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Photo by Chris Young/CP

To the countless constitutional scholars and lawyers who came to Comeau’s defence, that section certainly seemed clear enough on plain reading. But our country’s most elite judicial minds have no time for plain readings. The Supreme Court’s ruling, released Thursday, sided with New Brunswick and upheld the province’s liquor importation restrictions. Canada is a federation, not a country, the court reiterated — as if we’d forgotten — and the individual 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, the Supremes say, violate S. 121. In New Brunswick’s case, the province claimed the Liquor Control Act 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 — for such matters as health and safety, you see. Uh-huh. Now pull the other one.

The legalities of the decision have been well picked apart elsewhere and won’t be dwelled upon here. But they 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 slightly less obnoxious than overt protectionism. And this was the Supreme Court ruling, so we’re stuck with this disgraceful policy. It will likely be decades before Canada’s free traders find a way to manage a new challenge to this legal and political absurdity.