The following was published in the Vancouver Province and the Edmonton Journal on August 11, 2014

by Joseph Maloney, International Vice-President of Canada

Three Western premiers are leading the charge to remove inter-provincial trade barriers. The provinces and the federal government are expected to start talks soon to revise the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT) that was signed in 1995.

Removing trade barricades within Canada is something that can help us all, and could even help to ease the shortage of skilled tradespeople in the West.

As Canada's leading supplier of skilled workers in the Boilermaker trade, our union faces interprovincial barriers every day that prevent our members from working, and prevent employers from accessing a readily available supply of Canadians with the skills they need.

Indeed, with fewer interprovincial barriers, chances are Canada wouldn't need as many temporary foreign workers as we use now.

As always, however, the devil is in the details. It's fine for provincial premiers to agree to reduce trade barriers. It's quite another thing for all ten provinces to agree on new standards that will apply to everyone.

For example, every province has its own health and safety regulations. From the perspective of workers responsibilities and obligations, the rules are virtually identical everywhere. But someone from New Brunswick who is skilled in a regulated trade and wants to work in Alberta must take additional, repetitive training to qualify in Alberta. Can the provinces agree on standardized workplace health and safety laws and regulations without degrading the protections that are already in place?

Inspection and certification requirements for welders are basically the same in every province. While there is a national Red Seal program, which is supposed to guarantee that someone trained in one province can work in another, there is a labyrinth of provincial rules and regulations that requires a welder to be certified and tested in each province before being allowed to work there.

For us, one of the biggest interprovincial barriers to the free movement of our members is the different apprenticeship programs in each province. Curriculum, hours and requirements can vary greatly from province to province. Some provinces will still not accept work performed by an apprentice in a different jurisdiction, or recognize schooling received at an institution from outside the province where an apprentice is registered.

These examples are only a few of the many jurisdictional complications our members face, and they are echoed in every other skilled trade. Add the barriers in every other field of interprovincial commerce, and you face a mountain of conflicting rules and regulations.

We can climb that mountain, but armies of politicians and bureaucrats are not going to be able to do it on their own. To rewrite the hundreds of provincial regulations governing a trade like ours requires co-operation and participation of all the stakeholders who will be affected by this process.

We have to wonder, then: where is the call for public input into this process? Mouthing the rhetoric of dismantling inter-provincial trade barriers won't accomplish anything. Governments need a plan that will involve all stakeholders and get the job done.

Part of that plan includes listening to the public and not only to the captains of industry that usually put in cameo appearances to rubber-stamp whatever trade programs governments are pushing. In our case, if you want to know what barriers exist against the mobility of Boilermakers, it would make sense to ask a Boilermaker.

Where our own trade is concerned, we'd recommend a joint industry-union-government working group to come up with proposals on the removal of barriers. We, and our counterparts in industry, have done extensive research into the impediments to the free movement of our members and we have workable ideas on how to dismantle them.

The movement towards freer interprovincial trade will get bogged down in bureaucratic mire if the entire process is carried on behind closed doors. The movement of goods and people between provinces is too important a subject to be left to the politicians.

While we applaud the goal of reducing economic barriers between the provinces, it's the detail work that will make or break the exercise. And in this, governments must open the doors to the public. Interprovincial trade is too important to leave the discussion exclusively to the politicians.