Observers say federal-provincial relations have hit a new low.

Well, plus ca bloody change.

"Loud sings the little Man of the Province," Stephen Leacock observed, in a 1907 speech to the Empire Club, "crying his petty Gospel of Provincial Rights, grudging the gift of power, till the cry spreads and town hates town and every hamlet of the countryside shouts for its share of plunder and of pelf." Decades later, the great constitutional scholar Eugene Forsey, exasperated by the provinces' unceasing demands, proposed the adoption of a new flag, depicting "10 jackasses eating the leaves off a single maple tree." Provincial politicians with provincial ambitions are one of the great constants of Canadian political life. All that changes is the pretext.

While the last word on Canada's constitution remained at Westminster, the provinces relied on the judicial committee of the Privy Council to rewrite the British North America Act to their advantage, still the most outrageous example of judicial activism in our history. Throughout the nearly 60-year struggle to patriate the constitution, the provinces made their consent conditional on still more concessions of federal powers.

With each new crisis over Quebec, the provinces escalated their demands. Because Quebec had been "excluded" from the 1982 constitution, that somehow became cause for a general emasculation of federal authority, as proposed in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. The referendum scare of 1995 brought forth fresh proposals for the Swissification of Canada, as if to achieve for all provinces what Lucien Bouchard sought for Quebec. Through it all the feds have made a stream of concessions, offering to share powers (e.g. immigration) or to pull out of them altogether (municipal affairs, forestry, etc. etc.), hoping to slake the provinces' thirst for powers, even as it was footing the bill, in some cases, for half their annual budgets.

Fat lot of good it has done. Fed-bashing is built in to the very structure of Canadian politics: as there are 10 provincial governments to one federal, with even the federal opposition parties ever ready to chime in on the provinces' side, the debate is skewed from the start. "Co- operative federalism," as the provinces see it, is like the old Soviet saw of "peaceful coexistence": it only seems to run in one direction. The feds are obliged to co-operate, while the provinces do whatever they like.

These days alienation is all the rage: Westerners are alienated, Newfoundlanders are alienated, everyone's alienated. I'm not saying they do not have good reason to be. Canada, as I have written many times, is a dysfunctional democracy, especially at the federal level, with too much power vested in the executive, too few checks on the power of the majority and an electoral system that both exaggerates and exacerbates regional divisions. In consequence, the federal government has abused its power from time to time in ways that have been particularly hurtful to regional interests, the National Energy Program being the most notorious example.

Where I differ with the devolutionists is not over the legitimacy of regional grievances -- though we have become past masters in this country at nourishing these -- but their unquestioning acceptance of the premiers' favourite remedy: more powers to the provinces. Take the fishery. There is no doubt that the federal government has disastrously mismanaged the fishery over the years, where the short-term interests of the fishing and related industries and the even shorter-term interests of elected politicians were put ahead of the long-term sustainability of the fish stocks.

But did the affected provinces ever dissent from this course? Did Newfoundland, in particular, ever once call upon Ottawa to stop using unemployment insurance to supplement the incomes of seasonal workers, a practice that has kept many more people in the fishery than could be supported on the stocks alone? As scientists began warning that stocks were running dangerously low, was it one of those urging the federal government to impose earlier, tighter limits on allowable catches? Has it proposed innovative reforms of fishery policy, such as the property-rights-based approach championed by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies? Or has it, throughout, taken the same politicized, jobs-for-the-boys line as the feds, only with even less willingness to face the facts? To ask the question is to answer it.

In which case, what on earth would be achieved by transferring jurisdiction, in whole or in part, to the province? Why should we assume that a government drawn entirely from within the province will be more willing to take the long view than one elected from across the country? People talk about Iceland, which has done a far better job of managing its fishery, as an example of the benefits of local control. But there's an important difference. Iceland cannot go whining to some other government to bail it out of its policy mishaps. Whereas Newfoundland could fish the seas dry, then insist that Ottawa pay for all those suddenly unemployed fishermen. Come to think of it, that's exactly what they have done.