Ottawa-bashing is our national sport: It binds the provincial premiers against the federal government, while burnishing their popularity at home.

Now Kathleen Wynne is trying the anti-Ottawa tonic, fortifying herself for the campaign trail that lies ahead. It’s budget season, but also election (and byelection) season for the premier.

Coincidental or cynical, what better way to run a winning campaign than to run against the federal Conservatives? Ottawa-bashing enervates eastern voters, pays dividends in Quebec and feeds off Western alienation.

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But a word of warning to Wynne: Whipping up anti-Ottawa sentiment in Ontario is like trying to get United Empire Loyalists to turn on the monarch.

Ontarians are too quintessentially Canadian to hold a grudge against their federal government. Even when we’re being pickpocketed, poked in the eye, short-changed or double-crossed by one of our own — Whitby-Oshawa MP and federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty — we’re more likely to shrug than shriek.

It’s been two months since Flaherty told his Ontario counterpart, Charles Sousa, that he was unilaterally cancelling a $641 million payment the province had been counting on as part of Canada’s arcane equalization arrangements. Sousa made a show of sputtering and erupting in rage, but no one noticed.

The story still hasn’t gained traction. So on Wednesday, one day after Flaherty’s budget made it official, Wynne marshalled her fiscal forces and mounted a fresh counterattack.

At a media briefing, two dozen civil servants were deployed with PowerPoints, slide decks and a 34-page catalogue to make Ontario’s case. Another dozen political staffers joined Wynne and her treasurer at a follow-up news conference to condemn Flaherty’s transgressions on transfers:

Ontario says it is suffering the fiscal death of 116 cuts. That’s the damage assessment after chronicling every slash, slice and dice of recent years. It adds up to a cumulative $6.3-billion funding gap that will soon grow to $15 billion. By Wynne’s telling, the forgone future revenues are not just opportunity costs but eternity costs.

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In years past, when Ottawa tried to stick it the provinces, the premiers would form a common front — a very Canadian (if provincial) form of national unity. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper has muted those predictable, perennial attacks — simply depriving the premiers of a platform by refusing their entreaties for first ministers’ conferences.

Another reason Wynne can’t win against Ottawa: Harper and Flaherty are playing a game of divide and conquer, leaving Ontario truly isolated.

Alone among the provinces, we will not get any equalization payments in the coming fiscal year — while federal transfer payments are increasing for everyone else. Ever since the recession, Queen’s Park has received annual equalization payments — until Ottawa calculated last December that Ontario was disqualified by its recent economic recovery.

Fair enough. But Flaherty then pulled a fast one on Ontario by unilaterally cancelling the extra year of transitional funding that provinces normally receive to cushion the loss.

While Ontario was getting those modest equalization payments, its taxpayers were still sending out a net $11-billion to other provinces, via Ottawa, in transfer payments. With all that extra free cash, supposedly poorer have-not provinces can provide services superior to what Ontario can afford at home.

You could call equalization a gravy train by another name. Which is why it’s hard to imagine the other provinces disembarking from the free ride anytime soon.

The only politician in a position to reform the inequities in our equalization system would be Flaherty himself. As finance minister, he is primus inter pares in the 72-strong Ontario caucus of Conservative MPs in Ottawa — first among equals in a group that gave Harper his majority yet still punches below its political weight.

Would the Alberta caucus acquiesce so easily? Can anyone imagine Jason Kenney, the voluble MP from Calgary Southeast, sticking it to Alberta in quite the same way if he were minister of finance? Why then is Flaherty, the member from Whitby—Oshawa, so quick to stick it to his home province?

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