CONTENTS
Standing
Committee on the Economy
Bill No. 24 — The Saskatchewan Internal Trade
Promotion Act
THIRTIETH
LEGISLATURE
of
the
Legislative Assembly of
Saskatchewan
STANDING
COMMITTEE ON
Hansard
Verbatim Report
No.
15 — Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Chair
D. Harrison: — Welcome to the Standing
Committee on the Economy. I’m your Chair, Daryl Harrison. The others on the
committee: Tajinder Grewal, Racquel Hilbert, Sally Housser, Kevin Kasun, Kevin
Weedmark. And we will have a substitution when they arrive, but we’ll deal with
that then.
Bill No. 24 — The
Saskatchewan Internal Trade Promotion Act
Clause 1
Chair
D. Harrison: — Today we’ll be considering
Bill No. 24, The Saskatchewan Internal Trade Promotion Act. We will
begin our consideration with clause 1, short title. Minister Kaeding is here
with his ministry officials. I would ask that officials please state their
names before speaking for the first time, and please don’t touch the
microphones. The Hansard operator will turn your microphone on when you
are speaking to the committee. Minister Kaeding, please make your opening
comments and introduce your officials.
Hon.
Warren Kaeding: —
Good afternoon, everyone. Committee members, I am pleased to be here today to
discuss The Saskatchewan Internal Trade Promotion Act. Joining me today
is Jodi Banks, our deputy minister; Aaron Wirth, our ADM [assistant deputy
minister] of strategic policy and competitiveness; and Kareen Holtby, our
executive director of strategic policy and analysis; and certainly Michelle
Lang, our chief of staff; and Arlie Matisho, our MA [ministerial assistant] in
comms.
Mr. Chair, in response to
tariffs implemented by the US [United States], China, and India, we’ve worked
very hard to advance internal trade efforts throughout our country. And we’ve
done so because trade within Canada is just as vital to our economic prosperity
as international exports. We export more to provinces like Alberta and Ontario
than we do to China or any specific US state. Nearly 23 per cent of the goods
and services that we produce are exported within Canada alone.
Saskatchewan is a proud
participant in the committee of internal trade, which has been making some
great progress on enhancing the Canadian Free Trade Agreement. You might recall
a number of outcomes announced last summer from this committee. And a couple of
them to note would include reducing party-specific exceptions under the
agreement by 30 per cent, concluding the Canadian mutual recognition on the
sale of goods, concluding negotiations on the financial services chapter, and
cross-Canada commitment to a 30‑day service standard for processing
labour mobility applications.
Eleven jurisdictions also
signed an MOU [memorandum of understanding] committed to implementing
direct-to-consumer alcohol sales. And we also signed MOUs to advance internal
trade bilaterally with Manitoba, Ontario, and PEI [Prince Edward Island].
These are all examples of how
Saskatchewan continues to lead the way in reducing barriers and making it
easier to do business across the nation. And The Saskatchewan Internal Trade
Promotion Act allows us to reach even further. It enables the province to
mutually recognize goods and services from other jurisdictions. For example, a
good that is acceptable for sale in another province can be sold in
Saskatchewan without additional approvals, or a service offered in another
province can also be offered in our province without significant red tape.
And this legislation enables
us to participate in and implement mutual recognition agreements signed by
jurisdictions across Canada. This is an important step in increasing market
access for Saskatchewan products. And most importantly, it means that businesses
won’t need to go through unnecessary approval processes, saving them time,
effort, and reducing red tape. It approaches mutual recognition on a
case-by-case basis and can be implemented through changes to regulations and
through cabinet decision making.
The Act includes general
exceptions for Saskatchewan Crown corporations, procurement processes, and
occupations covered under The Labour Mobility and Fair Registration
Practices Act. It also allows for exceptions to be granted for reasons
including public health, public safety, and consumer protection. All of this
ensures that we can be responsive to the needs of Saskatchewan businesses.
This Act will reduce costs
for businesses, expand market access, and strengthen Canadian internal economy,
leading to more opportunities, jobs, and services the people of this province
need. And that’s really what’s at the heart of the Act, so making sure we’re
doing everything possible that Saskatchewan businesses and people can do to
succeed. So with that, we certainly welcome any questions that the committee
may have for us.
Chair
D. Harrison: — Thank you, Minister. Just
before we get on to questions, I will say that Jordan McPhail has chitted in
for Meara Conway. So welcome, Jordan.
I’ll open the floor to
questions, and I recognize MLA [Member of the Legislative Assembly] Housser.
