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Amidst a shattered and shaky trade relationship with the Americans, much of Canada is left scrambling to find new ways of doing business.
Many provinces, including Saskatchewan, have begun to sign trade deals amongst each other in an effort to tear down interprovincial trade barriers and expand Canada’s economy.
Business analyst Paul Martin joined The Evan Bray Show this week with guest host Taylor MacPherson to discuss what the business community has been seeing.
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Listen to the full interview here:
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Taylor MacPherson: Do you think that some of these interprovincial trade deals are just posturing, or will we see actual economic benefits?
Paul Martin: These are really memorandums of understanding, letters of agreement, basically declaring intentions. But there is nothing binding about these things. I don’t know at this point, but I just see that there seems to be a coalescing of political will around these topics. So maybe it’s more than lip service, but there’s nothing binding yet.
How much of this is going to ultimately require the federal government to sign off on? How many of these memorandums of understanding are really just designed to put pressure on the federal government?
Martin: I think there is some merit in that argument, but so much of the jurisdiction around resource development in particular relates to what is in the hands of the province. So if you’ve got provinces starting to agree, then you’ve got a whole lot more momentum.
There is a lot of politics to be sorted out her, and a lot of vested interests, but for the first time, we’re seeing momentum on this topic, and the feds do have to participate. If everybody else is lining up, the feds will have to line up, or it’s political dynamite.
Do you think U.S President Donald Trump is going to see this push from the provinces? Do you think that it might hurt our chances of getting the best possible trade deal with the U.S.?
Martin: I’m sure that the State Department is watching the debate going on in Canada very closely, and if they see any kind of a difference of opinion between Ottawa and provincial capitals, they will exploit that. They will pass that through to the negotiators in the U.S. and make sure that they understand that Canada is not necessarily unified in its debate with Washington over trade.
What about the federal government’s role in working to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers? Prime Minister Mark Carney ran for office on a promise of free trade within Canada by Canada Day, but it doesn’t seem like there’s been a progress.
Martin: I think Carney is probably now finding out that it’s going to be way more difficult to dislodge some of those long-held positions to make Canada more competitive.
If we did this, it would improve the Canadian economy by $200 billion. That’s a massive gain, and hopefully we will not lose the momentum.
Are both the provincial and federal governments on the right track here?
Martin: I think we’re moving in the right direction. If you have to find something I could be critical of, it’s that there’s no movement on supply management, and that really is one that defies natural advantage.
It makes more sense to grow agricultural products like poultry or dairy where you have abundant land and abundant feed, like the prairies. Instead, we’ve got a concentrated focus on Ontario and Quebec, because it’s based around population as opposed to natural capacity to produce.
We’ve made it regulatory as opposed to competitive. You could probably bring the food price down by dismantling that, but it’s too politically entrenched.
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