Power & Market

Canada is Not a Free Trade Zone

Power & Market Tho Bishop

When lampooning the various arguments for trade barriers, Murray Rothbard would like to try to use the arguments offered against foreign trade to trade between states themselves.

As he wrote in Making Economic Sense:

The best way to look at tariffs or import quotas or other protectionist restraints is to forget about political boundaries. Political boundaries of nations may be important for other reasons, but they have no economic meaning whatever. Suppose, for example, that each of the United States were a separate nation. Then we would hear a lot of protectionist bellyaching that we are now fortunately spared. Think of the howls by high-priced New York or Rhode Island textile manufacturers who would then be complaining about the "unfair," "cheap labor" competition from various low-type "foreigners" from Tennessee or North Carolina, or vice versa.

Fortunately, the absurdity of worrying about the balance of payments is made evident by focusing on interstate trade. For nobody worries about the balance of payments between New York and New Jersey, or, for that matter, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, because there are no customs officials recording such trade and such balances.

If we think about it, it is clear that a call by New York firms for a tariff against North Carolina is a pure rip-off of New York (as well as North Carolina) consumers, a naked grab for coerced special privilege by less-efficient business firms. If the 50 states were separate nations, the protectionists would then be able to use the trappings of patriotism, and distrust of foreigners, to camouflage and get away with their looting the consumers of their own region.

Unfortunately such "absurdity" has been ruled to be the law of the land in Canada. As the National Post reports:

After a legal battle fought all the way to Canada’s highest court, a New Brunswick man’s quest to be able to buy slightly cheaper alcohol in a neighbouring province has failed.

In a unanimous decision handed down Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled provincial trade barriers are constitutional as long as they’re aimed at a valid purpose within the province’s jurisdiction, with only an incidental effect on trade. Canada’s constitution simply “does not impose absolute free trade across Canada,” it declared....

On its face, the case was about booze. But had the challenge been successful, the precedent could have struck down a massive swath of provincial trade barriers, from agricultural supply management to e-commerce to environmental controls. Crown attorneys from every province had lined up at the Supreme Court to argue against the challenge, with the federal government siding with them.

The ruling declared that allowing “full economic integration” within Canada would “significantly undermine the shape of Canadian federalism, which is built upon regional diversity within a single nation.” Federalism means there must be “space to each province to regulate the economy in a manner that reflects local concerns,” the court ruled.

As Maxime Bernier, a Conservative Member of Parliament and a student of Austrian economics noted, "Sad day for defenders of economic freedom in Canada."

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