Skip to content

Show me the trade barriers: SK blogger

Joe Kutcha is a Saskatoon blogger who’s been following the TILMA fiasco from the beginning and chronicling the absurdities of the inter-provincial Red (trade barrier) Scare. His latest entry on how Premier Brad Wall lied his (and Saskatchewan’s) way into TILMA is a must read.

At the end of June, the Wall government made an executive decision to sign the province into a New West Partnership (read TILMA) with B.C. and Alberta as a way to “strengthen” the region by removing barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility. This was after over 30 organizations and individuals, including the Council of Canadians, sent the Wall government a letter demanding “a legislative review” and “a full and transparent public hearing on this issue.”

Taking Wall seriously, Mr. Kutcha asked his government for a list of the actually existing barriers (not included in the announcement). He was told he could have it but only if he filed an access to information request for that information. So he did so, only to have the Wall government break its promise, explaining there is no formal list of barriers, just general areas where barriers are presumed to exist. Conclusion: precisely what we already knew — that TILMA, the New West Partnership, the Ontario-Quebec Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the panic to reform the AIT, are based on a fantasy.

“For the past five years right wing politicians, think tanks and business lobby groups have inundated Canadians with apocalyptic rhetoric that the country’s economy and competitiveness is suffocating under a blanket of interprovincial trade barriers too numerous to count,” writes Mr. Kutcha.

“Besides confirming that no list of barriers exists, the document [Mr. Kutcha requested through access to information] also shows that, like TILMA, the New West Partnership is primarily an attack on standards and regulations – not bona fide trade barriers. The Wall government – in lock-step with business groups and conservative think tanks – is falsely claiming that differences in public interest regulation amount to ‘trade barriers.'”

You can more about the conspicuous absence of trade barriers, and about Mr. Kuchta’s experience with the Wall government, on his website: owlsandroosters.blogspot.com.