It should by now be obvious that there is no way of pleasing even one of the provinces, let alone getting them to agree on anything. That goes double where money is involved. Where every province believes, and has the figures to prove, that it is getting shortchanged by Confederation, there is no formula that can reconcile their interests. So, as the federal government sets out to redefine the terms of fiscal federalism, I have just two words of advice: Give up.

Oh, it can keep trying: to get the provinces to harmonize their sales taxes with the GST, and to reapportion federal transfers for health, education and social assistance. But if ever proof were needed of the futility of the exercise, last week's conference of finance ministers was surely it. Even the day-care promise was denounced, on the curious grounds that since Ottawa was spending less on other programs, it had no right to spend more on this one.

That was but the prelude to an unusually fierce tussle over who should get what share of the shrinking pool of federal transfers for social programs. Ontario Finance Minister Ernie Eves complained it was unfair of Ottawa to give the rich provinces less money for welfare than it does the poor ones. We already have one equalization program to redistribute revenues between provinces, he suggested. "I don't think we should be taking every single cost-shared program and trying to inject some form of equalization into that."

Oh? Why not? Put it another way: Why transfer funds between one level of government and another at all? One reason is redistribution: to ensure that provincial governments, whatever their local revenue base, can offer "reasonably comparable" social services. But if the redistribution principle is to be confined to equalization, what's left? What's the point of taking money from the taxpayers of Ontario at the federal level just to give it back to them at the provincial, except to allow two governments to claim credit for spending the same sum of money?

The answer, of course, is so that you can attach federal conditions to it. Transfers have traditionally provided the incentive for the provinces to comply with national standards. But the provinces, Ontario among them, are also demanding to be relieved of federal conditionality - though not, needless to say, of the federal cash. It isn't as if the provinces were telling Ottawa to put up or shut up. They want it to put up and shut up.

So: If the rationale for federal transfers under the new Canada Health and Social Transfer is to be neither conditionality, as with the old Canada Assistance Plan and the Canada Health Act, nor redistribution, as with equalization, why do it at all? Why, when the federal government is in far worse shape fiscally than the provinces it presumes to aid? And why, when all it can expect to get in return is resentment and suspicion on all sides, however the transfer is apportioned?

Obviously somebody in Ottawa is thinking along these lines. It is widely reported that the feds may pull out of funding welfare and postsecondary education (PSE) altogether, leaving medicare as the last shared-cost program - not counting the stillborn day-care proposal. But maybe this is the wrong answer. Maybe - deep breath - maybe it's the provinces who should pull out.

If anything, both welfare and PSE argue more strongly for a federal role than health care: welfare, given the desirability of co-ordinating social assistance with unemployment - oops, employment insurance - rather than shuffling recipients back and forth from one program to the other, as at present; and PSE, since the market for universities is not provincial, but national. Students don't stay cooped within their provincial boundaries when choosing a university; why should government funding? Yet that's what happens under provincial rules.

I know what you're thinking. How could Ottawa possibly afford to pay for these programs on its own? And what incentive would the provinces have to give them up? Glad you asked. Remember the GST? The feds are no further ahead in getting the provinces to co-operate on this file than they are on the social transfer. It just so happens that provincial sales-tax revenues are roughly equal to the provinces' share of the costs of welfare and PSE: $20-billion and change.

Let the federal government take over the sales-tax field from the provinces, along with the responsibility for funding the two programs, and it might solve two outstanding riddles at once: a single national sales tax, and a coherent national human-resources strategy. The provinces, or those that participated, could rid themselves of the political liability of a sales tax. And maybe we'd have some peace around here.