Every now and then, a week comes along that brings home how much has changed. This was such a week.
Stephen Harper's government introduced legislation to end the Canadian Wheat Board's monopoly. Word leaked about changes to a planned bill that would give Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta more seats in the House of Commons. And Halifax and Vancouver won big shipbuilding contracts, leaving Quebec City in the cold.
Put it all together and what do you see? That the power shift from Central Canada to the West that everyone speculated about is no longer speculation. It's here.
Some of us may not like it. But we're all going to have to get used to it.
Roger Gibbons, of the Calgary-based Canada West Foundation, speaks of "a fundamental change taking place in the country" that is only now, belatedly, being reflected in Ottawa.
From 1971 to 2008, Alberta and B.C. had a net growth of 1.1 million people through interprovincial migration. That growth will accelerate, Mr. Gibbons believes, as oil, other commodities and economic diversification power a Western boom that entices immigrants away from Toronto and toward Vancouver and Calgary.
What does this mean for our politics? A powerful government that prefers market-based approaches rather than regulation, as the Wheat Board bill shows. A greater emphasis on Asia-Pacific issues: Mr. Harper is travelling to Hawaii, Australia, Thailand and probably China – for the second time in three years – in the coming weeks. And a federal industrial strategy, to the extent there is one, that will focus more on broadening the base in Alberta and B.C., and less on scraping the rust off the Ontario manufacturing belt.
Look at the billions that the Conservatives have injected into the Asia-Pacific Gateway, an infrastructure project so successful that U.S. Pacific ports are demanding tariffs to prevent B.C. ports from taking more of their business.
Meanwhile, this week's shipbuilding decision shows that everything Ottawa does is no longer filtered through how it will play in Quebec, says Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at Montreal's McGill University.
Even when Quebec gets federal largesse, such as the recent announcement of funding for a new bridge in Montreal, she notes, it appears Premier Jean Charest's government wasn't given advance notice of the announcement.
"Those are the kind of things that resonate about how Quebec as a whole no longer has a pipeline into Ottawa," Prof. Maioni maintains.
Along with these shifts, major transfer programs, including the health-care and equalization agreements that are up for renewal in 2014, are going to have be rethought.
The Royal Bank projects that Saskatchewan and Alberta will lead the country next year in economic growth, thanks to capital investment and strength in commodities. Ontario and Quebec will lag behind the national average because of their dependence on the troubled U.S. economy.
Mind you, growth in B.C. will also be anemic, because of a weak retail sector, although RBC notes that "British Columbia's economic fate depends less and less on the U.S. market and more and more on non-traditional markets such as China." So Canada's Pacific half now will wax and wane based more on Asian than on North American rhythms.
This means a rethinking of the country's fiscal framework. If Ontario's economy continues to flag, how is it going to be able to carry on subsidizing the poorer provinces through equalization and other transfer programs? Though the West is rich and growing, it is still not rich enough and large enough to prop up the Centre and the East.
"It's not a case of regional conflict, or anything like that," Mr. Gibbons insists. "It's simply the case that it's hard to make equalization or anything else work when the biggest province is also a have-not province."
None of this means that Central Canada is entirely in eclipse. Projections continue to put Ontario at about 40 per cent of the country's total population 25 years from now, with the West at about one-third.
And Quebec will always be on any federal government's mind, as it was when the Harper government announced a new Ottawa-Quebec harmonized sales tax deal with financial compensation. Quebec will also get more seats in the bill to rejig the House.
The province is too large, the French fact too important and Quebec's ties to the rest of Canada too fragile for it ever to be completely ignored.
Pendulums swing. The West's new-found political power rests largely on the fact that Ontario voters supported a Western-based Conservative Party. One day, those same voters could endorse a party with roots in Quebec.
But for now, there's a new reality: The West isn't just in. It's in charge.