Canada has achieved much in the past year in addressing interprovincial and territorial trade barriers in the face of economic threats from U.S. President Donald Trump. But most of this progress has bypassed our health-care system.

Regulatory red tape continues to stifle both the mobility and recruitment of the hundreds of thousands of domestic and foreign-trained regulated health professionals in the country.

At a time when the OECD tells us that Canada ranks 18th of 37 countries in productivity and we continue to face existential tariff and sovereignty threats from our biggest trading partner, surely we can end these most obvious and fixable internal trade barriers that hurt us all.

Too many barriers for foreign professionals

To illustrate the problem, let’s say you are a British family physician interested in moving to Canada. You already know that Canada has only 2.8 doctors for every 1,000 people and that 5.9 million Canadians don’t have a family doctor, nurse practitioner or primary care team they see regularly.

With no language barrier, you can easily imagine being welcomed into a friendly Commonwealth country where your expertise and experience are sorely needed.

But when you consult the British Medical Association’s guide, Working as a doctor in Canada, you find it runs to more than seven pages of fine print, describing a complex, expensive and time-consuming bureaucratic obstacle course.

Welcome to the last frontier of getting rid of Canada’s interprovincial trade barriers – the thicket of 13 separate sets of provincial and territorial agencies whose rules and regulations govern the certification, licensing and practice standards for health-care professionals.

They reduce labour mobility by deterring foreign-trained individuals from emigrating to Canada and they make it more difficult for qualified health-care professionals to move between the provinces and territories.

The past year has seen some real progress in tearing down internal barriers respecting trade in goods as Canada realized we were fighting the Trump tariff onslaught with one hand tied behind our back as long as those barriers persisted.

Good but not good enough

In November, a major step forward was achieved with the federal, provincial and........

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