Bowing to the wishes of a fearful and adoring public, the premiers have graciously agreed to meet again this fall. The subject: national unity. This is probably progress: this week's conference was largely devoted to debating whether or not to discuss national unity. As New Brunswick's Frank McKenna declared at the closing news conference, "if continuing to talk is the worst we can do to the country, that's not a bad result." This is a fascinating question in itself: Is talking the worst the premiers can do to the country? Naysayers would point to all sorts of nonverbal weapons in the provinces' impressive arsenal of national destruction, from running up billions of dollars in debt to imposing hundreds of interprovincial trade barriers to the Charlottetown and Meech Lake constitutional disasters. But I think a strong case can be made that the premiers do more damage simply by opening their mouths than by anything else they may try.

Certainly this latest gathering offered further proof that the premiers really will say anything, even in public, oblivious to logic or shame. If you thought there were limits to their effrontery, individually or collectively, if you dwelled in the illusion that their gall might be mitigated, the past week's festival of humbug should put paid to that.

As ever, Lucien Bouchard set the standard. Aghast to learn that Premier McKenna had written a letter of support to a group promoting the right of federalist parts of Quebec to remain in Canada should the province secede, Bouchard hauled out the heavy artillery. "Your intervention in this matter not only constitutes an unprecedented interference by a provincial premier in Quebec's affairs," the premier wrote to McKenna, "but it offers support to a fundamentally antidemocratic position that international law and the history of peoples have many times rejected." You can just imagine Bouchard's anguish. That a premier, on behalf of a disgruntled minority, should promote the partition of long-established sovereign territory, in defiance both of majority rule and of international law -- why, it's unthinkable!

But the other premiers soon rose to the Bouchard challenge, inspired by the debate on social programs. Before the conference, you'll recall, the premiers of Ontario and Alberta had met to prepare their case for detaching the last threads of federal involvement in setting national standards. These are few indeed: for the last twenty years, since conditional grants for health and higher education were converted to block transfers under the Established Programs Financing agreement, the provinces have been free to spend these funds in almost any way they like.

With the elimination of the Canada Assistance Program, and the bundling of CAP and EPF together into the Canada Health and Social Transfer Fund, national standards have all but disappeared from welfare, too. About all that remains are the five principles of the Canada Health Act and the prohibition on residency requirements in the provision of social assistance.

Nonetheless, to the premiers of the two richest provinces in confederation, even these constraints were intolerable. "It shouldn't be up to the federal government to say, 'you have to do it our way or you will be penalized,' " said Alberta's Ralph Klein. "It really is ludicrous that Ottawa resists at least the provinces having an equal say," said Ontario's Mike Harris. After all, hadn't the federal government cut its cash transfers to the provinces in recent years by nearly $6-billion? What moral authority remains for the feds to dictate provincial spending priorities in this way?

By themselves, these arguments are nonsense. The justification for Ottawa's role in enforcing national standards is neither legal nor moral. It is simply a contract: in return for the funds it provides, Ottawa obliges the provinces to meet certain conditions. If they don't like the conditions, no one's forcing them to take the cash. And if federal transfers really have dwindled so far as to offer little incentive for compliance, nothing is stopping the provinces from going their own way, free of the federal yoke.

Nonetheless, there is at least a kind of coherence to the provincial argument.

Or there was, until this week. For what was the premiers' chief demand?

That Ottawa should increase funding for social programs! They even went so far as to suggest where it might raise the money: out of the surplus on the unemployment insurance fund.

Having insisted on fewer federal strings, on the grounds that skinflint Ottawa has lost its moral authority, the premiers turn around and demand more federal dollars -- with still fewer strings. Having argued for years that shared-cost programs blur accountability, since one level of government gets to spend the taxes raised by another, the premiers demand that accountability should be blurred still further. Having railed against federal "interference" in provincial spending decisions, the premiers now presume to decide how the federal budget should be allocated.

Maybe the premiers should turn their attention to national unity, then. They can't do any more harm than they already have. Can they?