It was the election of Doug Ford’s government last June that helped propel Dominic LeBlanc into a new job in the federal cabinet this summer as Intergovernmental Affairs Minister.

But several months after this major personnel shakeup in the Queen’s Park-Ottawa relationship, Justin Trudeau’s new point man with the provinces has yet to meet Ford himself.

“I haven’t met Premier Ford yet. We’ve been trying. We’ve been going back and forth,” LeBlanc said in a sit-down interview with the Star this week.

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Other premiers definitely haven’t been as elusive — in fact, LeBlanc was getting ready to chat with Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe immediately after this interview. Earlier in the day, LeBlanc had been speaking to the incoming premier of Quebec, François Legault.

“It was a very cordial, friendly, pleasant call,” LeBlanc said. “We agreed to get together in the coming weeks …. We talked about a number of areas where there can be a win-win for Canada and for Quebec, and the ‘win-win’ was his phrase.”

But Ontario’s premier hasn’t been all that easy for the new Intergovernmental Affairs Minister to pin down.

LeBlanc says he has had some good conversations with Economic Development Minister Jim Wilson about where Ottawa can be co-operative in the Ford government’s red-tape reduction efforts. LeBlanc also made sure he talked to Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark when issuing the federal statement condemning Ontario’s proposal to override a Charter right last month.

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A Ford-LeBlanc conversation, however, has yet to take place.

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When asked about whether any meeting was imminent, Ford spokesman Simon Jeffries said in an email, “We welcome the opportunity to sit down and raise important Ontario issues with anyone in the federal government.” No word on any plans for such a meeting, though.

And LeBlanc is not the only member of the Trudeau government either to run into some obstacles in two-way dialogue these past few months.

According to sources who talked to the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau, the prime minister himself had some trouble getting a call through to the premier in the immediate aftermath of a July 5 meeting with Ford. After telling reporters that he’d explained the refugee and asylum process to Ford, Trudeau was accused of speaking down to the newly elected premier. Trudeau reportedly tried to place a call to Ford but was rebuffed, and only managed to get through the next day by using Ford’s personal cellphone number.

That little episode may well have helped persuade the prime minister that he needed some backup on the intergovernmental affairs front. Up until the July 18 shuffle, Trudeau had kept that responsibility to himself.

LeBlanc is Trudeau’s oldest friend in the federal cabinet — they knew each other as children, when LeBlanc’s father, Romeo LeBlanc, served in the cabinet of Trudeau’s father. So does that mean LeBlanc can get away with more around the cabinet table?

No, says LeBlanc, but it does mean that he takes a bit more ribbing from the PM.

“He will tease me in a way that makes our colleagues laugh,” LeBlanc said, “probably because he’s got a bigger body of material over the years with which he can joke with me.”

One big reason that Trudeau needed LeBlanc to back him up last summer was that he was already juggling some formidable tension with none other than U.S. President Donald Trump. The very same week that the Ford government was elected in June, Trump and Trudeau got into a major tangle after the G7 summit in Quebec, paving the way for several months of intermittent shots by Trump against Trudeau and Canada.

LeBlanc was asked whether a blow-up of this scale rattled his old friend, or knocked him off his game.

“I think it made him resolve to be very disciplined,” LeBlanc said, adding that Trudeau also instructed his ministers to keep the tone respectful and even-keeled in all matters to do with Canada-U. S. relations while things were turbulent this summer.

That advice applies to LeBlanc’s own job too, he says, now that it involves grappling with a more fractious dynamic around the first ministers’ table. Trudeau has lost key allies on the federal carbon tax, and premiers such as Ford and Legault have been taking shots at how Ottawa has been handling the inflow of migrants and asylum seekers.

“It’s important in a job like I have ... you don’t overreact to every comment that’s made,” LeBlanc said. “Not every issue is a five-alarm fire.”

All this talk of keeping one’s cool reminds LeBlanc of a story from his days as an assistant to former prime minister Jean Chrétien in the 1990s. A senior public servant called the young LeBlanc and said he needed to brief the prime minister immediately about an urgent issue.

“I thought, well, this is it. I’m in the big leagues now,” LeBlanc recalled. He headed over in person to the official residence at 24 Sussex Dr., and had the prime minister pulled away from a dinner. LeBlanc handed Chrétien the piece of paper on which he’d summarized the great matter of state that needed his attention.

LeBlanc has never forgotten Chrétien’s reaction: “He told me to give it back to him in a month from now and we’ll see if it’s still urgent then.” For a young politician-to-be, it was a valuable lesson in perspective.

Here in the fall of 2018, with provincial Liberal governments losing power all over Canada — Ontario, Quebec, possibly his home province of New Brunswick, too — LeBlanc does not believe that intergovernmental affairs have to be a crisis for the Trudeau government.

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LeBlanc was at Trudeau’s side last Monday when all the premiers were getting briefed by telephone on the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. That was a big moment — it felt like something historic had been accomplished across the federal-provincial divide.

Over the coming weeks and months, LeBlanc expects that there will be some ups and downs over that trade deal and how it’s working out across the provinces. He’s also sure that eventually he’ll get a chance to talk to Ford, and that they will have to tackle points of sharp disagreement.

“We have some significant policy differences on things like climate change, clean energy, dealing with some of the challenges of irregular migration, (or) using the notwithstanding clause,” LeBlanc said. But “we also have a number of areas where we have similar views and similar objectives and can work constructively with them.”

That’s roughly what he plans to say to Ontario’s premier — whenever that long-delayed conversation does take place.