There’s good reason to be concerned about Canada’s free trade deal with the United States and Mexico. The current U.S. administration, which is to say Donald Trump, is interested in neither free trade nor a deal. They, or he, wants a win – an arrangement that benefits the United States. Canada wants to renew the current agreement, presented when Mr. Trump signed it as the greatest ever – “nobody had ever seen anything like it.” But forget all the talk about negotiation. President Trump doesn’t believe in give and take. This is likely to end up a “take it or leave it” proposition. We don’t have much, if any, control over what he says or does. But we do have control over what we do, and lately we haven’t been doing nearly enough. This time last year the prime minister and the premiers – with elbows up – were talking about tearing down the barriers to interprovincial trade in our own country. There has been some progress since then, but there’s a lot more to be done. As former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna said in a recent episode of the “Wonk” podcast with Amanda Lang, we’re not as agile as we need to be. He cites regulations and agencies that are still protecting small vested interests. One example: most of the provinces missed the May 31 deadline to bring in direct-to-consumer sales of beverage alcohol across provincial lines. We can blame Trump for our trade problems with the U.S., but we have no one but ourselves to blame for the lack of free trade in Canada. And, in the words of Frank McKenna, “We need to smarten the hell up.”
