electricity grid doubled by 2050, a carbon price redesigned in Ottawa and then “updated” with the provinces, a Major Projects Office that decides which proposals are strategic, an internal-trade scheme whose model law is federal.Provinces are then invited to sign.Those that sign are partners. Those that hesitate are problems to be managed. British Columbia learned the distinction last November, when the Alberta energy memorandum, pipeline clause and all, landed on Premier David Eby’s desk as a surprise.Ontario learned it when the China electric vehicle arrangement arrived with a few hours’ notice..A federation in which the senior government negotiates around you, then congratulates itself on the spirit of the thing, is not a co-operative. It is a head office with branch plants.This is the Liberal strategy of a century and a half, with better stationery. Macdonald wanted a strong centre and got one on paper. The courts spent the next eighty years giving the provinces their own. Pierre Trudeau spent his career trying to take it back: the spending power, the Charter, the National Energy Program, and patriation over Quebec’s objection. Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin used the surplus to buy provincial programs and call it the social union.Justin Trudeau did it by statute and sermon — Bill C-69, the tanker ban, the oil and gas emissions cap that never quite became law but frightened off the capital anyway, and a running commentary on Alberta as a place that had enjoyed more than its share of the driver’s seat.Mr. Carney has retired the sermon. But he has not retired the destination. The money, the permits, the tax credits, and the veto still sit in Ottawa. A province may have a resource. Mr. Carney wants Ottawa to retain the conditions under which the resource may be sold.Which is precisely where Alberta and Quebec have always been able to understand each other.Both provinces have a core jurisdiction they regard as the reason they entered Confederation, and that Ottawa has never quite accepted as closed. For Alberta, it is resources: that’s what section 92A of the Constitution Act is all about. For Quebec, it is language, civil law, education, and the right to order its own society without a federal morality play.Both have been lectured by the same capital for the same offence, which is refusing to become a region. Both have watched the federal spending power arrive in their capitals dressed as help. Both know what the cheque requires. Both have produced premiers, separatist and federalist, who figured out that a deal signed in a crisis is how you lose the next argument about who is in charge.Alberta’s interests are not identical with those of Quebec. Only the dreamily sentimental would pretend that. Quebec’s hydro is the asset Ottawa now wants to finance and call a national clean-energy triumph; Alberta’s bitumen is the asset Ottawa spent a decade trying to retire. Quebec’s grievance is cultural and constitutional. Alberta’s is fiscal and industrial. A pipeline to the East still dies in Quebec as often as a pipeline to the West dies in British Columbia. Anyone announcing a new alliance of the two should be asked to provide notes for a premier explaining it at home..But both provinces reject the idea that Canada’s national purpose is whatever the government in Ottawa announced last week, and that the provinces exist only to deliver it.Monday’s vote said so again in French. The PQ took 29% and a minority, which is not a mandate to leave. But it is a mandate to stop pretending that the last decade of Liberal Ottawa was an acceptable version of the country. St-Pierre Plamondon has said he will not call a referendum while President Trump is in office. Mr. Carney’s answer was to offer him infrastructure funding and the spirit of co-operative federalism.That is an answer to a question Quebec did not ask. Quebec asked who governs Quebec.Albertans know the script. When the petition crossed 300,000 names, the prime minister’s reply was the Clarity Act, the Supreme Court, and a promise to make the country work for Albertans.Of course, Mr. Carney wants Canada to work. But he wants it to work Ottawa’s way. In his scheme, the provinces are essential partners, but they don’t get to control the blueprints.In Alberta, a ‘yes’ vote on October 19 is not an independence ballot. It merely asks whether there should be one. What Alberta wants is a resource jurisdiction that cannot be regulated into a stranding, a fiscal deal that is not a lecture, a project system in which the province is the proponent, and Ottawa is the landlord of interprovincial works only.Defenders of the prime minister will say this is unfair. They will say he signed with Danielle Smith where Justin Trudeau would not have signed, that the consumer carbon tax is gone, and that the emissions cap has been scrapped. Quebec, meanwhile, got $10 billion for community infrastructure and a Churchill Falls agreement. Mr. Carney would also say — with truth — that first ministers have met more often than they did under his predecessor.And a prime minister who would rather cut a deal than give a homily is an improvement on the previous one. Smith has said he “gets it.” Premiers who have spent years unable to get Ottawa on the telephone are entitled to take the meeting..One cannot help noticing, though, that the federal spending power, the criminal law power, the trade and commerce power, and the declaratory power have survived every handshake in the history of Confederation. Perhaps Mr. Carney is saying he will use them more politely; nevertheless, on his lips, co-operative federalism is revealed as merely centralization by consent.Or perhaps by exhaustion. Years of delayed permits, projects killed, capital that will not come while Ottawa’s conditions are unsettled, a referendum or an election that does not change the statutes. At that point, the memoranda Mr. Carney offers look like the only way to get anything built, and a provincial signature is weariness rather than a meeting of minds. Thus, Smith takes the energy deal, Quebec takes the infrastructure package … the provinces do not so much consent as run out of road.The provinces save face; Ottawa holds the levers and calls the arrangement a partnership because both signatures are on the page. Quebec has heard this before, in two languages. Alberta is hearing it now, in the language of projects and apprenticeships.The common interests of Quebec and Alberta have always been evident to anyone watching the money and the statutes rather than the speeches.The election result in Quebec is a reminder that it is not only Albertans who reject the values and habits of Ottawa’s ruling elite.What now? Of course, a minority government in Quebec City cannot remake Confederation, any more than Alberta can with a referendum question. But what the two provinces can do, if they wish, is make common cause in rejecting the kind of central Canadian imperialism that Mr. Carney offers with his so-called ‘cooperative federalism’ and insist instead that Confederation in Canada means Ottawa is not the only government that gets to decide what the country is for.There really is so much more to it than hot dogs.
