Now Is the Time to Remove Interprovincial Trade Barriers and Strengthen Canada’s Economy

Trump’s claim of a $200 billion payment deficit with Canada is bunk, and we have a border grievance also, with the flooding in of American guns as well as increasing numbers of illegal migrants in the United States who fear deportation crowding into Canada. Given the immense disparity in the gravity of the American problem with illegal immigration and drug trafficking with Mexico over Canada, and the fact that Canada is a civilized democracy with a relatively low level of violence and, in many respects, a higher quality of life than the United States—while Mexico is a poverty-scarred and relatively corrupt society where Marxists and gangsters are in contention for political influence—the treatment of the two countries as if their conduct was identical is outrageous in itself. This, along with Trump’s flippancies about Canada becoming the 51st American state, has been seriously annoying to Canadians.There is reason to hope that the controversy will de-escalate and be resolved in the usual form of bilateral discussion. Irritating though they are, these new issues in Canada’s relations with the United States have generated patriotic considerations that have not arisen much in the recent era of the political class naively declaring a post-national world.

In examining what we might do to make our country stronger and less susceptible to capricious and annoying U.S. behaviour, one of the most obvious matters to address is the extensive number of obstacles to interprovincial trade within Canada. To some extent this is a matter of different standards of health and safety regulations, the required ingredients in products, and over-generous agricultural price supports. The problem is so complicated that it is impossible to incite any public interest in the elements of it, but in times like these, when the fundamental economic strength of the country is under threat and there is legitimate interest in what constructive steps we can logically take, there naturally arises a consensus that internal differences should be resolved to make the whole country a stronger entity, especially if we are now entering a climate of a much less supportive attitude from our large neighbour.

It is a notorious fact that there are many doctors either in Canada or seeking to come to Canada who are being delayed in being qualified to practice for spurious or protectionist reasons, even though every informed person in this country knows that our health-care system is a shambles and that its two greatest problems are an insufficient number of doctors and chronic excessive administrative personnel.

In the case of the maze of agricultural price supports, the logical answer is for those provinces who wish to top up the income of their farmers to do so in direct payments and not inflict absurdly elevated prices on the consumers of the country. This is one point that President Trump has commented on directly as an egregious affront to any notion of free trade, and he is correct.

With these should come all the power that the federal government can exert, including in the administration of transfer payments and the moral authority the prime minister will possess, to raise the flag and demand a higher level of rational efficiency from governments at every level to end these parochial internal barriers. If this were highlighted in the context of what would be a comprehensive and essential program of national self-strengthening, all of the provinces would ultimately be resistless against the logic of reducing these barriers.

In the present difficulties there is an opportunity to make Canada stronger by governing better. We must not squander that opportunity.