Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will host a Canada-US economic summit today (Friday, February 7th, 2025) in Toronto. The meeting comes on the heels of President Donald Trump pausing threatened tariffs for a month.
The summit will feature Canadian leaders in trade, business, public policy, and organized labor. Trudeau calls it an important opportunity to build a long-term prosperity agenda for Canada, one that is resilient, diversified in global trade, and breaks down barriers between Canada’s provinces and territories.
The leaders of Canada’s major cities got a taste from Trudeau yesterday of what is likely coming at today’s summit.
“But we’re doing more than just bracing ourselves. We’re convening provincial and territorial leaders to do the vital work of breaking down the barriers that hamper inter-provincial trade, trimming unnecessary red tape that is constraining our economic growth and holding Canada back from reaching its full potential,” Trudeau said
Trudeau says the aim of today’s summit is to explore ways to grow Canada’s economy by making it easier to build and trade within the country as well as to develop and diversity export markets.
The issue of interprovincial trade barriers is a sensitive one, some industry analysts complained that it’s often easier to do business with other countries than between Canada’s provinces, mainly because of regulatory barriers that include different licensing requirements.
Canada’s internal trade minister Anita Anand says removing existing barriers could lower prices up to fifteen percent and add as much as 200 billion dollars to the Canadian economy. With Trump tariffs still looming the need to find a solution to trade obstacles within Canada has taken on a new urgency.