BEER RULING IS BIG DEAL
Canada’s constitutional framers clearly sought to build an economic unit. More than 150 years later, we’ve yet to achieve that.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the “free the beer” case could drive you to drink. Not that you’ll have many beverage options to choose from. At least not Canadian ones.
The case, R. vs. Comeau, related to charges against Gerard Comeau, a New Brunswick man who would drive to a nearby Quebec store to buy beer for less. Police stopped him in New Brunswick and charged him with violating a local law that restricts importation of alcohol from another jurisdiction. Comeau contended the law was invalid because the Constitution struck down barriers to free trade within Canada from the moment the country was born in 1867.
A plain reading of the relevant section of the Constitution supports that view: “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” To the constitutional scholars and lawyers who came to Comeau’s defence, that section seemed clear enough. But our country’s most elite judicial minds have no time for plain readings. The Supreme Court’s ruling sided with New Brunswick and upheld the province’s liquor importation restrictions. Canada is a federation, not a country, the court reiterated and provinces have the right to establish trade barriers if they are connected to some claimed reason or other and are not solely protectionist because naked protectionism would violate Section 121 of the Constitution.
New Brunswick claimed its law has nothing to do with ensuring residents pay their taxes locally, but was instead over the right to regulate the sale (and use) of alcohol within its borders. Uh-huh. Now pull the other one.
The legalities of the decision are sweeping in their impact. The ruling will allow a province to establish virtually any desired barrier to competing products offered by a Canadian company in another province so long as it goes through the token effort of establishing some shoddy rationale that sounds less obnoxious than overt protectionism.
It is easier for a Canadian business to trade with the U.S. and the European Union than it is to trade with the province or territory next door. Canada’s interprovincial trade barrier regime is estimated by Statistics Canada to be equivalent to tariffs of almost seven per cent on goods and services traded within Canada. That sets our economic competitiveness and productivity yet farther behind other countries where goods flow unhindered between major cities and regions.