Sally
Housser: —
Great. Thank you very much, Minister, and to all your officials for being here
today. We’re largely supportive of this bill. So I’ve got a few questions but
may not need the full half-hour even so. And go outside and get the last bit of
warmth before the snow sets in this evening.
But if you could just start,
Minister, by maybe talking broadly about what stakeholders you and your
ministry and officials have consulted through this process obviously, you know,
from different provinces but also from within Saskatchewan, different people
who provide those goods and services that we are looking to facilitate
interprovincial trade with.
Hon.
Warren Kaeding: —
So I think we’ll maybe start at the top down. We’ve been engaging with the 13
jurisdictions across Canada, including Canada, and been at this since probably
pre‑2025. But certainly I’ve been at this since 2025 almost on a monthly
basis, and even more engagement at the deputy minister and the officials level.
So that’s been ongoing, and keep adding more and more to the discussions as we
go along.
And then I’ll have Aaron talk
to you about ultimately what we’ve been doing just internally within
government, what we’ve been doing with our outside stakeholders,
interprovincial stakeholders. And then certainly we’ve been talking to the
chamber. Represents businesses very well here. Different industry associations
that we talk to on a regular basis, ultimately considered our stakeholders,
from manufacturers to producers, you know, ag sector. So we’ve been having
those ongoing conversations every chance we get. But maybe get Aaron to detail
kind of who we’ve been engaging with.
Aaron Wirth:
— Sure. Aaron Wirth, the assistant deputy minister for strategic policy and
competitiveness at Trade and Export Development. Just building on what the
minister said, we’ve been at this for quite a few years now. And so we’ve been
engaging definitely across all 14 federal and provincial jurisdictions for
sure, making sure that we’re all working in lockstep to prop up our various
legislation so that we can enable mutual recognition under the Canadian Free
Trade Agreement.
Internally within
Saskatchewan, obviously we’ve been working very closely with all of our
ministries and agencies, our internal stakeholders — in particular our
regulators, who are directly impacted by this — to make sure that this is the
right legislation at the right time and works for all of them.
[15:30]
And then in terms of industry
and businesses, for many years we’ve been working and hearing a lot from those
industries and those industry associations and individual businesses just about
the need for this, about the red tape that exists across provincial and
territorial boundaries, and the need to address that red tape to help grow our
economy, particularly in face of US tariff threats. And so lots of
conversations with chambers of commerce, industry associations, and individual
businesses as part of our ongoing outreach.
And then of course, you know,
if and once legislation is passed, we have a system where businesses can come
and raise barriers to us and governments can raise barriers and regulators can
raise barriers with us. So we have a very open and accessible process whereby
businesses can directly identify barriers they face, again applying to
Saskatchewan businesses or out-of-province businesses as well.
And we’ll continue to engage
with our stakeholders. In fact we’ll make sure that we have various mechanisms
and portals where they can identify barriers for us and submit that to us so
that we can respond and assess the legitimacy of those barriers, the economic
impacts of those barriers, and then engage the relevant regulator.
Sally Housser: — Thank
you very much. Could you explain to me how the provisions of this bill, with
respect to the sale of goods, how does that specifically differ or align with
the Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement on the Sale of Goods?
Hon.
Warren Kaeding: —
I’m going to have Kareen, who has spent probably . . . I’m not sure
how much of her life. I’m assuming 23 hours a day on this file. So I think we
better leave it with someone who has spent an awful lot of their time
understanding this file. So Kareen.
Kareen Holtby:
— Okay, thank you. Kareen Holtby, executive director, strategic policy and
analysis. So this legislation is aligned with the Canadian mutual recognition . . .
or it’s complementary to the Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement. This
legislation allows us to enable that agreement. It’s enabling legislation.
And so overall the Canadian
Mutual Recognition Agreement is a multilateral agreement focused on reducing
barriers to internal trade through mutual recognition, similar to our Act. And
it’s on the sale of goods between jurisdictions. So the scope of our Act is
broader as it includes services. A big difference is the Canadian Mutual
Recognition Agreement is a multilateral agreement including most jurisdictions
from across Canada, whereas our Act is just for Saskatchewan.
I talked a bit about scope.
So the CMRA [Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement on the Sale of Goods] scopes
out certain goods. So it includes most goods but it scopes out items like food,
beverages, alcohol, tobacco, live animals, plants, cannabis. And again services
are not included in the CMRA.
We have listed exceptions in
the CMRA of things that we are not mutually recognizing at this time and our
Act takes a different approach to that. So basically our Act is for us and the
Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement is a legally binding agreement with
parties across Canada.
