Each new appointee to the Chretien cabinet, I am convinced, is required to sign a letter to a judge, or some similarly inappropriate public official, to be kept on file and leaked to the press when the minister has become too much of a liability. It's rather like the cyanide pills issued to spies. In some future crisis we will undoubtedly discover that Sheila Copps once sent a fax to the deputy chairman of the CRTC, or that Dave Dingwall had the chief justice of the Supreme Court paged. For now we will have to content ourselves with the head of David Collenette.

Of all the happy coincidences surrounding the Defence minister's resignation, the happiest is the occasion it provided to move Doug Young out of Human Resources, just as talks are about to begin with the provinces on the shape of future federal-provincial efforts in the field of social policy.

Young has a talent for dismantling things, much in handy at Transport and likely again at Defence. When it comes to the social union, precisely the opposite skill is required.

"Social union" is a phrase that translates into French more or less unscathed, which may explain why it was among the first words uttered by Young's successor, Pierre Pettigrew, at his installation. Or it may be that the new minister meant to signal a shift in Liberal thinking: away from dismantling the social union, towards rebuilding it.

The social union need not be taken as a synonym for the welfare state, in exactly the same size and shape as we have come to know it. It does, however, convey the proper sense of connection, that mutual obligation of all to all that marks a nation. It is every bit as vital to the nation's sense of self as the political union and the economic union, and it is in that spirit that we should approach the question of national standards.

In all the mesmeric chanting that substitutes for argument in the cause of "devolution" and "flexible federalism", no evidence has ever been produced of just how the provinces are supposed to be chafing under the federal yoke.

If it has escaped notice, perhaps it is worth pointing out that there are enormous differences in how medicare, social assistance and higher education are delivered in each province now. The federal government has not prevented Saskatchewan from closing 52 hospitals, or Alberta from introducing regional health boards. It has not insisted that New Brunswick pay the same welfare rates as Ontario, nor has it stood in the way of either province experimenting with different sorts of work and training requirements.

What, then, is left to devolve? The devolutionists talk as if these programs were some vast collectivized farm run by beefy Ottawa bureaucrats. But if there is any soviet tendency at work, it is to be found in the provincial capitals. The demand for devolution, properly understood, is a statist creed.

It is rooted in the notion that governments must not only finance these programs, but also manage them down to the last detail.

But suppose we adopt a different model. Imagine, for example, that students could take their per capita share of public funds for higher education with them to the university of their choice -- not just in their own province, but right across the country. Imagine that public health care funds were allocated in the same way: through the choices of consumers, rather than bureaucrats.

Suppose teams of providers and administrators offering comprehensive health care plans could compete for their custom -- again, nationwide.

By centralizing funding, in other words, we could really decentralize power: all the way to individual Canadians. Why stop at the provinces? Why not cut out the middleman? Or if that is a pipe dream, then let us at least recognize that a strong federal role in these programs is not inevitably a barrier to innovation and efficiency. More to the point, it is the federal government that is the proper instrument for binding the programs together. This is most obvious with respect to portability of benefits between provinces.

But it is much more basic than even that. It is, in the end, a simple matter of equality. If we are agreed that society is obliged to assure all of its citizens some measure of equity, then the only question is the population base over which it is to be measured. Implicit in the idea of Canada is the idea that the society that shares that obligation is the nation -- not the province, the nation. And for that you need a government that represents the whole of the nation.

It isn't social programs that make the nation. It is the nation that makes the social programs.