The hype around internal trade is stunning. The ministerial committee that oversees the Canadian Free Trade Agreement didn’t meet during the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2024, according to the most recent annual report. Now, that group appears to want to make up for lost time. “This meeting marks an important step towards achieving a more open and integrated domestic Canadian market,” ministers said in a statement after they met on Jan. 31. “We are determined to maintain the momentum, and our discussions and agreed upon recommendations today have set the stage for continued progress.” 

Every action is met with an equal and opposite reaction, so the hype was destined to crash into a wall of skepticism. “It’s an odd reflex in the finest circles: whenever something doesn’t work, call for interprovincial trade barriers to be eliminated,” journalist Paul Wells wrote in his Substack newsletter on Feb. 4. “Eventually one notes the barriers persist despite all the calling.”

The Canada West Foundation, a think tank that has advocated for the removal of interprovincial and territorial trade barriers, also felt compelled to puncture the enthusiasm bubble. Freer movement of goods and services should in theory increase gross domestic product, wrote Carlo Dade, a trade expert, but “there is no evidence or reason to believe that removing the remaining minor irritants will automatically and magically lead to more trade within Canada.” 

So, yeah—lots of reasons to be skeptical about Transport Minister Anita Anand’s suggestion that non-tariff barriers that have resisted change for decades could be wiped away in 30 days. But this time might be different. The forces that stopped Canada from creating the internal market imagined by Section 121 of the Constitution were strong. For the first time in memory, the counter forces are equally strong, and maybe even stronger. 

The most important force is U.S. President Donald Trump.

Some more physics: Inertia is a useful way to describe why humans and the systems and institutions they create resist change. The Fathers of Confederation may have envisioned a common market; however, they did too little to overcome not only regionalism, but what academic Donald Savoie calls a “culture of victimhood” that animates Acadians, Maritimers, Quebecers, Ontarians, Westerners and Indigenous Peoples, the only “true” victims of Confederation. 

All that victimization creates more friction than can be overcome by abstract studies about theoretical gains. When thinking about habits and systems, duration replaces mass in Isaac Newton’s first law of motion. “Once we consider a story true, it takes a great deal of force to change it,” Shane Parrish observed in the second volume of his The Great Mental Models series. “Data alone is rarely enough.” 

What has been enough to shock Canada into potentially operating like a unitary state is an existential threat to the nation. Canada was shaped by the War of 1812 and Confederation was a response to American expansionism. Trump’s tariff policy and persistent trolling about Canada’s viability as a sovereign state appear to have delivered a similar shock. That matters. Inertia makes moving a heavy object difficult, but once in motion it acquires a new steady state. Thanks to Trump, advocates of greater internal trade will find it easier to keep the ball rolling. “You need a catalyst, and this could be the catalyst,” said Ryan Manucha, the author of Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups, a history of Canada’s attempts to create an internal market. 

An unusual number of Canadian political leaders have now stuck their necks out and said publicly they want more internal trade. That suggests an unusual number of bureaucrats are now empowered to ensure their bosses save face. Politicians evidently sense a change in the weather, so much so that Quebec Premier François Legault is talking openly about letting a pipeline pass through his province. Anand, a talented minister who said last month that she won’t be running in the next election, might be motivated to depart with a legacy accomplishment that would impress her peers at the University of Toronto’s law faculty. 

The final reason skeptics might be wrong is fashion. Ideas come in waves and deregulation is becoming a global trend. The anti-hero of the movement is Argentine President Javier Milei, who brandished a chainsaw at rallies as he romped to power in 2023, symbolizing his ambition to clear away bureaucracy and red tape. Now, it’s Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” that’s generating the excitement. Parrish tweeted in December that he’d help fund a Canadian version of DOGE.

Milei and Musk are examples of what economic historian Joel Mokyr calls “cultural entrepreneurs,” individuals who have the right combination of determination and influence to spread ideas that burst through inertia and end up as cover stories in The Economist. The European Commission has promised to clean up its regulatory thicket. Last year, New Zealand created the Ministry for Regulation, which describes its job as enabling New Zealanders to make more productive use of their time, and achieving “better outcomes for those who want to get things done.” 

Canada’s leaders had taken note of the trend before Trump returned to the scene. The productivity crisis had given them every reason to do so, as evidence showed regulation was crushing businesses’ enthusiasm to invest. Statistics Canada published research this week that found a 37-per-cent increase in the number of regulations between 2006 and 2021 reduced inflation-adjusted GDP growth by 1.7 percentage points. 

Anand’s confidence that internal barriers could be removed quickly is based on an agreement Ottawa and most provinces struck last year around trucking. Rather than get bogged down trying to create one set of rules for the entire country, they said they would try accepting each other’s standards. “Mutual recognition” could become the template for erasing barriers in other industries, which might achieve much of what Milei and Musk have set out to do, but without all the drama. It’s the Canadian way.

Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief.