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Last winter, Kenney spoke at the Tory convention in Ontario where (after some embarrassing trouble with the voting tallies) Ford became party leader. He was talking to a party that was still stunned from Patrick Brown’s sudden flame-out and the internal battles that followed. He bucked the Progressive Conservatives up, telling them they were the next government of Ontario and — with unusual generosity from an Alberta politician — that Canada is only prosperous if Ontario is prosperous.

Photo by Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press/File

“Ontario,” he said in his first minute, “has always played a special role as the older brother of Confederation. Or, as Justin Trudeau would say, ‘the gender-neutral sibling of Confederation’.”

Ohoho. A minute later, he said the then-governing Liberals were competing with his province’s New Democrats “to see who can be the greatest enabler of Prime Minister Dressup’s fumbling, tax-raising, debt-hiking Ottawa government.”

Above all, Kenney said, he was delighted the next Progressive Conservative leader, whoever it would be, was committed “to joining with me to fight Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax.”

Seven months and one election later, Ford’s returning the favour.

Plus, now Ford doesn’t have to limit himself to complaining about Trudeau and the federal Liberals. He has a government he can use to undermine them.

When she was premier, Kathleen Wynne used some of her power against the federal Conservatives when they were on the way down in 2014 and 2015, devoting a whole section of a provincial budget to the myriad ways Stephen Harper was allegedly cheating Ontario. She also did things like volunteer Ontario money for things the feds stopped paying for, such as research on lake ecosystems in the northwest. The work done in the Experimental Lakes Area has value in itself, of course, but for just $2 million a year Wynne also bought a symbol of her government’s commitment to science in the face of federal Tory vandalism.