Canada’s economic future increasingly hinges on a deceptively simple question: how free is trade within Canada itself?

For decades, economists and policymakers have warned that Canada’s internal market—fragmented by duplicative rules, sector-specific carve-outs, and a thicket of provincial exceptions—acts as a drag on growth and competitiveness. Even the Canadian Free Trade Agreement, heralded as a breakthrough, is riddled with loopholes.

To dig deeper, Inside Policy Talks brings together legal scholar Paul Daly and MLI senior fellow Mark Mancini for a conversation with Peter Copeland, MLI’s deputy director of domestic policy.

Daly explains the central irony: removing regulatory barriers requires a mechanism with real authority to do it. Without a body empowered by both Parliament and the provinces, “what you're going to get is what we have, which is a mosaic of different provisions.” Canada needs a national coordinating agency with the power to set standards, enforce mutual recognition, harmonize where necessary, and “raise [barriers] to the ground,” as Daly puts it. 

Mancini agrees, stressing that skepticism toward new agencies is understandable—but the status quo simply cannot solve the problem. This wouldn’t be “an agency for the sake of an agency,” but an institution designed to tackle a precise challenge: the inability of governments to coordinate regulatory reform on their own. With nationwide buy-in, such a body could finally move Canada beyond one-off bilateral deals toward a genuinely integrated economic union. 

Together, Daly and Mancini make the case that fixing Canada’s internal trade system is not a technocratic curiosity—it’s a national economic imperative.