Premier Kathleen Wynne sat down with QP Briefing at the end of the Council of the Federation meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake. An edited transcript of her interview follows:
&nbsp;
What was it like to chair the meeting? You’ve never been to one before and had to run this one.
There was definitely pressure. I felt pressure about getting this right and being able to come to some agreements on issues. That’s what I wanted to have happen. I wanted there to be a good, collegial tone at the table. I wanted us to come to some resolutions that would make a difference and I think we did that. I’m feeling quite positive about that.
Tell me more about the working groups you’ll be chairing over the coming year: Fiscal arrangements and the health care working groups. So what do those entail, when do they meet?
Officials will start working right away after this meeting. Then there will be interactions among the premiers who are on the working group. There will be phone calls (and) in fact there will be some face-to-face meetings, because I know the energy working group had some face to face meetings (over the last year).
My particular interest in the fiscal arrangements working group is the work I’m going to be leading on strategic infrastructure…and the gathering of information about the need for a long-term strategic infrastructure investment plan. I came into the meeting wanting to get that on the table and that’s one of the things that I’m pleased about.
Since Chrétien started talking about infrastructure, nobody has ever said we don’t need to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and yet there doesn’t seem to be any money to do this…. Why are we building community centres with infrastructure money when sewers are crumbling?
That’s exactly the point. The point is that there is urgent and important infrastructure that needs to be built that has to do with water systems, with roads with bridges with transit with other transportation infrastructure like ports. We have to get at that work, and the amount of money that is in the system federally to do that is not enough, and there isn’t enough of a plan across provincial and territorial boundaries to be able to make good decision, which is why I want to be part of this.
The other working group on health care, what are your hopes for that?
 There has been a interim report from the health care innovation working group. Our minister of health in Ontario, Deb Matthews, is very keen that we take the lead on this. If you look at all the areas, seniors’ work, the appropriateness of diagnostics the issues around pharmaceuticals, we’ve been the leading jurisdiction on all of those fronts.
So the issues of higher quality and lower cost, of making the health care system better and be sustainable over the long term, this is work that we are doing in Ontario and we want to be able to get the very best from across the country on these initiatives. So I’m very pleased that our health ministers and our premiers are going to be able to work on this.
What do you make of the idea of national pharmacare?
Those are some of the conversations that we are going to need to have. During my leadership I actually spoke to this issue. There are good reasons to cover the cost of certain drugs for example for heart attack patients because we’ll actually save money. Apart from the fact that if you fund the drug it means they will take it and be healthy, that’s good for the person. But it’s also good for the system because that person doesn’t end up having a second heart attack and end up in acute care in our emergency rooms. So there are good arguments for that kind of funding.
The broader discussion of pharmacare, that’s something that may come out of this working group, but we’re looking at is how do we use the money that we have in the best way possible to provide drugs for people.
The two working groups you’ll be chairing seem to converge over the issue of the Canada Health Transfer, which the federal government seems pretty set on cutting after 2014. How do you plan to tackle that issue?
 The conversation we had this morning around the health innovation group is that the funding is actually a separate discussion and that is for the finance ministers to talk about, so it’s rightly with the fiscal arrangements (working group).
The health innovation working group is really working on how do we make things better? How do we find ways of improving quality and keep costs down without talking necessarily about those financial arrangements. I’m just joining the committee so I’m looking forward to the work and I think what’s been done so far is really hopeful and demonstrates the importance of this table.
The premiers of Canada have a lot to say to each other about what they’re doing in their jurisdictions that will help people across the country.
Will you be asking Prime Minister Stephen Harper for a meeting with the provincial and territorial ministers on any of these issues?
 We consistently ask the federal government to meet with us, ask the prime minister to meet with us. I have said consistently it would be much better for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to be at the table, it would be better for the discussion, it would be better for the possibility of resolving issues. And therefore I think it would be in the best interest of Canadians if the prime minister engage with the leaders of the provinces as a group.
Which ones would you point out as things you’re particularly happy about?
 I want to make a general comment that people brought specific issues that they wanted to advance to the table. What I was happy about was that we found a way to come to agreements on mechanism (for improvement)… on cyberbullying and bullying.
Calling for changes to the Criminal Code, I think that’s a good next step…what was equally good about the conversation was we talked about the complexity of bullying and cyberbullying, that there’s not one single thing we could do to resolve these issues.
 On the disaster relief, one of the things that I’m pleased about was it was an acknowledgement that these disasters are going to look different depending on where we are in the country, so we may be talking about flooding, we may be talking about forest fires, we may be talking about other kinds of extreme weather that threatens communities. But we all agreed that there needs to be a call again for strategic infrastructure investment and an acknowledgement that when there are these disasters, there needs to be a timely response, there needs to be a predictable and stable response so that people can get on with their lives. There was a lot of sympathy around the room in terms of the different issues that are confronted. The marine salvage that was raised by the premier of Nova Scotia… it came out of a discussion of the rail disaster in Lac-Megantic, but it broadened into a national conversation and therefore became a more relevant discussion of disaster mitigation.
