This essay is being jointly posted today with Acadiensis and Borealia.
By Bradley Miller
The Supreme Court declined this month to radically change the way that Canada works. In R v Comeau, lawyers for a New Brunswick man ticketed for bringing too many bottles of beer into the province from Quebec urged the justices to use the history of the Canadian federation to improve its future, at least as they saw it. They asked the court to find in section 121 of the Constitution Act 1867– a long-ignored little provision that says that the products of each province shall be “admitted free” into each of the others – a right to largely-unfettered free trade between provinces, a move that would put at risk a vast array of regulatory schemes that in one way or another end up limiting or burdening the flow of goods across Canada, such as the beer that the RCMP hauled out of Gerald Comeau’s car after he was pulled over in October 2012.
Many people loathe the kinds of restrictions and regulations that might have been killed by Comeau, and there’s lots of evidence that they massively hike costs on consumers and badly damage Canadian productivity. So the notion that the constitution could bridge the boundaries that are too often created by provincial laws and that the justices could find a right to economic liberty in the way that they’ve laudably found rights to so many other pieces of modern Canada was dazzlingly tempting to many of our brightest commentators and public policy thinkers.
The case drew even more attention because of the role of history and historians in the litigation: elements of the pro-free trade argument entailed an originalist analysis, a technique which is often a tool of social conservatives seeking to squash rights for women, LGBT people, and others, and very uncommon in Canadian constitutional cases. In the telling of Comeau’s lawyers, free trade wasn’t a new right at all, but rather the recognition of one that had been there since the Fathers of Confederation and Britain’s legislative draftsman finalized the British North America Actin 1867. They backed this point up in the New Brunswick trial and the Supreme Court appeal using the Confederation debates of the 1860’s, the expert testimony of a Canadian historian on nineteenth-century trade and the intentions of the BNA Act’s framers, as well a secret 1924 letter describing a clandestine meeting between judges and politicians that purportedly delegitimized a foundational precedent on section 121. Their case, in other words, was that the court should restore a key plank of the original Confederation deal. Continue reading