Responsibility, that is, though not the obligation of paying for it: not only will the federal government withdraw from the training field, but it will pay the government of the Quebec to take it off its hands, to the tune of nearly $3-billion over five years. So while Quebec will take the credit for providing training to all those workers, Ottawa will take the blame for the taxes that paid to provide it -- this, in the name of "disentanglement." Federalism works!

Long though it has remained on Quebec's shopping list, the policy rationale for this latest abdication of federal responsibility is as murky as ever. It might have relied on that old standby, eliminating overlap and duplication, had it not been revealed that the government of Quebec will spend exactly as much, and employ just as many bureaucrats, as before: along with the federal cash, Quebec City will also take on board another 1,084 federal employees. Sources say it may wind up hiring even more. Federalism works!

Nor is there evidence that the provinces -- four other provinces have signed similar agreements -- have any better ability to place the workers they train in paying jobs: yes, the federal record is execrable, but the provinces' is just as bad. If any government should control the purse strings, reason would prefer it should be the federal. That's if an integrated national labour market is a matter of any importance. The provinces, after all, can hardly be expected to train people for jobs and industries that are not found within their borders. But those may be the very skills that are most in demand elsewhere in the country.

So while jobs go begging in Province A, Province B will be training its workers to stay at home. And, thanks to these latest agreements, it will do so with the generous help of the federal government. Federalism works!

(Perhaps this is not so irrational as it seems: if B ever did help workers train for jobs in A, chances are that A would not recognize their qualifications.

See: internal trade barriers.) But why talk about training as if it had anything to do with the unemployed? This is about the constitution, and the constitution says education, like other "matters of a merely local or private nature," is a provincial responsibility. End of discussion.

Actually, that doesn't exclude a federal role, any more than adult education is a local matter. Constitutionally, the federal government has responsibility for unemployment insurance, out of which it funds the programs in question.

Constitutionally, moreover, the federal government is entitled to spend money on anything it likes: it just can't regulate in certain areas.

So this isn't even about the constitution, really. It's about politics, and the runup to "the next referendum," as we have all learned to say without shame.

The federal government needed to withdraw from training to show Quebecers that -- wait for it -- federalism works.

How I loathe this phrase, and its cousin, "Canada works." Quite how the press learned to parrot this bit of devolutionist cant I don't know, but it has become the preferred description for every effort to denude the federal government of what are properly federal responsibilities. Apparently, federalism works best when it looks most like independence.

This is yet another example of our extraordinary tendency to argue for federalism from separatist premises. The one and only reason why we should form a federation in the first place is to establish a federal government. If we don't want to have a federal government, if we are not prepared to trust it with federal powers, then we don't really want to be a federation. It hardly makes the case that "federalism works" if we are in fact robbing the federal government of any meaningful role in the federation.

Yet, incredibly, that is what the case for federalism has sunk to, and not only in Quebec. On those rare occasions when they can be prompted to say anything good about Canada, as opposed to warning of the costs of separation, federalist leaders can do nothing but recite from the long list of powers Ottawa has ceded to Quebec, in whole or in part, from the pension plan to immigration, from the opting-out contortions of the Pearson era to the all-out federal retreat we have been watching since the 1995 referendum.

These, too, were supposed to show that federalism works.

The other provinces soon learned to chant this refrain. When the Agreement on Internal Trade, negotiated among the provinces like little sovereign states, was first signed, it was hailed as living proof that federalism works.

The agreement is now universally discredited. Are we to take it that federalism is as well?