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“We’re recreating a bloc of influence that’s always been at the heart of Canada,” Couillard said in French. “A bloc in which Ontario and Quebec speak together on issues of common importance. . . . When Ontario and Quebec speak with the same voice, everyone has to listen.”

When the two provinces work together, Canada wins, he said. When they’re divided, Canada loses.

“We believe that from the centre of the country, we’re giving leadership that is much needed,” Wynne said, as Couillard nodded alongside her.

It’s a shot across the bow of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who this week blew off a request from Wynne for a meeting two months after she made it. The two haven’t spoken since before last spring’s provincial election, she says. So if the prime minister won’t tend to things that are important to Canada’s two biggest provinces, the premiers of those provinces will.

The accord on climate change is the main example. It doesn’t quite commit Ontario to joining an emissions-trading market currently comprising Quebec and California, but it brings Ontario closer than it’s ever been.

Roughly speaking, the market works by requiring big emitters of greenhouse gases — paper and steel mills, cement makers, electricity generators — to buy emissions permits at government-run auctions. The quantity of permits available decreases over time, raising prices and pushing the emitters to find ways to emit less.

It’s more complicated than a straight tax on gas emissions but the idea is that it really presses companies to make the most of the emissions they’re allowed. The bigger the market, the more participants it has, the better a job it’ll do. So adding Ontario, Canada’s biggest and most industrialized province, would be a big deal.