Interprovincial trade barriers concern feds

The federal government is taking immediate steps to remove some regulatory barriers to trade across the country, hoping to persuade provinces to follow its example.

For starters, it is making the national building code available for free, making it easier for the construction industry to access a single, standardized set of rules which the feds hope the provinces will adopt. Until now, downloading the code has cost $350 and provinces have imposed a patchwork of different rules and interpretations on top.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc says the move was inspired by Australia, which saw $1 billion worth of additional economic activity after getting its state governments to harmonize their building codes and drop the fee for accessing them.

“The faster we can get to a national building code, a standardized building code, the better it will be for that whole sector to reduce costs and grow their businesses,” LeBlanc said in an interview Wednesday.

The move comes as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is preparing to hold a first ministers’ meeting next week, at which eliminating interprovincial trade barriers is high on the agenda.

“I’ve been saying to provincial governments that we want to come to the conversation having identified the federal barriers because I don’t pretend that they’re exclusively provincial,” said LeBlanc.

LeBlanc said the federal government is focusing on areas where it can act quickly to remove regulatory hurdles that impede trade between provinces and territories and add unnecessary costs to businesses.

Besides making the building code free, the government is amending federal energyefficiency regulations for household appliances, clarifying food labelling rules and modernizing meat inspection regulations.