Ford’s work as Captain Canada is far from done: Selley

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Re-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford mentioned “fighting” no fewer than 14 times in his victory speech in Toronto on Thursday night. He’ll fight “for every auto worker” in Ontario, “for every miner,” “for every steel maker,” “for every worker on the factor floor, every student starting their career and every senior starting their retirement,” “for First Nations communities, for newcomers (and) for everyone in Ontario looking to get ahead,” he vowed.

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Whom he intends to fight on these fronts isn’t clear — beyond the man in the White House. “I will work with every level of government, and every political stripe, because fighting back against Donald Trump, standing up for Canada, it will take a full Team Ontario effort; it will take a full Team Canada effort,” said Ford.

“Canada won’t start a fight with the U.S., but you better believe we’re ready to win one,” Ford vowed. “Canada will never, ever be the 51st state, and Canada is not for sale.”

So he’s not done trying to play Captain Canada, in other words. And that’s good news, if he can help keep premiers on the same page, to the extent they’re still on it, and not off pursuing their own provincial agendas. After all, the “Team Canada effort” that set out to Washington on Feb. 12 with all 13 provincial and territorial premiers was something of a bust, if not an outright embarrassment.

“To be clear, we never agreed that Canada would not be the 51st state,” announced the mid-level White House functionary with whom they met — and only thanks to an $85,000-per-month retainer with a lobbying firm — before the premiers had even returned home. Trump was quickly back to mocking the prime minister, and Canada generally, just as soon as he could get in front of a keyboard. And the premiers hadn’t even really stayed on message for the brief journey; they were clearly playing in large part for their particular audiences back home.

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The fact is, nobody knows what Trump is going to do next on the Canada file. Trump himself probably doesn’t know. Tariffs or the lack thereof is ultimately a federal issue. Where Ford and his colleagues can be most useful right now is in going after interprovincial trade barriers — something they claim to want to do, just like their predecessors always have, and yet always yielding lacklustre results.

One of the more unexpected moments of the Ontario election saw Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston appear with Ford on the campaign trail to announce new legislation that would (per Bill C-36) “remove all barriers to trade in goods, services and investment between the provinces and territories of Canada,” provided the other provinces and territories reciprocate, which Ford certainly implied Ontario will. (Nova Scotia’s NDP opposition was not pleased Houston introduced this in Ontario, rather than in Halifax, but hey, where better to signal you’re serious than in another province?)

Such an agreement would be a significant win. Nova Scotia and Ontario scored marks of C and a C+, respectively, in the Canadian Federation of Independent Business’s latest “interprovincial cooperation scorecard,” while Manitoba (A-), Alberta (B+), Saskatchewan (B) and British Columbia (B) topped the table — all four western provinces being signatories to the anti-trade-barrier New West Partnership Trade Agreement, which Ontario could presumably ask to join if it wished.

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But as I wrote earlier in the campaign, the heart of the issue isn’t so much tariff-esque restrictions or indeed prohibitions on the movement of goods across provincial lines. (Alcohol tends to get the most press.) The larger dream is, or ought to be, a country where everything from professional and skilled-trade certifications to trucking regulations and occupational health and safety rules are harmonized, so people have the maximum possible freedom of mobility to meet the economy’s needs.

(Obviously, I’m leaving Quebec out of this vision. That’s a no-hoper.)

Such changes will make for controversial news, because those who benefit from the status quo and the regulation-fetishist left will insist that any attempts at harmonization are a “race to the bottom,” and Canadian media love stories like that to bits. Imagine the Toronto Star finding out that Ontario is harmonizing, say, environmental standards with Alberta. It wouldn’t even matter what the standards were; the principle of the thing would be shocking enough to get the NDP opposition riled up.

“The attempts to remove so-called interprovincial trade barriers is (sic) mostly a push for ‘mutual recognition’ of regulations,” the left-wing Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives complained in an article last week, “a process by which all provinces could be forced to accept the least stringent regulations for safety, environmental protection, and consumer protection.”

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“It is a way of attacking provinces’ ability to pass laws for environmental, worker, and consumer protection,” it continued.

Of course it’s not attacking provinces’ ability to do anything if the provinces themselves agree among themselves on these matters, which is certainly a preferable approach to the federal government trying to harmonize such things. That’s where Ford should now be directing his domestic-diplomacy skills. This is something we can do, and should do, and say we want to do; it would benefit everyone; and there’s nothing Trump can do to stop it.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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