While Canada celebrated 150 years since Confederation on Saturday, the country’s new interprovincial trade agreement also came into effect.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business senior vice-president of national affairs is Corinne Pohlmann. She told the Alberta Morning News these new rules are the first step to making things easier.
“They’re going to start setting up what they call a ‘regulatory cooperation table’, where they’re going to sit around and start talking about specific areas that they need to find ways to align their roles better.” said Pohmann.
“So it’ll become easier for businesses to be able to trade right across those interprovincial borders.”
But while it’s a vast improvement over the previous agreement, Pohlmann said there’s still exceptions.
“So every province is allowed to sort of, list a series of exceptions of things that they didn’t want to have included in a free trade agreement.” Pohlmann said. “So you’re absolutely right, those exceptions continue to exist. But at least the difference today in this new agreement versus our old agreement is that they have to list what those exceptions are. So we can actually go in and see, what are some of the areas that provinces want to protect for whatever reason.”
Despite the improvements, Pohlmann said there are five critical priorities the CFIB wants dealt with immediately regarding interprovincial trade.
They include: simplifying corporate registration, making food inspection processes easier, streamlining trucking rules from province to province, simplifying training requirements in the trades, and addressing the different rules for workers compensation and occupational health and safety.
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