The provincial and territorial finance minsters met with Jim Flaherty at Meech Lake yesterday, only for Flaherty to turn down the proposal that they were had a fair degree of consensus on. Flaherty insisted that that the global economy was still too fragile to implement this plan (though he did sound like maybe one day in the future he’d be more amenable), which left Ontario talking about going it alone. Ontario was also upset that in the transfer payment listings released that they were the one province destined to take a hit, which seems unprecedented as usually provinces are protected. Oh, but don’t worry, Flaherty says – their economy is growing. Um, okay. Manitoba also says that they may be out some $500 million because the last census took lace during major floods and up to 18,000 residents may have been missed, though StatsCan says that they double-checked their numbers. Going into the discussions were three different models on CPP expansion that were being discussed in the media, for the record.

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