Dalton McGuinty was doing a favour for reporters afflicted with summer-brain stupor.
“Here's the news,” the Ontario Premier said, helpfully, after a speech late last month. “Ontarians are coming together to more effectively assert themselves in the face of an unfairness caused by the financial arrangements between us and Ottawa.”
Indeed, it would be news if this coming-together was actually happening, and it would be momentous given the suggestion by the federal government this week that it is prepared to shift some economic powers to the provinces. But the residents of Canada's most populous province do not have an unbroken history of rising up as one to take on the federal government. Ontario is not Alberta, and the philosophy that provincial rights should be paramount has always had to compete with a powerful sense that Canada comes first.
Mr. McGuinty embodies this duality. For more than three years, he has wasted few opportunities to make his claim that Ontario is being treated unfairly in Confederation because it receives, by the latest estimate, about $20-billion less in services from federal government than its taxpayers remit to Ottawa. He criticizes the federal equalization program – financed predominantly by Ontario taxpayers – for redistributing money to provinces that are more prosperous than his. He takes issue with health and other transfer payments that are less generous than those given to other provinces. And he asks why an unemployed worker in Ontario is treated more severely than in the rest of the country and why the Harper government wants to leave the province under-represented in the Commons.
Hanging over all this is the feeling in Ontario that the 1988 U.S. free-trade pact broke the bargain of Confederation in which Canadians bought their manufactured goods from Ontario in return for a recycling of some of its wealth through programs such as equalization.
The Premier is always careful to say that he is a proud Canadian and that he understands his province has been blessed by geography and circumstances that give it a responsibility to share its wealth. But the Premier's sustained effort – reflected in his website fairness.ca – suggests a growing sense of regionalism in Ontario.
“My friends, it is time to stand up for our province, time to stand up for Ontario,” he said in his speech last month to the Chamber of Commerce in London, Ont. He suggested that lessons could be learned from other provinces that have gone mano-a-mano with federal administrations although he shied away from emulating Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, who stormed out of one federal-provincial meeting in protest and then removed Canadian flags from provincial buildings.
Ontarians who realize that Newfoundland has a much larger per-capita income than Ontario, thanks in part to $477-million in equalization payments this year may wish their Premier to be as aggressive.
But while his tactics may be lower-key, Mr. McGuinty isn't going away. “It's becoming more and more urgent, and there's a continuing need to speak about it, because there hasn't been an appetite at the federal level to really engage in fixing the system,” said an official in the Premier's office.
The question is whether Ontarians are likely to respond to his appeal or whether circumstances will transform Ontario into a province with a profound regional grievance. The trend line of estrangement from Ottawa suggests it is possible, but this has to be countered by the strong identification with Canada that Ontario residents have always shown.
Mr. McGuinty recognizes other provinces will resent Ontario throwing its weight around. “There is a lazy caricature that is convenient for people, which people can resort to, which is that we're being greedy, we're being uncharitable, we're being un-Canadian,” he told the editorial board of The Globe and Mail in 2006.
