RICKY BLUE

Quebec's Federalist Premier challenging Canada's federal system

Once again politics is changing in Canada. For the last decade, Quebec has stubbornly continued its journey into the narcissistic dead end called 'sovereignty' and the West has echoed it with 'reform,' so the Liberal party has had our national government handed to it on a silver platter.

It has not really had to negotiate anything because Quebec was held hostage by radical separatists so anything it wanted wasn't meant in good faith, and the west were held hostage by redneck bible thumpers so anything they wanted was ridiculed.

Neither had to be taken seriously.

Now the ex-leader of the national Progressive Conservative party has captured one of the largest and most powerful provinces and is challenging Ottawa in a new way: with provincial co-operation.

Premier Jean Charest is now leader of the real opposition. This could be dangerous for the Ottawa Liberals. They can dismiss the all the other parties in the House of Commons as mere nuisances with no real hope of mounting a national opposition, but now — this cannot be dismissed.

You have to admire the arrogance of it. But, in fact, it is in keeping with the exalted position of premier of Quebec.

The Parti Québécois premiers liked to act as if they were leaders of their own country, even if they weren't and had no hope of ever being so. They repeated the word 'nation' as much as they could and blustered around pretending. How could they be mere premiers of a Canadian province like Ontario or, ugh, Alberta? They were far too important for that.

So, now we have a federalist premier. And what does he do? He will not simply join the other provinces to see if they can wrest some powers away from the feds in Ottawa. He will lead them!

He will set up a Council of the Federation in which all the premiers will join forces to storm the Hill and take control of the country from outside the house. It is so perfect an act, so predictable when you think about it, but strangely so unexpected — that it might just work.

We have a pretty fair system of government here with the parliamentary model. It works well as long as there are two strong parties. But when there is only one strong party and a few weak parties, as there has been for over a decade now, it works like a dictatorship.

Only the people who voted for that party are represented. But this new Council of the Federation could be the first group we have seen in a long while to actually represent most of the people all across this country. They would be more of a reflection of the needs and wishes of wishes of Canadians than the federal government itself.

Perhaps the provinces will eventually behave like a block, making real demands rather than feeble requests. They could become a counter government, an alternative power to the federal government of Canada. They could make pronouncements about all sorts of policies that are within federal jurisdiction, like foreign affairs. Perhaps we could find ourselves in a situation one day when the government of Canada backs a war or an international treaty and the Council of the Federation is against it. That would be an interesting stand-off.

It could happen, in this country where we have never really decided what we are: a colony, a republic, a dominion, or a federation.