By Cam Scott
Since taking office in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney and his government have ushered in an astonishing range of US-compliant, deregulating policies – all under cover of an “elbows up,” patriotic agenda. Whether dismantling a range of ministries pertaining to disability, labour and gender equality, pledging $150 billion a year to military expansion, or scrapping the digital services tax on multinational tech giants, Carney’s government has been a blessing to the Trump GOP as well as the forces of reaction and austerity at home.
Amid these dangerous policy turns, much has been written of Carney’s pledge to comprehensively deregulate interprovincial trade. This free market bait-and-switch was initiated by a range of right-wing provincial governments, eager to offset losses from trade with US regions, and largely portrayed in the media as a benefit to small businesses. But the decades-old demand to bolster continental integration with domestic free trade originates with transnational monopolies, and is a straightforward fulfillment of US priorities during the present, soon-to-be overstated, trade war.
According to a June 30 press release from Internal Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland, the government has now eliminated all 53 federal exceptions to interprovincial free trade. These barriers, mostly pertaining to procurement of goods and services, follow the passage of Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act on June 26. Together, these announcements make good on Carney’s post-election pledge to remove all interprovincial trade regulations by Canada Day. This bill grants the federal government unprecedented power to rush development across the country, effectively bypassing democratic protocol and Indigenous participation for the sake of “the national good.”
As Freeland removes federal exceptions for financial entities, commercial land development and transportation services, and Carney proposes to rush resource-intensive development projects, it’s clear that there is much more at stake here than the interaction of provincially run liquor stores with microbreweries, or any number of other petty interests used as cover by proponents of unlimited free trade.
As noted, the removal of trade regulations has been a longstanding, stated goal of Canadian and US monopolies. But now, in an ingenious turn, the media representation of this demand has been delegated to small businesses, owner-operators and independent farmers, among other hard-pressed interests.
This conceals the true nature of such summary deregulation, which threatens food security, labour law, healthcare and Indigenous sovereignty at once. The fact that these deregulating moves implicate so many areas of life at once, from the issue of marriage licenses to timber harvesting rights, smacks of concealment and deceit.
Who is driving these demands? For many years, “interprovincial trade barriers” were a pet obsession of a small company of policy wonks, accountancy firms and provincial Chambers of Commerce – hardly a popular concern. Against the backdrop of Trump’s tariffs, however, the lifting of interprovincial trade restrictions has become a matter of consensus across all major parties and jurisdictions.
Carney’s pledge to deregulate interprovincial trade only chases the resolve of premiers across Canada, who have embarked on their own negotiations and still hold most of the decision-making power with respect to domestic trade. Since April 2025, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signed memoranda of understanding with multiple provinces, pledging to “unleash the province’s economy.” These measures are part of Bill 2, the Protect Ontario through Free Trade within Canada Act. As one expects, the act boasts of increased labour “mobility” and reduced “red tape,” essentially redescribing the market conditions under which workers and small producers are forced to cast an ever-wider net for opportunity as a space of personal freedom.
In fact, many unions across the country have raised the alarm at this kind of language. Both the Manitoba Nurses Union and the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals have voiced concerns about the interaction of increased labour “mobility” with the deteriorating conditions of the province’s healthcare system. A 2024 survey of MAHCP members revealed that two out of three health professionals were already considering leaving their jobs, and relaxed licensing requirements across jurisdictions could facilitate flight to private healthcare providers outside of the province.
Manitoba’s own Bill 47, the Fair Trade in Canada Act doesn’t address labour mobility, to the chagrin of the Chambers of Commerce. Rather, this legislation concerns the mutual recognition of standards and certification across multiple jurisdictions, which means that a good or a service that meets one province’s standards will be treated as if certified in Manitoba.
This is certainly expeditious, but global environmental lobbies and corporate watchdogs have repeatedly flagged how mutual recognition between trading partners often entails a general regression to the least stringent labelling practices for a given commodity. Mutual recognition, writes the Corporate Europe Observatory, is “trade-speak for lowering standards.”
For a clearer accounting of just who benefits from such policy – and it isn’t workers – we should look to its loudest champions. Revealingly, Ford’s “Protect Ontario” act opens with an approving citation of the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, a right-wing think tank long purposed at the deregulation of domestic trade. Since its formation in 2010, the MLI has published extensively against trade regulations, arguing that any restriction on the free movement of goods and services in Canada infringes the constitutional rights of capital.
For many years, MLI has lamented on record that provincial momentum in the west can’t suffice to create a country-wide free trade zone, calling for federal intervention and leadership. Today, Trump-by-way-of-Carney seems to have delivered beyond their wildest fantasies.
The instigating role of MLI lobbyists is evident throughout the Protect Ontario Act, which uses popular suspicion of tariffs to portray existing regulations as already punitive. “Statistics Canada’s modelling estimates suggest that internal trade barriers are equivalent to an almost 7 percent tariff,” the Act claims, which cheaply commends Ford’s own mercantilist bluff before the US as well as his present designs on domestic markets.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, this exploits the commonsense idea that, as tariffs are absorbed by consumers at market, fewer licensing costs for owners and greater competition will be transparently reflected in prices. This consumer appeal is extremely limited, however, where monopoly prices permit no such relief.
