Canada has spent thirty years pretending that internal free trade can be achieved through polite first ministers' meetings, press conferences, action plans, and the creation of agencies.

More recently, Paul Daly and Mark Mancini (2026) have published a proposal to eliminate internal trade barriers through the creation of a new joint federal-provincial agency. In their Macdonald-Laurier Institute paper The single market myth: How Ottawa and the provinces can finally dismantle Canada's costly internal trade barriers they call for a specialized agency to identify and eliminate internal trade barriers using interdelegation powers. Daly and Mancini argue that Ottawa already has significant constitutional powers that could be used to reduce internal trade barriers under s. 91(2) Trade and Commerce power.

The s. 91(2) Trade and Commerce power of the Constitution Act, 1867 gives the federal government the right to regulate economic activity that is national in scope, rather than confined to a single province. Some legal scholars believe that it could permit the federal government to eliminate internal trade barriers created by the provinces (Lord 2019).

Daly and Mancini are right to call for urgent action on this issue. Although estimates vary as to just how costly Canada's internal trade barriers are, there is a consensus that they are significant. A group of authors estimated that full elimination of these barriers could raise real GDP by nearly 7 per cent (Alvarez, Krznar, and Tombe 2019). The result would be an increase in living standards for Canadian families, especially those struggling with the high costs of groceries.

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