Premier Kathleen Wynne is getting ready to pass the gavel — and it's actually a ceremonial gavel — to her successor as the chair of the Council of the Federation. Wynne, who's held the chair since last summer's meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake, is about relinquish the post to Premier Robert Ghiz of Prince Edward Island at next week's meeting of provincial leaders.

Speaking with QP Briefing Friday morning, Wynne says she's not worried that issues she's spent the last year championing will get any less attention from Ghiz, who represents a province with slightly more people than her own riding of Don Valley West.

"It would be easy to find the differences between a tiny province like PEI compared to a huge central Canadian province like Ontario or Quebec," Wynne says, "but what everyone strives to do is find the shared interests, the common interests."

Pausing only slightly, Wynne added pointedly "that's why it would be wonderful if the prime minister actually agreed to come and sit with us and hear that national discussion."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has attended no meetings of the Council of the Federation, though he held two joint meetings with premiers to co-ordinate the response to the global financial crisis in 2008-09.

That helped produce a federal-provincial plan to bail out the auto industry in Ontario, and a country-wide economic stimulus package that produced a massive deficit of more than $50 billion for Ottawa but kept the economy from sinking into a deep hole.

The joint meeting of 10 provincial premiers and three territorial leaders in is Charlottetown this year from next Wednesday to Friday.

Wynne's year as the chair has seen some major successes — with the premiers forcing the government to accept changes to the Canada Jobs Grant, for example and negotiating major deals with drug producers to cut prescription drug costs for provincial health plans.

But there have also been some files with more ambivalent results.

Wynne has been pressuring the federal government to spend more money on infrastructure, most recently calling for Ottawa to quadruple its infrastructure spending from 0.5 per cent of GDP to two per cent, or roughly $30 billion nationwide. Finance Minister Joe Oliver has dismissed the request, something Wynne thinks is a mistake.

"It's not an outrageous ask, at all. ... That's why I went to Quebec City yesterday to speak with Premier [Philippe] Couillard," Wynne said. "He's pretty much on the same page in terms of the need for stable, predictable infrastructure funding."

Wynne, repeated her government's argument that provincial and municipal governments in Ontario are currently spending about three per cent of GDP on infrastructure, so asking Ottawa to spend two per cent is not unreasonable.

As she has since winning her narrow majority on June 12, Wynne emphasized the need to infrastructure spending in the face of global climate change.

"The infrastructure needs in Ontario may be due to aging infrastructure and, I would suggest, the need for resilient infrastructure because of climate change. But in Alberta, you've got the same situation — it may be new infrastructure, but it needs to be resilient because of climate change."

Estimates of the cost of flooding in Calgary last year range from $6 billion to $7 billion, leading Wynne to argue that her calls for infrastructure funding aren't placing Ontario's needs ahead of other provinces.

"There's no way I'm saying Ontario needs infrastructure funding at the expense of other provinces. I'm saying this is a national issue, part of our economic stability going forward, our economic growth," said Wynne.

There will be some changes at the Council of the Federation table this year: notably, the meeting that had six female premiers last year in Niagara will be down to two this year: Wynne and B.C. Premier Christy Clark.

Wynne — who last year attributed the collaborative tone to the presence of so many women, and who personally got along with Quebec's then-Premier Pauline Marois and Alberta's Alison Redford — says she hopes the positive tone of discussions last year will continue.

"I'm disappointed the proportion has shifted, but I've always said we had to be careful: having six women at the helm may or may not be indicative of some kind of trend," Wynne said.

"I'm going to continue to encourage young women to get into politics, because we can't bank on having succeeded yet."

Wynne prepares to pass the gavel as Ontario ends year as Chair of COF

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