The removal of trade regulations remains a compelling labour and safety issue as well. Polls suggest that people in Canada overwhelmingly support interprovincial regulation such as supply management when asked about farmers’ livelihoods or food security, and only begin to express concern when polled about prices as a single issue.
Such leading questions continue to conceal what is at stake in these deregulating moves, and the dismantling of supply management remains a stated goal of US negotiators and MacDonald-Laurier wonks. Since the 1970s, Canada’s system of supply management in agriculture has been a crucial bulwark against US domination, helping to ensure Canadian food sovereignty and guaranteeing a market and an income to producers of dairy, poultry and egg commodities.
As the National Farmers’ Union explains, supply management is based on three pillars: production discipline ensures that farmers produce only what the market requires; cost-of-production pricing guarantees a fair income to farmers; and import controls stabilize supply. These controls entail a schedule of Tariff Rate Quotas, which applies high tariffs to competitive imports in food stuffs above a certain threshold, ensuring that domestic markets aren’t threatened by unlimited free trade.
For the time being, supply management has been left intact by the government’s sweeping deregulation, but it isn’t for lack of ambition. Negotiations over NAFTA and USMCA seized bitterly upon the issue of supply management, which the US hoped to dismantle in order to open up Canadian markets for US imports. As recently as last month, the MLI was publishing tirades against supply management, claiming that this “anti-competitive production model results in higher prices” for Canadians. Their argument is deceptive on several levels, most notably in its claim that deregulation should increase dairy production on the prairie, where the brunt of production is presently assigned to more populous eastern provinces.
Nothing in the rationalization of quotas requires the dismantling of supply management in general, however. If anything, the opposite is true and the NFU continues to advocate for an equitable distribution of quotas between new farmers and growing markets. It’s sleight-of-hand at best to argue that a new regional distribution of quotas requires the scrapping of planning altogether, or that free markets would bring about this result.
Worse still, the MLI argues that supply management “hurts lower-income households” by blocking free competition in dairy. It’s simply outrageous to blame income guarantees for the impact of price-gouging grocery monopolies on household budgets. The same capitals who made enormous profits during a cost-of-living crisis are set to benefit from the new relaxations on trade.
Real action on the cost of living will require more regulation rather than less, and still more stringent price controls on all necessities. This angle is an obsession of far-right politicians like Maxime Bernier, who routinely pits farmers against workers in his faux-populist rhetoric.
Still more audaciously, the MLI report claims that supply management in dairy “jeopardizes the health of young children, who require ample amounts of calcium for proper bone growth.” In fact, the borderless supply-and-demand system that MLI and other liberalizers prefer would certainly result in an influx of milk from the US, laced with artificial growth hormones.
Finally, the report concludes, supply management excludes Canada from future free trade agreements – and it’s true that Trump has recently reaffirmed that supply management makes Canada a “very difficult country to TRADE with.”
Trump is lucky to have found such eager accomplices in Canada’s present governments, both federal and provincial, and a Carney-led realignment with US objectives is virtually assured. Perhaps there is no clearer sign of this eventuality than the federal Bill C-5, rushed through the Senate in time for a country-wide holiday.
At a glance, the first half of the act facilitates a province-led deregulatory spree, key aspects of which are discussed above. The second half intends to “enhance Canada’s prosperity, national security, economic security, national defence and national autonomy by ensuring that projects that are in the national interest are advanced through an accelerated process,” with lip service to Indigenous rights after “investor confidence.” Under cover of a push for sovereignty, this legislation permits mining and energy companies to completely circumvent any meaningful environmental assessment or Indigenous consent as they break ground and markets.
In Manitoba, the Southern Chiefs’ Organization (SCO) has condemned the lack of consultation, noting that the ability for the government to fast-track “nation-building projects” before adequate review poses a serious risk to the duty of government to consult with First Nations, who “are uniquely positioned to advocate for the health of the environment for today and for future generations.”
The Chiefs of Ontario convened an emergency rally to oppose the bill, warning that “the government is rushing the bill through the legislative process at an unprecedented speed – granting just two days for committee debate and amendments in the Senate and the House of Commons.”
The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations, spanning much of Alberta and Saskatchewan, noted “the sweeping powers it grants cabinet, and the risk it poses to constitutionally protected treaty rights.”
Between strong opposition from First Nations, organized labour and agricultural producers, it’s apparent that the lifting of interprovincial trade regulations is far from the panacea that mainstream commentary depicts. Rather, the gloating of right-wing think tanks should be taken for a clear sign that these policies are only the fulfillment of longstanding, carefully laid plans for unrestricted continental free trade.
As all levels of government conspire to secure this outcome, it falls to a people’s coalition to re-narrate and defend the premises of public ownership, of planning, and of Indigenous title against these sweeping attacks. However it is sold to people in Canada, free trade has never been a path to independence.
[Photo: Quebec demonstration in defence of supply management]
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