Yours truly and my friend and fellow Sun columnist, Claudette Cain, had front row seats yesterday for Premier Harris' speech to the Greater Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

However, he didn't actually show up with an open wallet as some had anticipated. Instead, over the course of a 33-minute speech he accomplished three things: First, he brought his perspective and closure to the transition funding debate; second, he laid out his government's vision for made-in-Ontario smart growth and its applicability to Ottawa; and finally, (in a later announcement) he signalled that Queen's Park will fund studies of a ring road around the city, an in-city widening of the 417 and converting Hwy. 7 to four lanes out to Carleton Place.

If announcements in other parts of the province are any indication (read: Toronto, Hamilton and Niagara-on-the-Lake), these studies are merely a formal precursor to actual provincial involvement in building these roads, which is good news indeed.

During breakfast yesterday (memo to my wife: I really did have a fruit plate, ask Claudette or the premier for that matter) I also had a dead-ahead view of the Mayor and several councillors. During the premier's defence of the 50% transition funding grant, their faces were pure white and expressionless. Suffice it to say, the premier and city council will agree to forever disagree on this issue. Nonetheless, Mr. Harris slammed the door shut and brought closure to this acrimonious debate that was, in his words, sometimes too "partisan."

Moving on, the premier acknowledged Ottawa's smart growth challenges and this city's growing importance in the context of the overall Ontario economy. Citing a culture shift of attitude and the demonstrable decline of government being the No. 1 employer in the region (now down to No. 2 behind high tech), he even made passing reference to our city profile in Time magazine a few weeks back.

Wisely, the Premier did not pre-judge what Ottawa does or does not need.

Indeed, the last thing we need is Queen's Park telling us how to develop our economy and where to build our roads and parks. Instead, he hedged by pointing to the Mayor's "smart growth" summit this June and implicitly promised provincial cooperation in funding a priority list of infrastructure projects that will no doubt be one, if not the principal, outcome of the smart growth summit.

While some pessimists will state that the premier's visit was nothing more than a feel-good photo-op, such a shallow analysis misses two key political points.

To start, ten, seven or even five years ago, Ottawa wasn't even on the radar screen as far as Queen's Park was concerned. The fact that the premier himself came to Ottawa to put closure on the transition debate is significant. His office saw the bickering that was commonplace during late-January and throughout February and realized that something had to be done.

Moreover, the second and more important point from Mr. Harris' short visit to the capital was to reduce the anxiety level.

Behind all the posturing and sometimes ill-advised name calling that has characterized the city-province debate front over the last six weeks, it is clear that Mayor Bob Chiarelli has been looking for some needed consistency in his dealings with Queen's Park.

And as one of his harshest critics over this period, even I must admit that a mayor needs some sense of certainty in what he should and should not expect from Queen's Park … especially as he embarks with council on a $2 billion budget building exercise.

So it was a good news day. To sum it up, the most encouraging words yesterday did not come from the premier, in fact, they came from Mayor Bob Chiarelli and his pledge of cooperation. There, I said it (note to self, prepare for a deluge of angry emails from Tory friends).

The challenge now is for the mayor's office to work with local cabinet ministers and get more details on the studies that were just announced. As well, substantively looping these into the smart growth summit is imperative. Ottawa's infrastructure future looks a little brighter than it did just 24 or 48 hours ago.

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On another matter, I'm pleased to note that nine people read this column. Nine you ask? Well, two scathing letters to the editor last week plus a grab bag of seven emails makes, get out the calculator, yes it adds to nine.

To clarify, I was not specifically advocating toll roads last week, just a debate on their merits and/or drawbacks. As for using gas taxes for local infrastructure, check our website at www.taxpayer.com, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has led the charge for the last two years with its annual Gas Tax Honesty Day (before each May long weekend) in demanding that governments reallocate gas tax revenues for road construction and urban transit.