YOU CAN EVEN PRETEND IT'S nATIONALISM/pROTECTIONISM...:

It's called the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA). Look closely and you'll see that the name of the trade deal doesn't say who Canada signed it with. That's because Canada didn't sign CFTA with any other country. Rather, Canada signed CFTA with itself. And that's what makes CFTA so interesting: It seeks to increase commerce inside of Canada by lowering inter-provisional trade barriers. The U.S. can learn a lot from CFTA.

Free trade is difficult to achieve within countries, let alone between them. Canada is a big country geographically, which adds to the costs of trade. But there are also provincial policies that get in the way. According to one estimate, the tariff equivalent of these policies is a staggering 6.9 percent. To cut these costs, Canada's Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT) came on line in 1995, just seven months after the World Trade Organization (WTO) made its debut. These trade deals are complementary.

By 2015, the amended AIT included 18 chapters on topics from government procurement to investment. AIT had some design flaws, made worse by an abundance of provincial carve-outs. Still, by 1998, the International Monetary Fund concluded that the AIT had made real progress in liberalizing inter-provincial trade. 

CFTA is more comprehensive than the AIT. For one thing, the provinces agreed to a "negative list" approach, meaning exceptions were negotiated, not treated as the default. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd