On real costs

Erin's discussion about a federal conference on internal trade highlights the fact that while the TILMA's alleged benefits have been properly debunked in the minds of all but the most reality-averse corporate shills, its costs need to be far more strongly considered:

The academic and policy people all agreed that the material costs of alleged inter-provincial barriers are insignificantly small relative to the economy. Representatives of nursing and legal associations indicated that their members have no difficulty transferring between provinces and perceive no meaningful barriers to labour mobility...

Despite the near consensus that there is not much of a problem, there was some discussion of potential “solutions”: expanding TILMA, deepening the Agreement on Internal Trade, or applying the World Trade Organization’s rules to intra-national trade...

Many participants had not scrutinized TILMA and its likely negative consequences. Although John Helliwell and I tried to raise some of these potential pitfalls, I fear that many people have concluded that this agreement entails minor benefits but no costs...

The optimistic conclusion is that Marc, I, and others have been somewhat successful in dispelling the fantasy that TILMA will yield significant economic benefits. The pessimistic conclusion is that much more needs to be done to inform people of TILMA’s economic, social, and environmental costs.

As noted by Erin, much of the debate over the TILMA has centred on the wildly-inflated claims about the possible benefits. But that focus on debating the size (or existence) of any benefit may result in the anti-TILMA side paying short shrift to the even more important costs of any agreement which puts a straitjacket on government in the name of increased corporate profits.

Of course, it's virtually impossible to quantify what some of those costs could be - though it's not hard to extrapolate from the Sierra Club's legal analysis to see how the TILMA could constrain governments now in ways which result in far larger environmental costs in the future.

But even immediate dollar amounts aside, it's also worth noting the political cost when governments are preventing from governing. Any problem faced by governments under a TILMA-type regime will have a far more limited range of potential solutions, with a strong bias toward corporate-friendly ones even if these do less to resolve the core issue. And that real reduction in what government actually does is only likely to lead to further cynicism on the question of whether government can in fact do better.

Needless to say, that kind of shift from (relatively) people-centred decision-making to an enforced corporate-friendly focus is probably exactly what makes the TILMA so appealing to businesses. But it's also a serious danger which would itself make for reason to be highly skeptical of the TILMA even if the Conference Board's invented benefits were even close to realistic.