Apparently, the Latin Americans were not interested in being fobbed off with the likes of federal Trade Minister Sergio Marchi, let alone a bunch of hayseeds from the provinces. And even the most bumptious of the premiers knew it. Alberta's Ralph Klein pleaded with the Prime Minister to come as soon as he could. Mexico was familiar enough ground, but "none of us really knows about Brazil." Glen Clark of British Columbia conceded "the trip is not quite as effective without the Prime Minister." Even the premier of Ontario, mighty Ontario, saw the need for federal leadership, "in Brazil, in particular." What's this? Hadn't any of these people read Tom Courchene's latest manifesto? The one everyone's talking about? About how Ontario was emerging as a "North American region state"? How globalization had made the nation-state irrelevant, allowing powerful subnational regions to plug themselves directly into the world economy, without the aid of national governments? Yet here they all were, taking the service elevator to meet their hosts, while they waited for the real boss to show up.

Courchene, a noted academic economist and sometime adviser to the Ontario government on federal-provincial relations, is well-known for his provincialist views. A previous paper of his a year or two ago had lent some intellectual tone to the premiers' perennial attempt to squeeze Ottawa out of its oversight role in social programs. So it is hard to see why such a fuss is being made of this latest piece, co-written with graduate student Colin Telmer for the University of Toronto's Centre for Public Management.

There is nothing here that Courchene has not said in much the same way before, nor is there much that we do not already know. Apparently, Ontario is a very big province. Also very rich. Over the years, it has tended to see its own interests as very much in line with the country's, if only because it was big enough and rich enough to make them coincide. The so-called National Policy, in particular, protected Ontario's industrial base, forcing consumers in the west and east to buy overpriced Ontario manufactured goods, in return for which Ontarians were expected to underwrite federal redistribution programs for the poorer provinces.

But lately Ontario has had things less its own way, and so it has taken to a more unashamed assertion of its self-interest within the federation.

Increasingly, this has put it at loggerheads with the federal government, on everything from tax policy to the constitution. It is more likely to make common cause with other provinces in demanding the handoff of federal powers. It is less keen to see its citizens' taxes being redistributed to have- not regions. And it is busily promoting its own interests and identity in a North American context.

Courchene identifies two broad forces that have contributed to this evolution in Ontario's sense of itself, as in the book's title, "from heartland to North American region state." One, Ontario has been pulled headlong into the north-south trade axis, thanks to the free trade agreement. And two, it has been pushed out of the Ottawa-Queen's Park entente by its alleged mistreatment in fiscal matters, notably the "cap on CAP" of the early 1990s, which slowed the growth in federal transfers for social assistance, but only to the three richest provinces.

This is the sort of thing that gets Courchene, like his west coast counterpart, B.C.'s Gordon Gibson, very excited. Can you imagine? They slowed the growth in transfers! To the richest provinces! It's so unfair! And, what is more, they did it unilaterally. Unbelievable: that a federal government would presume to decide for itself how it should spend federal funds. No wonder Ontario is reexaming its options.

Actually, it isn't. Ontario nationalism, like B.C. nationalism, exists almost solely in the overheated heads of a few thinkers like Courchene and Gibson, or aggrieved members of the local political class. Ontario is not ill-treated as a province of Canada, and knows it. Nor is there anything particularly novel in it going toe-to-toe with the federal government once in a while: think of the dustups between Sir John A. and Oliver Mowat, if you doubt it. Its recent peevishness more reflects its declining power in the federation than its emergence as a North American dynamo.

Far from a new region state, Ontario is in fact becoming more "a province like the others" -- just as selfish, just as inward looking. And just as insignificant on the world stage.