REGINA – The Sask Party government has introduced legislation aimed at promoting internal trade between other provinces and Saskatchewan.
On Tuesday afternoon Minister of Trade and Export Development Warren Kaeding introduced The Saskatchewan Internal Trade Promotion Act in the Legislature. According to the province’s news release, this Act will allow for mutual recognition of goods and services entering the province from other Canadian provinces and territories.
“What we’re introducing is a bill to support, further enhance interprovincial trade,” Kaeding said to reporters Tuesday.
“I’d say Saskatchewan has been the leader in the charge on supporting inter-provincial trade since, really, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement was signed in 2017. And this would be just an extension of all the great work that we’ve done in the past.”
Kaeding pointed to such efforts as the New West Partnership as an example of that previous work. What this Act will do, Kaeding said, is to “support the mutual recognition of goods.”
Kaeding said there has been mutual recognition of services for quite a while now. That was enshrined in legislation since 2022, but it did not include goods at the time.
“And that’s what this Act is designed for, is to support the mutual recognition of goods across the country.”
Kaeding said what this Act is going to cover is “everything but food and food products.”
“So that’s, as I use the example of widgets, this will cover every widget that is produced across Canada, just to make sure that if it’s accepted in the province of Prince Edward Island, and it’s deemed to be safe there, that ultimately we would recognize that widget to be deemed to be safe in Saskatchewan, without having it to go through all the appropriate safety protocol that we would register a product here. So, it’s just to fast-track that mutual recognition of any good that’s produced across Canada that doesn’t include food or food products.”
Kaeding said this Act is “opening the door to facilitating trade coming into Saskatchewan. Now we’re using that as a launching point to make sure that we can get that reciprocal offering in other provinces that we want to do business with, which is literally every jurisdiction across Canada.”
Kaeding acknowledged there are still other areas which will need to be looked at in the future to completely remove barriers on interprovincial trade.
“Certainly the food and food product side has got a lot of work to do. And that’s based mainly around the risk to human safety. So there’s a lot of regulatory aspects that we need to work around that.”
There are also different regulations regarding transportation as another example.
“Trucking regulations are going to be different in BC driving through the mountains than they are across the prairies, across the narrow bridges of New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island. So we’ve got to find, you know, an acceptable approach to reducing those barriers based on regulations in different sectors.”
NDP plans their own bill
While the Sask Party government has put forward this bill aimed at removing interprovincial trade barriers, the opposition New Democrats have plans for a bill of their own.
NDP Trade critic Kim Breckner reiterated to reporters her party’s plans to introduce a private member’s bill on Wednesday, something she announced during the summer. The initial indication is that bill will include some items not in the Sask Party legislation.
While Breckner said she welcomes the government’s interprovincial trade bill, she calls it “only one piece of what we need to do to support the Canadian economy.”
“We’ve seen this government walk back measures to support the Canadian economy. They put US booze back on the shelf, and they refuse to commit to a Canadian first procurement policy. What I want to see is the government literally put their money where their mouth is and commit to these things to use the public procurement dollars to support the Canadian economy, rather than just this one piece of the puzzle in making a better Canada.”
Breckner adds that the concern she has heard about the Sask Party bill, she said, is it “doesn’t exclude occupational health and safety regulations. It’s important that we are protecting our workers and our safety standards here in Saskatchewan.”
