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In the end, none did, but not before a lot of heavy breathing over the supposed “tension” and “acrimony” said to exist between the participants. For which we will have to take everyone’s word for it, the officials inside the room and the reporters without, each with their own interest in pretending the emotions the leaders are paid to pantomime are real. We will have to take their word for it, because the meetings are held in private.

Photo by Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press

A First Ministers Conference held in front of the cameras would be theatre, but useful theatre: as in question period, or the televised election debates, there is sometimes something to be learned from direct public encounters between political rivals, when they are under pressure and (at least somewhat) off script. Recall Pierre Trudeau’s seemingly spontaneous challenge to Rene Levesque, at the November 1981 First Ministers Conference on patriation, that they settle their differences via a nationwide referendum, and Levesque’s instant acceptance: all of it televised.

That was a conference with a real agenda, of course, and real stakes. (I dare say there was also some genuine emotion.) Compare that to the utter contrivance of this week’s installment.

The original agenda for the conference was meaty enough: the elimination of interprovincial trade barriers. Of course, if federal-provincial conferences were likely to achieve this, the economic union would have been completed long ago. Sooner or later it will dawn on people that leaving internal free trade to interprovincial negotiations is the problem, not the solution: the very attempt only encourages the idea that the provinces are not part of a larger whole, with an overarching national interest to which they are obliged to defer, but little countries whose populations are as alien to one another as those of sovereign states.