Costly trade

The Cons are apparently perfectly willing to match Stephane Dion in the corporate pandering department, matching the Libs' call for tax cuts while promising yet another attack on mythical "internal trade barriers". But there's a strong possibility that the Cons are miscalculating in trying to force the latter issue at the national level:

Mr. Flaherty (said) on Monday (that) taxes are still too high, and the federal government is committed to lowering them.

Ottawa also wants to knock down trade barriers within Canada so provinces can trade more freely with each other, he said.

Now, it certainly isn't news that the Cons are eager to see the TILMA imposed nationally. But any inclusion of the issue in the throne speech nonetheless figures to raise the stakes considerably.

Remember that just this summer, the provinces agreed to include a dispute-resolution mechanism in the existing Agreement on Internal Trade. And it seems a reasonable assessment that the actual agreement on a relatively limited expansion of corporate privileges hinted at a lack of consensus on anything more.

Presumably, the Cons wouldn't be bringing up the issue if they were satisfied with that outcome. Which strongly suggests that Flaherty's path will be to attempt to impose the TILMA on a national scale - whether by direct legislation, or by pressuring the provinces into accepting it.

The unpopularity of the TILMA itself offers reason enough to think of that as a problematic strategy. But there's an even more significant danger in trying to impose the TILMA from the federal level.

Remember that the main force against any additional national agreement has been Quebec's refusal to cede any sovereignty to national pressure and corporate interests. For Harper to force on Quebec what it's already rejected for itself - and thereby limit the province's scope of legislative action - would reek of unwarranted intrusion into provincial jurisdiction, offering Gilles Duceppe just the kind of issue that could reverse the Bloc's recent slide.

And even if one assumed the Cons are willing to take the minority side of an issue where the opposition parties will then split the majority position, it's far from clear that TILMA would offer that opportunity. With the Libs obviously seeking to reclaim their title as the party of corporate Canada (and generally unwilling to fight the Cons' priorities), they'd be at least as likely as not to simply play along with the Cons' plan. Which would eliminate any benefit in the big-business buyoff department, which making the Cons extremely vulnerable to the NDP and the Bloc.

Of course, it's possible that any talk of internal trade barriers in the throne speech will be limited to more of the relatively noncommittal language which the Cons have already spouted through most of their time in office - making the declaration merely meaningless rather than reckless. But if the Cons do plan to try to impose government barriers on unwilling provinces, they have little to gain and much to lose in doing so.