After scoffing down a 20-minute chicken-sandwich lunch, we made it to "the Bunker" by two o'clock. The Bunker is almost an annex to the Assemblée Nationale, and a concrete hulk that is as ugly as the parliament buildings are beautiful. It's where the real decisions are made. We were greeted by two of Bouchard's henchmen, who told us of his "final" offer.

We left the Bunker with its concrete coffered ceilings and incongruous pine chair rails and fetched up at the Hilton, another architectural victim of the 70s mania for in-your-face concrete and boring rectilinear furniture.

Our meeting at the Hilton was with Bouchard and the UMRCQ - the union that represents tiny towns. The UMQ - who supposedly represent bigger cities - had their own meeting, as they had refused to sit in the same room as we. The UMQ is still in a snit because the Conference left them after they passed a formal resolution that treated all cities uniformly - and could have raised our share of the tax grab by $23 million a year.

Later that night, we four had a private audience with Bouchard. During that meeting, my mind wandered for a few seconds. I was trying to decide whether Bouchard more resembles a bear; or, because of his thick eyebrows and glowering eyes, he looks more like a bird - a raptor, say. And, as suggested by either an ursine or avian resemblance, he does hold his interlocutors captive. Bouchard actually thinks before responding, a quality quite rare in political circles. And he does smile. Sometimes.

Why should Bouchard care about the Island of Montreal - where he gets so few votes? He knew all about the rally, calling it a "sortie virulente". I told him that he should not further distance the 770,000 people we represent. If he thinks we're anti-PQ now, wait till the tax bills come out!

We made a pitch for the uniqueness (distinctness?) of the Island of Montreal. How we already pay for services the rest of Quebec gets for free. And that any tax increases would just contribute to urban sprawl. We also took issue with his new - uniform - formula for divvying up the $500 million - now cut back to $375 million. (The Island still pays the same, with the rest of Quebec getting a $125 million break.) This formula is based on 5.8% of a city's "compressible" costs - as if costs were some kind of cheap foam rubber cushion. So now debt service costs are removed from the calculation - which penalizes cities like Westmount that have little debt, and favours heavily-indebted cities like Laval.

After a media scrum, we left for Montreal. I got home at 1:30 a.m.