Why Canada’s plan to tear down internal trade barriers is a huge deal
Trump’s tariffs have provincial leaders scrambling to cut red tape, starting with restrictions on booze and labour mobility.
Stupid question, but why does Canada have internal trade barriers, or is it just like regulation about what can be transported across provincial lines?
It's mostly each province having different regulations, standards, definitions, or licensing bodies around things that are provincially governed.
Most of it is businesses not being willing to jump through thr hoops in all provinces, or those hoops making the end product overly expensive if sold in a national format.
We must also keep in mind that Canada is so vast that provinces end up having their own interests to defend. Ontario's workers can't just uproot their lives and move to BC because their industry moved there, it's a 3 to 5 days drive! So Ontario has an incentive to protect their jobs even if it means that BC has less jobs... Now open borders and make everything free-for-all and it might put a ton of jobs at risk from products from other provinces entering markets they never had access to and starting to compete with the local market...
Provinces might be allies, but they're in competition with one another as well...
or is it just like regulation about what can be transported across provincial lines?
That's a big part of it - this is a decent explainer.
I’m absolutely thrilled about this. Words cannot express.