It doesn't matter who's right in the two-year-old slanging match between British Columbia and New Brunswick over the latter's alleged "poaching" of 900 United Parcel Service jobs, via a $12-million relocation grant. What is significant is that in the very first test of the agreement that was supposed to deliver, 129 years after the fact, the economic union the Fathers of Confederation intended to create, it has been exposed as a fraud: unworkable, unenforceable, and unbelievably vague.

The obvious weakness of the agreement's dispute resolution mechanism -- that's right, just like in the North American Free Trade Agreement, only less binding -- is hardly the worst of the agreement's failings: just the most comical. After several months of desultory talks between the warring provinces, as mandated under the agreement, New Brunswick has refused to advance to the next step: a biprovincial review panel, with two members from each province, plus a "neutral" chairman (a Mexican, perhaps?).

And, under the agreement, that's as far as it goes. There's no way to force New Brunswick to the table. Amazingly enough, the dispute panels depend upon the consent of both parties even to begin hearings, let alone enforce their findings. O. J. Simpson should wish for such a tribunal. To dramatize its dissatisfaction, the B.C. government is now threatening to pull out of the agreement altogether, which would be more impressive had it shown the slightest enthusiasm for the enterprise in the first place.

Oh, but the fun's just beginning. The McKenna government argues that since the UPS deal was signed before the agreement's standstill provisions took effect, the rules don't apply. That is, if there were any rules. In fact, the provinces have yet to agree on these, or indeed on much else that they were supposed to have settled by now.

The agreement's procurement section, supposed to outlaw discrimination against out-of-province suppliers in government contracting, is a case in point. Crown corporations are not as yet covered under its provisions.

Neither are municipalities, universities, schools or hospitals, more than a year after their deadline.

But that hardly begins to describe the agreement's many loopholes. