Saturday, January 28, 2023
No Result
View All Result
  • Media
Support Us
Macdonald-Laurier Institute
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
    • Jobs
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy Program
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • Economic policy
      • Energy
      • Health Care
      • Innovation
      • Justice
      • Social issues
      • Telecoms
    • Foreign Policy Program
      • Foreign Affairs
      • National Defence
      • National Security
    • Indigenous Affairs Program
  • Projects
    • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
    • COVID Misery Index
      • Beyond Lockdown
    • Provincial COVID Misery Index
    • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Dragon at the Door
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
    • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
    • Speak for Ourselves
    • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • The Transatlantic Program
    • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
      • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
    • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
    • Past Projects
      • Justice Report Card
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Libraries
    • Inside Policy Magazine
      • Inside Policy Back Issues
      • Inside Policy Blog
    • Papers
    • Columns
    • Books
    • Commentary
    • Straight Talk
    • Video
    • Multimedia
    • Podcasts
    • Leading Economic Indicator
    • Labour Market Report
    • MLI in the Media
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
    • Jobs
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy Program
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • Economic policy
      • Energy
      • Health Care
      • Innovation
      • Justice
      • Social issues
      • Telecoms
    • Foreign Policy Program
      • Foreign Affairs
      • National Defence
      • National Security
    • Indigenous Affairs Program
  • Projects
    • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
    • COVID Misery Index
      • Beyond Lockdown
    • Provincial COVID Misery Index
    • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Dragon at the Door
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
    • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
    • Speak for Ourselves
    • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • The Transatlantic Program
    • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
      • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
    • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
    • Past Projects
      • Justice Report Card
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Libraries
    • Inside Policy Magazine
      • Inside Policy Back Issues
      • Inside Policy Blog
    • Papers
    • Columns
    • Books
    • Commentary
    • Straight Talk
    • Video
    • Multimedia
    • Podcasts
    • Leading Economic Indicator
    • Labour Market Report
    • MLI in the Media
No Result
View All Result
Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Search for internal trade barrier cost shrouds real issue: Crowley in the Globe

August 7, 2014
in Columns, Domestic Policy Program, Economic policy, In the Media, Latest News
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A

Writing for the Globe and Mail, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley says the obsession with how much Canadian internal trade barriers cost is obscuring what should be the real focus: how to knock them down.

“No, we cannot stuff a comprehensive list of internal trade barriers and their exact costs into a big computer and get a precise figure out”, Crowley writes.

“Yet here is what we can state with confidence: such barriers exist, they leave us all far worse off materially, and the harm compounds with time”.

By Brian Lee Crowley, Aug. 7, 2014

There are two questions journalists always fall back on when they need a good story. The first is “Whose fault is this?” The second is “How much is all this going to cost?” If you can find a guilty party and a big number, bingo. In fact you’ve probably got a series of stories as the “bad guys” in one article (the provinces, unions, corporate elites, free trade, the One Percent, Baby Boomers, marketing boards) rise up in their own defence and point at somebody else as the true culprit.

In this Manichean world, having a guilty party is not enough on its own. In the vast majority of countries, for example, Mike Duffy and the $90,000 Senate expense scandal would be too small to register on the radar when the local rulers are salting away billions in the Caymans.

I have been fascinated to watch the search for the journalistic magic formula (guilty party plus big bill) play out recently in discussions about renewing the effort to tear down the barriers to trade within Canada. Industry Minister James Moore has recently been making much of his sense that this is a historically propitious moment to attack those barriers, not least because of a strongly federalist government in Quebec with a mandate to rebuild the economy.

Having written a lot about the plague these barriers represent to Canadians I have been inundated by journalists’ calls, but they have all asked one question and one question only: what do these barriers cost Canadians? Give a big number, like the Conference Board’s $50 billion or the Macdonald Royal Commission’s 1.5 percent of GDP, and their eyes light up. But then they hear from others lowball estimates like $2 billion to $3 billion annually and that results in stories that claim trade barriers are insignificant and big numbers don’t pass the “baloney meter” test.

Trying to fix a number on the cost of existing barriers, though, misses the point and misunderstands the problem. As I argued in a report a few years ago, suppose it was possible to list every provincial rule that raised the price of everything from a bottle of beer to a lawyer to a haircut to an insurance policy, figure out how much every rule raised the price of each, then multiply the relevant dollar figure by the number of beers consumed, lawyers’ hours billed or haircuts or policies issued in that province in a year, and add it all together. To call that result the “total cost” would still undercount badly, even if you got every part of the exercise right.

