What are we to make of the current—almost hysterical—campaign by business interests  who claim that removing interprovincial trade barriers is the best way to address the threat posed by Trump’s aggressive tariff policies?

To answer this, Canadians should ask a simple question: “How will reducing the capacity of governments to regulate and manage our economy enable us to meet Trump’s challenge more effectively?”

At a time that Canadians are demanding that our governments take steps to shelter us from aggressive U.S. policies, how does removing provincial and federal public policy tools—which is what proposals to amend the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) boil down to—make Canada stronger?

Like its predecessor, the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), the purpose of the CFTA is to limit the role of government in the economy. It assumes that government constraints on market activities are a major source of economic inefficiency. They are a “burden” which needs to be lifted. So, restricting the ability of governments to regulate the private sector will, according to its proponents, significantly improve Canada’s economic performance.

Because its neoliberal advocates assume that markets are always more efficient than governments, the CFTA is designed to reduce, incrementally, the latter’s role in shaping how the economy functions. It is also designed to prevent future governments from enacting new constraints on business that interfere with the market.

Supporters of expanding the scope of the CFTA carefully avoid discussing its basic policy focus. But the well-orchestrated corporate campaign to slash interprovincial trade barriers is essentially a neoliberal project. It is designed to take advantage of the current crisis by further consolidating the free trade agenda that business interests have been pushing for the past 40 years.

The CFTA does so by harmonizing provincial policies with those the federal government has included in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and numerous other international trade agreements. The goal is to privilege the role of markets and limit the ability of governments to regulate them. Far from strengthening Canda’s ability to manage its economy, enhancing the CFTA further undermines it.

The push to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers is supported by many of the architects of the original Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, including Thomas D’Aquino, of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and Perrin Beatty, former Conservative MP and  head of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association. It is consistent with their continuing efforts—supported by organizations like the Fraser institute—to weaken the policy capacity of our governments and limit their ability to regulate the market and protect the public interest.

The CFTA facilitates the implementation of Canada’s international trade agreement obligations at the provincial and territorial level by getting these governments to voluntarily accept the measures the federal government has negotiated in its international agreements—measures that significantly impinge on the constitutional jurisdiction of provinces and territories. Much of the actual text of the CFTA deliberately copies, word for word, what is in these international agreements.

Claims that eliminating the remaining CFTA exemptions will give Canadian business an advantage over its U.S. competitors are fundamentally misleading. This is because the USMCA, Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) and many other of Canada’s international trade agreements guarantee foreign corporations the best treatment that we give to Canadian companies and investors.

U.S. and other foreign corporations automatically benefit from any further concessions implemented in the CFTA because Canada has locked this commitment into its international agreements.

The claim that the proposed changes to the CFTA will support Canadian business is also problematic. Neither the federal government nor the provinces and territories have a functioning national system for determining who really owns corporations registered in Canada. There is a patchwork quilt of different provincial, territorial and federal reporting requirements.

Being registered by any jurisdiction in Canada is taken as evidence that corporations are Canadian for purposes of the entitlements the CFTA offers, but real ownership might be located entirely outside the country. Without such information, claims that the CFTA will enhance Canadian business are completely hollow: foreign companies and investors will use their registration in jurisdictions with the least transparent reporting requirements to take advantage of the entitlements given to Canadian-registered companies. In other words, they can circumvent any restrictions governments might implement on foreign corporations.

While Canadian governments may stop purchasing from a few high-profile U.S. companies, they are notably silent about repealing the offending text from the trade agreements themselves. This is because they have no intention of rolling back the neoliberal commitments they have made in these agreements.

We have already seen the negative impact of Canada’s numerous international free trade agreements. These have been Trojan Horses promoting deregulation, privatization, regressive tax policies and the erosion of public and social services.

As a result, inequality has dramatically increased. More people are homeless and living on the streets. These neoliberal policies have not improved the standard of living of Canadians and there is no evidence that more of the same will do any better.

Continental integration has been accompanied by deindustrialization,  the closure of tens of thousands of domestic businesses and the migration of others to the U.S.—illustrated recently by Brookfield Asset Management’s decision to move headquarters to New York.

Privatization has dramatically reduced the number of domestic Crown corporations owned and controlled by our governments—and the good jobs that accompanied public ownership. Their influence in the economy is a shadow of what it once was, making Canada far more vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

The free trade agenda has also promoted much deeper integration of Canada’s economy with the U.S. As a result, Canada has far less control over it than it did four decades ago when the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was signed.

Yet the very same corporate interests who promoted this agenda now claim that imposing further neoliberal restrictions on provincial and federal policy capacity through the CFTA will enable us to meet the challenge of Trump’s tariffs more effectively while adding significantly to Canada’s GDP.