Since becoming prime minister, Stephen Harper has gone out of his way to build his government's popularity in Quebec, working closely with Premier Jean Charest in the process.

However, this approach -- which some strategists consider key to a possible majority government for the Conservatives in the next federal election -- appears to be coming at the cost of Ottawa's relationship with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

There are both partisan and policy aspects to this growing dispute. First, the partisan part.

On May 4, Harper held a last-minute meeting with McGuinty, the Liberal premier of Canada's richest and most populous province, for 45 minutes at a downtown Toronto hotel.

The two men had not had a face-to-face meeting since the Conservatives took office on Feb. 6.

After the meeting, which had taken three months to arrange, Harper left without so much as a photo op with McGuinty.

He went to speak at a $750-per-plate fundraising dinner for Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory, whom he described as the next premier of Ontario, and lavished praise on Quebec premier Jean Charest - without mentioning McGuinty.

Liberal strategist Don Moors criticized the open endorsement, saying "it was over the top and uncalled for."

"I don't think the timing was any accident that he would meet the premier of Ontario elected, elected by Ontarians and then within the same 24 hours introduce John Tory as the next premier of Ontario," Moors said, appearing on CTV Newsnet.

Moors rebuked Harper's move, saying the prime minister appears to be pitting the two provinces against each other.

"I think Canadians should be concerned that Mr. Harper thinks the best way to people to Quebecers is to draw divisions between Ontario and Quebec and frankly that is not really a role that a prime minister should be playing," Moors said.

Political analyst Graham Murray, who publishes the Inside Queen's Park newsletter, told The Canadian Press that Harper's partisan comments were a clear departure from tradition.

"There's a convention that there should be some elbow room between the two levels of government," he said.

"The job of people in government is not to interfere too blatantly with the political affairs of the other level of government."

The day after his meeting with McGuinty, Harper jetted off to Quebec City to sign a deal with Charest giving Quebec a role at UNESCO meetings.

The two men smiled for the cameras. Harper again praised Charest, a provincial Liberal but also former leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party.

That meeting was the fourth between the two men.

The equalization sore spot

In return, Charest had nothing but kind words for Harper's plan to resolve the so-called fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces by changing the equalization plan -- which brings us to the policy part.

As a "have not" province, Quebec gets funds from the equalization program, designed originally in the 1950s to ensure that Canadians across the country had comparable levels of education and health services at comparable levels of taxation.

Ontario and Alberta are Canada's two main "have" provinces, with Ontario contributing about $5 billion towards the $11.3 billion program in 2005.

From McGuinty's perspective, taking even more money out of Ontario when his province is struggling to get its books in order (although some suspect Ontario could have balanced its budget this year) simply isn't fair.

He wants Ottawa to address the "fiscal imbalance" between the provinces and Ottawa by increasing per-capita transfer payments or transferring tax points - something Ottawa might not find affordable, having cut the GST by $5 billion per year in its new budget and boosted military spending, among other things.

The premiers discussed fiscal imbalance a month ago. Other than agreeing it exists, no consensus emerged on how to fix the problem.

University of Ottawa Professor Michael Behiels told CTV Newsnet that Harper is actually trying to restructure the Canadian federal system.

"I think Dalton has to stay very close to his game plan which is I think to try to force Harper to understand that his attempt to re-jig Confederation, fiscal federalism has to encompass all the provinces and territories," said Behiels.

"They all have to be at the table, they all have to participate in this process that Harper has set underway here to in a sense change the governance of the Canadian federal system."

The Quebec factor

With no easy solution on the horizon, the issue for Harper could become how he can meet his promise of addressing the fiscal imbalance and extract maximum political benefit from it.

Political observers like The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson have said the whole focus of the Harper minority government is to win a majority whenever the next federal election occurs. To do so, the Tories would need to add another 31 seats to the 124 they captured in the Jan. 23 federal election.

The province where the Tories could capture the bulk of those seats appears to be Quebec. The Conservatives captured 10 seats in 2006, there when they didn't expect to win more than one or two at the campaign's beginning.

Since then, their fortunes continue to look good in la belle province. A May 2 CROP poll, published in La Presse, has them statistically tied with the Bloc, which won 51 seats.

The Bloc had made a huge issue of the fiscal imbalance - so much so that political commentator Lysiane Gagnon wrote in The Globe that the Bloc is now trapped by Harper's efforts to address that imbalance.

In addition, with the UNESCO move (a campaign promise), Gagnon wrote: "Voting against such a government that is showing such goodwill toward Quebec would be suicidal for the Bloc." On May 10, the Bloc voted to support the 2006-07 federal budget, although its leader Gilles Duceppe said they only did so because the Conservatives promise to address the fiscal imbalance.

However, winning Quebec's affections while alienating a province of 12 million people and 106 federal seats might be a high price for the Tories to pay.

The Tories did win 40 seats in the central battleground of Ontario, although they were shut out in Toronto, the country's largest city.

"He eventually will need to have Ontario at the table," Behiels said of Harper. "He cannot go forward with his revolution in federalism without the acceptance of Ontario.

"But at the moment, his short-term strategy is on getting Charest re-elected in the province of Quebec."

Former NDP house leader Joy MacPhail believes Harper is playing a dicey political game with the premier and people of Canada's largest province.

"It is pretty risky politics Mr. Harper singling out Ontarians to snub them. But having said that it also makes sense for Mr. Harper to organize from strength," MacPhail told CTV Newsnet.

"So it makes sense for Stephen Harper to organize against the Bloc Quebecois and not upset Ontario, who remain social democrats."

But Murray believes Harper's partisan behaviour could work against him by turning an increasing number of Ontario voters away from the Tories.

"Some people will in fact treat that in a way that is more sympathetic to the premier of Ontario because he's been treated in a way which is really unexpected," he said.