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They all display a concern for joint endeavour and common ground

It is they — and here I come back indirectly to Scheer, but not to swipe at him — who are now constituting the actual “countervailing power” (an emblematic notion of Pierre Trudeau) to the present minority Liberal government. (It is worthwhile even after all the years that have passed since its 1968 publication to re-read Pierre Trudeau’s essays in Federalism and the French Canadians.)

It is premiers, particularly Ford, Kenney and Moe, who are presenting a present-day agenda, who are warning that an Ottawa-fixated, “social-justice”-oriented, identity-politics-absorbed government is badly, perilously, out of touch with the real dilemmas of Confederation. They do not speak in bumper sticker sentences. They are, to coin a phrase, the adults in the room.

In raising the possibility of adding more nuclear power to the country’s energy mix, they are also guilty of introducing a new idea into the infinitely tedious global-warming debate. The folks who tell us everyone is going to die, the planet wrecked unless “we do something” will now have a chance to praise something someone is doing. I’d bet a small Prius they won’t, it being characteristic of the climate crowd that they only want to put off Armageddon if it’s done their way. Zero-emissions nuclear, though the near-perfect solution, and technologically feasible now, is a stench in their puritanical nostrils.

Photo by Cole Burston/Bloomberg

What else has been remarkable in the month following the election? Two things really. That Parliament hasn’t met, and that the ubiquitous, conspicuous prime minister we knew from his first term, has adopted the habits of a people-shunning hermit. Where has he been? Save this week, while he has been at the NATO meeting in London, Mr. T has disappeared from the skyline.