Pointing out the costs

It's been remarkable how little attention the Alberta/B.C. TILMA has received since the first set of highly inaccurate articles which sang its praises. But Murray Dobbin adds one more voice on the issue:

As part of their sales job, Alberta's Gary Mar and B.C.'s Colin Hansen have claimed the agreement will not result in lower provincial standards — just ones that are “appropriate.” In reality, however, the agreement can only lead to deregulation because businesses are only likely to sue governments over regulations they think are too high, not ones that are too weak...

Governments can go on bended knee to trade investment panels and argue that their regulations were “necessary,” but trade dispute panels rarely accept such arguments. Plus, this agreement only recognizes a limited list of regulatory objectives as “legitimate.”

For example, a city's desire to prevent urban blight is not on the list of legitimate objectives, so municipal bans on billboards would likely be a violation.

No wonder Gary Mar could tell a business audience in Richmond that the dispute process is “everything Canadian business asked for.” The pact creates endless potential for litigation against government right down to the school board level, without any demonstrable benefit. A 1998 study done for the B.C. government found that: “efforts to liberalize interprovincial trade will have almost no effect on trade flows. The reality is that interprovincial trade barriers are already very low.”...

When asked about the constitutionality of the agreement, Steven Shrybman, a partner in the law firm of Sack, Goldblatt, and Mitchell, commented that “a basic principle of constitutional law is that a government cannot fetter its own legislative prerogatives by abandoning its authority to govern.”

Sounds like what the Trade, Investment, and Labour Mobility Agreement is all about.

Sadly, the current governments of either B.C. or Alberta don't apparently see any problem with trading away all chance of effective government for essentially no gain. And indeed it looks like PMS is eager to do the much the same damage on a federal level.

But despite the existence of such clear and present threats to good government at all levels, it's still an open question as to how many (if any) other provinces will throw away their ability to govern by signing onto TILMA. And the more attention we can direct to the real effect of TILMA and any federal equivalent rather than the ridiculous sales pitches of their promoters, the better chance there will be of stopping such indiscriminate anti-government ideology in its tracks.