By abolishing decades-old barriers that restrict transporting alcohol across provincial borders, Canada would move beyond prohibition-era rules and embrace the country’s founding vision of “one country, one market,” according to a constitutional expert.
Howard Anglin, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), said the existing barriers were created during prohibition, which ended nearly a century ago.
“We got rid of prohibition 97 years ago. But we’re still being restrained by the laws of the prohibition era,” Anglin told CTV News Channel on Tuesday.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear the case of a New Brunswick man who brought 14 cases of beer and three bottles of spirits back home from Quebec.
RCMP arrested Gerard Comeau in 2012 and charged him under a provincial law, which puts a cap on the amount of alcohol that can be brought into New Brunswick from outside the province.
Comeau challenged the charges. His lawyers will argue in Canada’s top court that the law violates section 21 of the Constitution Act, written in 1867, which says Canadian goods should be able to travel freely across the country.
Free trade between the new provinces was a clear tenet of the 150-year-old document, Anglin says, but that changed in the early 20th century when several provinces enacted prohibition laws.
“So this is a chance to actually, paradoxically, upgrade and bring us into the 21st century in terms of our alcohol transport, but also to go back to the original vision of free trade that was in the Constitution in 1867,” Anglin said.
Several other nations have grappled with a similar question, Anglin said. Australia, the United States and the E.U. have all updated their rules on internal alcohol transport, but Canada has yet to confront the same questions.
The reason, Anglin said, has to do with “a lack of political will” by provinces that already hold monopolies over alcohol sales.
“There’s no reason why a province needs to have a monopoly to make a tax income on a product. We don’t have government-owned tax gas pumps, and yet provinces make a lot of money off gas taxes. They don’t have to own Starbucks to make taxes off the sale of coffee. And we don’t think it should be any different for alcohol.”
In a recent survey, 89 per cent of respondents said Canadians should be able to transport alcohol from one province to another. The poll, commissioned by Ipsos Public Affairs, surveyed 1,103 Canadians in an online panel between Oct. 26 and Nov. 1.
That strong support also translated to wine sales, with 84 per cent of respondents agreeing that Canadians should be allowed to order wine from any winery in the country. Another 78 per cent said there shouldn’t be any limit on the amount of wine or beer a person can bring from province to province.
In a 2016 report, the Senate described Canada’s internal trade barriers across numerous industries as “mind-boggling rules, dueling bureaucracies and maddening regulations.” The cost of those rules to Canada’s GDP could range from $50 billion to $130 billion, the Senate found.
As U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement – a decision that would have major repercussions for Canadian farmers, automakers and other industries – Anglin said history appears to be repeating itself.
“There’s an interesting historical parallel. The reason that this free trade clause was put in the Constitution Act in 1867 was because the United States … had just repealed the free trade agreement with Canada, it was called reciprocity treaty,” he said.
“And now you fast-forward 150 years, you have an American president who’s threatening to dismantle free trade with Canada. And you’d think we’d be trying to protect and ensure the biggest possible market for consumers and producers within Canada.”
With files from The Canadian Press
