A former Manitoba Deputy Premier, Agriculture Minister and Industry, Trade and Tourism Minister is calling for federal action and provincial cooperation to break down interprovincial impediments to trade.
Amid escalating global trade tensions, Manitoba’s pork producers have called for government action to reduce interprovincial trade barriers.
Jim Downey, a former Manitoba Deputy Premier, Agriculture Minister and Industry, Trade and Tourism Minister, says several internal trade issues have been identified but jurisdictional concerns related to revenue and labor, such as authority over trucking as just one example, have kept them from being addressed.
When you have a trucking industry in Canada and lot of it goes east and west and a lot of it goes north and south, but I think we can encourage a lot more eastern western travel with truckers if we could have one Canadian transportation licence. If you bought a licence for a transport truck in Canada, that should apply to driving through any province and being able to do so under the same permitting.
The reason that that doesn’t happen is because the minute that the federal government were to take over that particular responsibility, the revenue from those licenses would go to the federal government. That’s not to say there couldn’t be an arrangement made between the federal government and the provinces to give them a revenue stream. But, as soon as the provinces give up some of the control of these items, it’s an employment factor. People may lose their jobs because, if you had a national transportation agency collecting the revenues, doing the business, then who needs the provincial government employees other than for weight, measures and all of those things so it’s a revenue stream and it’s also a labor situation.
Another one that I think is important to show we are a nation, I think the federal government should take over the operation, management and maintenance of Number One Highway. It’s a TransCanada highway; we should have the Canadian government responsible for Number One Highway from coast to coast.
~ Jim Downey, Manitoba Farmer
Dowey stresses trucking is a big factor in agriculture so, if you can lower the cost of trucking, Canadian farmers and consumers will benefit.
