When I first came across this story, What I thought would have been a fairly straightforward story about internal trade.

But then I started reading the reactions from my video and just in general.

People were thrilled about this news.

And that is when I learned something important about this country:

Us Canadians really love our alcohol.

And I understand the excitement. I’m a Whiskey man.

However nine provinces have signed an agreement intended to make it easier for Canadian alcohol producers to sell and ship directly to customers across provincial borders.

That means a winery in British Columbia, a brewery in Nova Scotia or a distillery in Alberta could gain access to customers across much more of the country.

Now this is fantastic news but there’s more to it.

The bigger story is that Canada still does not operate like one fully connected national economy.

And at a time when Canadian businesses are being told to find new customers and reduce their dependence on the United States, that is becoming much harder to defend.

On July 21, the premiers of nine provinces signed a direct-to-consumer alcohol agreement.

The participating provinces are:

British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

*Quebec???

The agreement is designed to allow adults in those provinces to order Canadian beer, wine, spirits and other alcoholic beverages directly from licensed producers in participating jurisdictions.

Until now, those sales were often prohibited, limited to certain products or dependent on separate agreements between individual provinces.

Manitoba and New Brunswick already permitted direct sales of all alcohol products before this agreement.

Nova Scotia and British Columbia allowed some direct wine sales, while Ontario and Nova Scotia signed their own agreement earlier this year.

So this announcement does not create an entirely new system from scratch.

It expands and connects several systems that were already beginning to change.

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Signing an agreement is not the same thing as completing the work.

Most of the participating provinces are implementing their own approaches, while British Columbia says its system for all types of alcohol is expected to be ready in February 2027.

Provinces can still apply their own rules involving:

So this is meaningful progress.

But it is not yet a completely open national alcohol market.

And that distinction matters.

Governments have become very good at announcing that they are removing trade barriers.

Alcohol may be the easiest example of Canada’s internal trade problem to understand.

A Canadian winery could sometimes find it easier to reach an international customer than to ship a bottle directly to someone in another Canadian province.

Think about how strange that is.

We tell people to buy Canadian.

We ask Canadian businesses to become less dependent on the United States.

Then we make it difficult for those businesses to sell to Canadians living on the other side of a provincial border.

Canada’s Constitution says products from one province should be admitted freely into the others.

That sounds fairly clear.

But the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in the Comeau case did not interpret that section as creating absolute free trade across provincial borders.

The court concluded that provinces may still pass legitimate laws that affect interprovincial commerce, provided restricting trade is not their primary purpose.

In practice, that leaves Canada with a patchwork of provincial systems.

And alcohol is only one part of it.

A worker certified in one province may face new applications or delays before doing the same job somewhere else.

A manufacturer may need to satisfy different standards in different provinces.

A builder may face different codes, product approvals and permit systems.

A food processor approved to sell inside one province may need another layer of certification before reaching customers elsewhere.

Trucking companies can face different rules involving vehicle weights, dimensions, safety training and operating requirements.

Each difference may sound minor.

Together, they create paperwork, delays and additional costs.

Those costs do not simply disappear.

They can show up in the prices Canadians pay.

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Canada says it needs to build more homes, and build them faster.

But builders, manufacturers and prefabricated housing companies can still face different requirements depending on the province where a project is located.

A building product accepted in one province may require another approval somewhere else.

A worker qualified in one jurisdiction may face delays before being recognized in another.

A prefabricated home manufacturer may need to adapt the same product to several different systems.

Governments are now working on broader recognition of professional credentials, products and standards.

That could matter far more to the economy than whether someone can order a bottle of wine from another province.

The alcohol deal matters because it makes the larger problem easy to see.

Supporters of internal trade reform argue that fewer duplicate approvals would lower business costs.

Allowing more companies into provincial markets could create additional competition.

And giving smaller businesses access to customers across Canada could help them grow before they attempt to export abroad.

There are large estimates attached to these reforms.

Ottawa and other advocates have promoted studies suggesting that removing internal barriers could eventually add tens of billions of dollars, and potentially much more, to Canada’s economy.

Those numbers need to be treated carefully.

This is not money that suddenly appears in Canadians’ bank accounts.

It is an estimate of the additional economic activity that could develop if workers, products, services and investment moved more freely across the country.

The result would depend on which barriers are removed, how governments implement the changes and whether businesses actually experience a simpler system.

That process could take years.

Here is what people are missing.

Canada cannot eliminate its dependence on the United States overnight.

The American economy is much larger than ours.

Canadian companies have spent decades building supply chains, transportation networks and customer relationships across that border.

Internal Canadian trade cannot replace the U.S. market.

But Canada should not make an external trade threat worse by maintaining unnecessary barriers inside its own country.

Giving Canadian companies easier access to Canadian customers could help them diversify.

It could allow smaller businesses to grow to a national scale before competing internationally.

It could also make domestic supply chains more resilient.

That will not protect Canada from every tariff or decision made in Washington.

But it could make the country slightly less vulnerable and more productive.

Donald Trump did not create Canada’s internal trade barriers.

He simply made them much harder for Canadian governments to ignore.

Not every difference between provincial rules is pointless protectionism.

Some regulations protect public health, workplace safety, the environment, language rights and professional accountability.

Alcohol also creates legitimate concerns involving age verification, taxation, responsible sales and public health.

Removing trade barriers should not mean automatically accepting the weakest rule in the country.

A better approach is for provinces to recognize one another’s systems when they achieve similar outcomes.

There is also a business concern.

Large national companies may be better positioned than small producers to take advantage of a more open Canadian market.

A small winery may gain access to millions of potential customers.

But it may also face more competition from larger producers entering its home province.

Removing a barrier creates an opportunity.

It does not guarantee that every business will benefit equally.

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Canada has signed internal trade agreements before.

The hard part is turning them into changes that businesses and workers can actually feel.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business recently gave governments improved grades for their internal trade efforts.

But it also warned that much of the progress remains on paper, in the form of legislation, agreements, pilot projects and promises.

Many small businesses still say operating across provincial borders has not become noticeably easier.

The alcohol agreement shows why that distinction matters.

Governments had previously committed to making progress on direct-to-consumer sales.

The latest agreement came only after the earlier target had passed.

Governments are no longer denying that Canada has an internal trade problem.

Now Canadians need to see whether the promised solutions work.

Canada is asking businesses to become less dependent on the United States.

It is asking consumers to buy Canadian.

It is asking workers to move where their skills are needed.

And it is asking builders to produce housing faster.

Those goals are harder to achieve when the country still operates like a collection of separate provincial markets.

The alcohol agreement is a useful first step because Canadians immediately understand the contradiction it is trying to fix.

A Canadian producer should not face greater difficulty selling to another Canadian than selling to someone abroad.

But the bigger opportunity is not alcohol.

It is making it easier for workers, builders, truckers, food producers and businesses to operate across the entire country.

Canada cannot control every decision made in Washington.

It can decide whether Canadians are allowed to trade more freely with one another.

The next question is whether governments truly removed a barrier, or simply replaced it with a new registration system.

That is what I will be watching.

Dean.

P.S. What is one Canadian product or service you have found surprisingly difficult to buy from another province? Hit reply.