Sally Housser: — Right, and I know this is
just on the goods, but obviously for this current Bill 24, it also covers
goods, just not the services for the CMRA. But when you talked about those
exclusions in the CMRA — I think it’s food, cannabis, alcohol, live animals — are
those included? And I know like cross-provincial sale of alcohol is something
that has been, you know, one of the top things that comes up when people are
talking about interprovincial trade. Is that covered under Bill 24 and not
covered in the CMRA?
Kareen Holtby: —
So
our Act doesn’t give us legal authority that we don’t have. So the federal
government is responsible and has authority for the interprovincial movement of
food and beverages. And so this Act does not allow us to mutually recognize
food and beverages. And in terms of alcohol, Crowns are exempt from this Act.
And so SLGA [Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority] as a treasury board
Crown is exempt from the Act. However we are doing, the minister is doing work
at the committee on internal trade on direct-to-consumer alcohol sales.
Sally Housser: — Okay. And sorry, I’m not
deliberately trying to be obtuse here. But so is it fair to say that just on
the sale-of-goods side, that we’re really just enabling and totally aligned
with the CMRA?
Kareen Holtby: —
Yeah, for the most part.
Sally Housser: —
Okay. All good.
I’m always interested, you know, with an Act or legislation, the problem we’re
trying to solve, right.
Okay, that’s great. So could
you talk to me a bit about in which regulatory sectors, or even just some
examples of where Saskatchewan’s regulations are more stringent than other
provinces or less stringent?
Kareen
Holtby:
— Thanks for the question. So I think the question was about where we have more
stringent requirements or where we don’t. And so the sort of . . .
the answer is, overall, we don’t have a great understanding of where our
requirements are better or worse than other provinces.
We
do have some . . . we do know what our regulatory requirements are
related to goods. And so the next step is for . . . and so we talked
about identifying exceptions within the Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement.
And so the next step in that would be for the experts to talk to regulators in
the other jurisdiction to understand, is your requirement as safe as ours? Is
it the same as ours or is it not?
So
that will be a process that our regulators will take with their colleagues in
other jurisdictions. But we do have some, like, examples where we know we have
requirements that are important. And so I can give a couple of practical
examples.
So
we have regulatory requirements for pressure vessels such as boilers, and there
are differences between jurisdictions. And so we know boilers in Saskatchewan
need to be able to operate in lower temperatures than they do in warmer
jurisdictions. And so we might not mutually recognize the regulatory
requirement in that sector, because we know that mutually recognizing
requirements from a warmer jurisdiction might bring risk to consumer protection
if the boiler failed to work in Saskatchewan. So that is one example.
Another
example would be, Saskatchewan has regulatory requirements that prevent the
sale of elm wood without authorization. And so this regulatory requirement was
put in place to prevent the spread of Dutch elm disease. There are other
jurisdictions who do not have those same regulatory requirements. And so that
would be an area we’d be working closely with our regulator colleagues, and we
wouldn’t necessarily mutually recognize those.
Sally Housser: — Okay. Thanks. Yeah and
that’s, you know, I’m interested in it. As the minister knows, my colleague
from Saskatoon Riversdale put forward a similar bill on interprovincial trade.
And our concern around this and what we wanted to explicitly lay out is the
concern around a race to the bottom in terms of regulatory requirements, you
know, if everybody’s deciding we’re going to standardize.
I
guess what I’m getting at is, kind of, what provisions or considerations have
you given to protecting that so we don’t all just end up across Canada with the
lowest standard that each province has had on any given goods or service?
[15:45]
And
I think I’ll add to that, because specifically occupational health and safety
is a major concern for us in that one.
Hon. Warren Kaeding: — So I’d say there’s a number
of factors that certainly went into the bill that we believe very much
supports, you know, the current occupational health and safety requirements
that we’ve got in the province here. A couple of them is, ultimately we took kind
of the best practices from other jurisdictions and just made sure that we were
able to, you know, adopt that to what we believe were some of the best
practices that were seen in other jurisdictions. We chose not to make it, you
know, an automatic approach. And then that gives us a lot of latitude to kind
of look at each activity and evaluate them.
So
certainly we’re going to have input from the regulators, certainly have input
from those that are certainly going to benefit or may experience some hardship
in dealing with that. So we’ve got the opportunity to kind of work through that
entire process with ultimately everyone who’s going to be affected by that.
I’d
say, you know, we certainly want to make sure that we’ve reduced the amount of
red tape. And that’s probably the biggest issue that we’re trying to get in
front of here, is let’s just keep this a simple, you know, expedited process.
And going by that case-by-case approach gives us that latitude to be able to do
that.