You said earlier how all of us (in the media) were focusing on conflict, so tell us about things that didn’t get done – there must have been a disappointment, it wasn’t all sweetness and light, right?
There are issues that we don’t have agreement on, so the Canadian energy strategy is probably the biggest example of that. The reality is there are tensions among different provinces in terms of the movement of resources and those kind of jurisdictional issues. Even in that, even though there wasn’t agreement and there are two provinces that haven’t signed onto the development of a Canadian energy strategy, even in that there was agreement that it’s still important to have the discussion.
There was an acknowledgement that even though Quebec wasn’t going to sign onto a national energy strategy, Quebec is willing to have bilateral conversation with jurisdictions about specific projects. So, yes, there were areas of disagreement…. But even there, there was a willingness to engage.
The Senate seems to be another obvious area of disaccord between the provinces, are there any others?
I would say… one premier brought the Senate abolition as an issue. It did not get taken up. No one else saw it as something that they really wanted to talk about because all of us were focused on jobs and the economy. We know that the Senate is way down the list for our constituents in terms of their concerns.
If BC is ever able to win royalty payments from Alberta for allowing a pipeline to pass through the province … would Ontario consider the same thing for the oil that may pass through its jurisdictions should the proposed west-east pipeline go ahead?
I’m just not going to get into that level of detail because right now. B.C. and Alberta are having a conversation, and we need to let them have that without weighing in on either it or other discussions. What I’ve said is that for me, the movement of these resources, the primary concern is safety. The reality is we recognize that energy depends on resources being moved from one jurisdiction to another… but the environmental concerns, the relationship with first nations, the imperatives around monitoring those safety concerns are of paramount concern to me.
You guys did manage to agree about the Canada Job Grant despite some rumblings you wouldn’t.
 The Canada Job Grant, there was unanimity around the table that the Canada Job Grant as it’s designed will not work. That is why we called for a ministerial meeting… with the federal government to redesign the program to have that discussion about how this could work.
Going in there was some suggestion the Western provinces didn’t have much of a problem with that. Did you have to convince them that this needed to be done?
In fact there were concerns around the table. Now there were different concerns, but some of them were shared like the flexibility that each province needs to have to be able to design the kinds of programs that will work in their jurisdictions and not leave out the most vulnerable people in their jurisdictions. One of the concerns that was brought was around the uptake of the program. There was a real question about which employers were actually going to participate in this. There was real consternation because there were premiers who had basically been told by their employer communities they basically weren’t going to take up the challenge. So it wasn’t going to work. So there actually wasn’t any need to convince anybody that it wasn’t going to work, all we needed to do as figure out what the language was going to be and what the strategy was going to be in order to engage the federal government.
What do you make of the fact Jason Kenney is taking over this file? Is that a good sign or a bad sign?
It’s a good sign if Jason Kenney is willing to work with us, it’s a bad sign if he dismisses our concerns. The fact is the way the thing was designed, there was no consultation, not real consultation, with the provinces about the work that they were doing and the way those dollars were being spent and the success of those programs. There was some assumption on the part of the federal government that the programs that we had in place were not working. Well, the fact is, our bridge-training programs and Second Career programs are getting people jobs. They’re getting people into the workforce.
I’ve heard the suggestion from some people who defend the job grant that this could have been much worse for the provinces, that there’s much more money in jobs training that they could have gone after.
But the point of devolution of those dollars to the provinces was a recognition that the provinces were best situated to design these programs and get people into the workforce. That’s how this came about. So the $194 million that Ontario gets as part of the labour market agreement that was devolved to Ontario… because there was an acknowledgement that we designed the programs. And now there’s this backtracking and that somehow the federal government that is more detached from the community and doesn’t have the capacity to design the programs, all of a sudden that they can design the programs. It just flies in the face of all the evidence.
Does it not make you concerned that if they think you guys can’t spend that amount of money that they will certainly conclude pretty easily that you won’t be able to spend the next amount of money?
Well, I’m not going to fear-monger. We’re going to deal with this issue. I’m pleased that we got some agreement. I’m pleased that the federal minister is going to meet with the provincial and territorial ministers. My hope is that we’ll have a better design coming out of this.
Because the idea of getting people hands-on experience and closing the skill gap, we want to do that - but not at the expense of other things.

Transit, health, and jobs: Wynne talks COF with QP Briefing

Read this for free.