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In sum, for all of the participants’ labours, we are left, 150 years after Confederation, with an economy in which internal trade remains markedly less free than it is within other federations — or indeed between the separate countries of the European Union.

Even the chapters devoted to freeing trade are riddled with limitations, caveats and exemptions

Hard work it may have been, but it was essentially useless labour, busywork; it only appears worthwhile within the bizarro world of federal-provincial relations, and the strange assumptions on which it operates:

• that provincial policies that restrict competition and raise prices are not an obvious blight on its consumers and taxpayers, but something to be resolutely defended and surrendered only with great reluctance;

• that we should rather be amazed that trade within the same country has been so far liberalized, rather than that it should have been so restricted in the first place;

• and most particularly, that the business of ensuring there is a single market within a single country should be left to negotiations between its constituent parts, as if between sovereign states, rather than simply enforced by the federal government, as part of its normal duties.

That was indeed the point, in large measure, of Confederation: to create a common market, overseen by a federal government, to whom the Fathers assigned all the constitutional powers necessary to strike down provincial trade barriers on its own — not with their permission, but as of right. That is how it is done in any normal federation — not to say within the EU, which isn’t even a federation.

That the feds cannot summon the nerve to use those powers; that they do not, in part, because we will not let them, because we do not see ourselves as one people, who would no more think of imposing barriers to trade with one another across provincial lines than between city blocks; that the best the framers of the new agreement could boast, pathetically, was that trade will now be no less free between the provinces than it is between each of them and the outside world, is not, I submit, evidence that “Canada works.” It is evidence of profound dysfunction.