TILMA’s Faulty Premise
How a myth about trade barriers became
a national neurosis
Bad news travels fast.
We can say the same
about bad policy.
It has been two and a
half years since Alberta
and British Columbia
signed the Trade,
Investment and Labour
Mobility Agreement
(TILMA), ushering in a new order of
sorts in western Canada, where corporate
priorities don’t just outweigh all
other community concerns – they are
legally superior to them.
TILMA was signed on the faulty premise
that there were considerable barriers
to trade and investment, and the movement
of labour, between Alberta and
British Columbia.
It didn’t matter to the premiers in
Alberta and B.C. that Canadians could
already, by and large, work wherever
they pleased, that agreements were
already in place to ensure free labour
mobility across all provinces.
It didn’t matter because by April 2006
it was too late. TILMA was a done deal
before a single question or concern could
be raised by the municipalities, hospitals,
school boards and others who will be
impacted by the agreement’s unheard conditions
on democratic governance.
As expected (and as planned), TILMA
sparked a frantic debate within and
among provincial governments across the
country, now under new pressure from
emboldened business lobbyists to get
serious about so-called “inter-provincial
trade barriers.” Why can’t there be free
trade within Canada as there is between
Canada and other countries, they asked.
The media didn’t probe much further,
and merely borrowed this handy soundbite
when developing editorials and opeds
about TILMA.
Nonetheless, the empty talk infected
Canada’s other premiers. “Should we
sign TILMA too?” they asked. The governments
that studied the agreement and
debated its merits openly and democratically
– Saskatchewan and Yukon –
said “No Way!,” deciding not to restrict
themselves for the sake of a non-existent
or highly exaggerated “problem.”
Others started working on similar agreements
with their neighbours, such as
Ontario and Quebec, who are currently
negotiating an inter-provincial Economic
Partnership Agreement, partially modelled
on TILMA. A summary of the
framework for negotiations shows that
premiers McGuinty and Charest are
considering regulatory harmonization, as
well as a dispute resolution process that,
like TILMA, would bind each government,
and possibly their municipalities,
to unelected trade panel decisions.
Still others, including Manitoba,
thought that it made more sense to
“strengthen” the existing Agreement on
Internal Trade (AIT) by including financial
penalties. These penalties could run
as high as $5 million and would be paid
out to corporations when government
policies are deemed to be barriers to
trade, investment or labour mobility.
What ’s next?
Enormously successful municipal pressure
in western Canada resulted in a
strong position by the Union of British
Columbia Municipalities (UBCM)
against several of TILMA’s more egregious
parts: regulatory harmonization,
limits on local procurement, a ban on
business subsidies or focused development
plans, and the fact that municipal
governments will not have the right to
defend their own policies in front of dispute
tribunals.
After several months of negotiations
with the UBCM and its counterpart,
the Alberta Urban Municipalities
Association, the B.C. and Alberta
governments recently announced only
three minor concessions, including
moderately higher thresholds on when
TILMA’s rules will affect procurement,
an exemption for land-use bylaws as long
as they treat companies from both provinces
equally, and a promise to consider
“options for the reconciliation of business
licencing requirements
The Council of Canadians continues to
work with municipal governments across
the country, particularly in Ontario,
where already 11 city councils have
passed resolutions either questioning
or rejecting outright a new trade deal
with Quebec. What is needed is full
disclosure of the terms of the agreement,
and a chance to discuss and debate its
merits on equal grounds with the powerful
business interest groups pushing our
premiers along a clearly redundant and
dangerous path.
Stuart Trew is the Ontario/Quebec/Nunavut
Regional Organizer for the Council of
Canadians.
Printer-friendly version: TILMA's Faulty Premise in PDF Format (78kB)
Photo: Chapter activists from Golden, British
Columbia got out to the provincial border
between B.C. and Alberta this spring to
show there really are no barriers to interprovincial
trade.
