Even granting that politics is necessarily mean-spirited, must it also be inane?  For instance the latest gathering of Canada's premiers to demand that the federal government give them all big bushels of cash from the magic money tree for our wonderful crumbling health care system.

National Post cartoonist Gary Clement summed it all up in a single-panel editorial drawing with Doug Ford telling his colleagues "Welcome to the Premiers' meeting.  We want more federal money.  Well, that's about it.  Thanks for coming."  He nailed it.  But since a picture is worth a thousand words, I get another 900 or so to expand on this thought without improving on it.

For starters, every Premier's meeting since the Flood has agreed that the national government should give the provinces and territories more money.  So why fly to Toronto to say it?  Why not just send a card?  (Of course they all got Maple Leaf jerseys from host Ford which BC Premier John Horgan ostentatiously refused to wear, even though the Leafs' 52-year record of futility and counting was strangely appropriate given the setting.  But they could have been couriered for less than the cost of the plane tickets.)

Next, where do these clowns think the money comes from if not from their own citizens?  If that obvious point can't be raised, or literally doesn't occur to anyone including the press, what degree of enlightenment can possibly be expected on more complex questions, let alone progress?

Of course there's an element of base cunning rather than blank stupidity here.  As Manitoba's Brian Pallister let slip in criticizing the federal government for planning to spend money on its priorities instead of handing it over so he could spend it on his.  Specifically, he questioned national pharmacare because "Don't start broadening health care when you can't get it right now."  Which I guess passes for deep thoughts.  Unless, say, you recall that Paul Martin promised to "fix" healthcare "for a generation" by throwing money at it back in 2004.

If you do, you realize a generation has gone by, more or less, and it's still busted.  So the solution is to… throw more money at it.  Brilliant, Holmes.  Or Bullwinkle.  Or whoever you are.  But for the provinces, the idea of getting credit for spending the money while the feds get the odium for raising it in taxes appeals.  However short-sighted and destructive of accountability.

Before I rant off into the sunset, there's also the plan of using anodyne words nobody ever uttered before except last time and the time before ad infinite nauseam.  According to the National Post, which somehow reported it straight-faced, "In response, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said the government is "open and keen to discuss" how governments can work together toward the goals" on health care.  And you can take that to the bank.  No wait.  You can't.

Of course as a premier you can go there anyway.  Because as everybody knew before they started, what will happen is that the feds will continue to increase transfer payments for health because if they don't they'll get called meanies.  And the provinces will spend it all on the current hopeless system because if they don't they'll get called meanies.  And waiting lists will continue to grow, especially as the population ages, and nobody will even dare have an original idea let alone voice it.

If they did, they'd say "Hey, let's do it like Sweden" or "Hey, let's do it like France."  Both of which have universal systems far more open to private sector involvement than Canada, where the BC government continues its scorched-wallet effort to destroy Brian Day's clinic and won't even say how much public money they've spent trying to roll over him despite the Chaouilli decision.

Instead everyone will do what they would have done anyway and call it victory even though from a policy point of view it's a dead end, intellectually it's stupid and politically it's hollow.  Yay.

Not one person believes that adding 5% a year to federal transfers without reforming the system will prevent it from collapsing.  Not one.  So of course everyone agrees to do it.  Grand.  And since they were going to do it anyway, the whole point of the trip was that it had no point.

Topics not discussed?  Well, there's a well with no bottom.  But among them are pipelines and Quebec's Bill 21.  Because why discuss anything important when you can go "Send more money" and stagger off home?

Given the national unity crisis and Western alienation, one thing that was on the agenda was Equalization.  Until it was hastily swept off the table into the refuse on the floor.  And to give some idea just how inane the conversation was, prior to the meeting NL premier Dwight Ball said they shouldn't discuss changing Equalization because it would mean taking money from one province to benefit another.

As if that's not the whole point of Equalization now.  Does he not know it?  Does he think we don't?  Or has the whole concept of making sense collapsed?  I mean, if you don't think Ottawa taxes your people to give you money unless it taxes someone else's there isn't much you do know.

Now I grant that when you hear how they discuss the things they do discuss, you might not want these people talking about stuff that mattered.  And I am mindful of Sir Humphrey Appleby's dictum that "Politicians… need activity.  It's their substitute for achievement."  But what possesses them, or us, to pretend something weighty, or even differently daffy, happens at these meetings?

So be vicious if you must.  Beat each other up rhetorically in nasty campaigns over irrelevant trivia and important issues wrongly described and feebly analyzed.  But please don't be quite so vacuous in between even if the alternative is silence in an empty room.

That alternative would make for a less diverting cartoon.  But it would be an improvement in every other way including carbon footprint.

Photo Credit: Global News