You
know, we’ve got a lot of exemptions, and we’ve made sure we’ve worked that in
there. And there’s a number of things that if, say, the minister is satisfied
on the basis of materials that he receives — documents, you know, reasons
provided in one way, shape, or form — that if we need to grant an exemption, we
will.
And
I’ll just identify some of the following exemptions: if it had anything to do
with and risked public security and safety; if it had anything to do to risk
public order; anything to do with protection of human, animal, or plant life or
health; protection of the environment; consumer protection; protection of the
health, safety, and well-being of workers; provision of adequate social or
health services to all geographic regions in Saskatchewan; if it affected
programs for disadvantaged groups; or any other prescribed purposes. The
minister has the right to be able to refuse to grant the exemption as well,
right, if it’s the minimum required and deemed to not fit in some of those
parameters.
Sally Housser: — Okay. Thank you, Minister.
And just through this process, again I guess specifically on that occupational
health and safety, just when I asked earlier in terms of consultation with
stakeholders, you listed a number of different chambers, industry, ag sectors.
Just wondering if, particularly around the occupational health and safety, that
you’ve met with any unions or any other kind of worker . . . Workers’
Compensation, any other kind of professional association focused on workers.
Hon. Warren Kaeding: — So we have to make sure
everyone understands that the Act doesn’t override any current legislation. So
we’ve got those safety factors all factored in, worked in. So all existing
rules still exist, right.
We
have engaged with LRWS [Labour Relations and Workplace Safety], so that is
certainly that main stakeholder that we’ve engaged there. And then, recognizing
that this is done on a case-by-case basis, that we would then have that level
of engagement if an entity brought something forward or a regulator brought
something forward that we need to address. We then would have that ability to
do that.
So
the bill gives us that flexibility to have all of those levels of engagement
but not be overwhelming, that ultimately we’re restricting the ability.
Sally
Housser: — Great. And I think finally,
Minister, are you still committed to regulatory reconciliation and co-operation
under the Canada free trade framework? And if there’s any progress that’s been
made in that respect.
Kareen
Holtby:
— So yes, we remain actively engaged in the regulatory reconciliation and
co-operation table. It’s an officials-level table, and we continue to make
progress. For example, there was a reconciliation agreement related to gas
fitters that was signed this year.
Sally Housser: — Great. I think that’s it for
me, Mr. Chair.
Chair D.
Harrison: — Thank you. Are there questions from any
other committee members? No. Seeing none, we will proceed to vote on the
clauses. Clause 1, short title, is that agreed?
Some Hon. Members: — Agreed.
[Clause 1 agreed to.]
[Clauses
2 to 27 inclusive agreed to.]
Chair D.
Harrison: — His Majesty, by and with the advice and
consent of the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, enacts as follows: The
Saskatchewan Internal Trade Promotion Act.
I
would ask a member to move that we report Bill No. 24, The Saskatchewan
Internal Trade Promotion Act without amendment.
Kevin Weedmark: — I so move.
Chair D.
Harrison: — MLA Weedmark has moved. Is that agreed?
Some Hon. Members: — Agreed.
Chair D.
Harrison: — Carried. That concludes our business
for today. I would ask a member to move a motion of adjournment. MLA Kasun
. . . Sorry, I’m ahead of myself.
Minister,
would you like to make some closing comments? You’re hanging over the edge
wanting to. Sorry, my apologies.
Hon. Warren Kaeding: — No I’m not, really. No
absolutely, and thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, I’d say Saskatchewan has been a
leader in implementing free and open trade across Canada and has been for a
number of years. As a signatory to the New West Partnership Trade Agreement is,
I’d say, one of the leading-edge things that we did.
We’re
certainly very proud in the quick turnaround that we have on labour mobility
challenges. You know, we’re co-chairing the direct-to-consumer alcohol sales.
And I’d say we’ve been leading by example, and we’re going to continue to lead
by example.
And
very proud of the group that’s with us that you have in front of you here today
that does spend an awful lot of time in trying to free up and facilitate open
trade across Canada, which we know is very important.
So
again, I’d like to thank committee members. Certainly like to thank Hansard
and officials and very much would like thank my officials for the incredible
work that they continue to put into this file. Thank you.
Chair D.
Harrison: — Thank you, Minister. To you and your
officials, thanks for coming to join us today.
That
now concludes our business for today. I would ask a member to move a motion of
adjournment. MLA Weedmark has moved . . . oh,
Kasun, sorry, has moved. All agreed?
Some
Hon. Members: — Agreed.
Chair
D. Harrison: — Carried. This
committee stands adjourned until the call of the Chair.
[The committee adjourned at 16:00.]
Published
under the authority of the Hon. Todd Goudy, Speaker
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