For one thing, it would leave out the time and effort brewers, lawyers, stylists and insurers waste filling out unnecessary forms full of baffling fine print. For another, it would omit the things people don’t buy goods or services because they cost too much and the things entrepreneurs never even try to do because a successful new trans-provincial business might unleash a swarm of provincial bureaucrats determined to stop this assault on local businesses. And it certainly fails to capture the long-term harm: how can anyone claim to measure the cumulative impact of stopping a decade’s worth of innovations and improvements before the first one can take place?

We’d also have to count all the regulatory bodies and enforcement mechanisms created in each province to oversee every profession, every insurance policy, every movement of a bottle of wine or beer, most of which we could dispense with if we had uniform national rules, or even just mutual recognition by each province of the others’ rules.

Because of the complexity and the dynamic effects of barriers and potential barriers, it is frankly impossible to come up with an estimate of their costs that will not be subject to legitimate criticism by the friends of the status quo. But focusing on the methods of estimating the barriers’ costs is a classic obfuscation.

No, we cannot stuff a comprehensive list of internal trade barriers and their exact costs into a big computer and get a precise figure out. Yet here is what we can state with confidence: such barriers exist, they leave us all far worse off materially, and the harm compounds with time.

Worst of all, the barriers are an affront to our rights of citizenship, preventing Canadians from buying from and selling to one another and pursuing their lawful occupation in any part of this country. That cost is not forgone economic progress, but violated rights and obstructed nation-building.

Confederation was in part about tearing down these barriers between Canadians. The job is far from done.

Brian Lee Crowley (twitter.com/brianleecrowley) is the Managing Director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an independent non-partisan public policy think tank in Ottawa: www.macdonaldlaurier.ca.

Tags: Brian Lee CrowleyInternal trade barriersinterprovincial trade.Macdonald-Laurier InstituteMLI
Previous Post

New approach to crime statistics encouraging: Newark in Postmedia papers

Next Post

Follow the Macdonald-Laurier Institute on LinkedIn

Related Posts

Canada can help Ukraine in better ways than sending tanks: Richard Shimooka in the Hub
Columns

Canada can help Ukraine in better ways than sending tanks: Richard Shimooka in the Hub

January 27, 2023
Just as Canadians see smartphone bills head down, the cost of watching online content on them may be going up: Peter Menzies in the Financial Post
Columns

Want cheaper cellphone bills? Allow more foreign investment in telecoms: Aaron Wudrick in the National Post

January 27, 2023
Face it, millennials – There is no realistic alternative to capitalism: Philip Cross in the Financial Post
Columns

Face it, millennials – There is no realistic alternative to capitalism: Philip Cross in the Financial Post

January 27, 2023
Next Post
MLI Report: Delays, lack of capacity lead to historic levels of unspent defence funding

Follow the Macdonald-Laurier Institute on LinkedIn

Macdonald-Laurier Institute

323 Chapel Street, Suite #300
Ottawa, Ontario
K1N 7Z2 Canada

613.482.8327

info@macdonaldlaurier.ca
MLI directory

Follow us on

Newsletter Signup

First Name
Last Name
Email Address

Support Us

Support the Macdonald-Laurier Institute to help ensure that Canada is one of the best governed countries in the world. Click below to learn more or become a sponsor.

Support Us

Inside Policy Magazine

  • Current Issue
  • Back Issues
  • Advertising
  • Inside Policy Blog
  • Privacy Policy

© 2021 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
    • Jobs
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy Program
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • Economic policy
      • Energy
      • Health Care
      • Innovation
      • Justice
      • Social issues
      • Telecoms
    • Foreign Policy Program
      • Foreign Affairs
      • National Defence
      • National Security
    • Indigenous Affairs Program
  • Projects
    • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
    • COVID Misery Index
      • Beyond Lockdown
    • Provincial COVID Misery Index
    • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Dragon at the Door
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
    • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
    • Speak for Ourselves
    • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • The Transatlantic Program
    • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
      • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
    • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
    • Past Projects
      • Justice Report Card
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Libraries
    • Inside Policy Magazine
      • Inside Policy Back Issues
      • Inside Policy Blog
    • Papers
    • Columns
    • Books
    • Commentary
    • Straight Talk
    • Video
    • Multimedia
    • Podcasts
    • Leading Economic Indicator
    • Labour Market Report
    • MLI in the Media

© 2021 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

IDEAS CHANGE THE WORLD!Have the latest Canadian thought leadership delivered straight to your inbox.
First Name
Last Name
Email address

No thanks, I’m not interested.