After some last-minute negotiations at the very end of the Council of the Federation meeting in Whitehorse, the premiers finally came to an agreement – well, an agreement in principle – about interprovincial trade. It only took 149 years of confederation to reach this point, and we’re trying to be optimistic about it, but its full virtues remain to be seen as the list of exclusions has yet to be published, and we don’t know how extensive it is, or what the process for standardising regulatory hurdles between provinces is going to be (and this is things like trucking regulations that change at provincial borders, or the sizes of milk cartons, and so on). There is a great deal of pessimism in some corners about this whole thing, and it’s hard not to get caught up in it, particularly when Alberta was the holdout over local infrastructure projects, and the first question asked of the Yukon premier (who chaired the meeting) from his local press was how it would affect local jobs, playing directly into the kinds of protectionism that a trade agreement is supposed to break down. But again, we await the actual details to be delved into.

Otherwise, the other outcome of the meeting was that surprise, surprise, the premiers want to meet with the Prime Minister in the fall about healthcare funding, because they’re largely opposed to targeted spending (saying that it’s too “temporary” and not “long term”) and want the federal government to cough up more funding overall instead – 25 percent of each province’s expenditure, which seems to me that it makes it easy for a province to ramp up their spending with the assurance that Ottawa would fill that gap, again with little in the way of accountability for how those dollars are spent, or for ensuring that there is equitable access to things like homecare across the country, which is what the federal government is looking to achieve.

Meanwhile the beer spat between Saskatchewan and Alberta had some impact on the interprovincial trade talks, but for all of Brad Wall’s complaints about how terrible the changes being made to Alberta’s system would be for his province, here’s a look into how Saskatchewan’s system isn’t all that open either. But hey, a deal on wine was reached between Ontario, BC and Quebec, so that’s progress, right? Well, considering that it’s about online ordering, it’s a half-measure at best.

Good reads:

• Jody Wilson-Raybould yet again talks at length about why you can’t just adopt UNDRIP wholesale, but rather that it’s a far more complex process.
• Conservative MP David Yrdiga is classily attacking Trudeau for not doing enough for the Fort McMurray fires in a local mailing.
• Michael Chong wants to debate his fellow leadership candidates on carbon pricing.
• More diving into MPs office budgets, if you want some more cheap outrage that MPs spend money.
• Michael Petrou takes on the NDP’s poor record of internationalism.
• Kady O’Malley offers her wishlist of ways she’d like to see the Electoral Reform committee operating as it goes into high gear yesterday.
• Laura Stone talks to Deepak Obhrai about his leadership bid, and what he thinks he brings to the table.
• Susan Delacourt profiles NDP MP Tracey Ramsay, who was an autoworker before she got elected.

Odds and ends:

The slow-moving train wreck that is the Phoenix pay system has now engulfed the overtime of the staffers helping to resettle those Syrian refugees, and more personal information was inadvertently sent to subcontractor IBM.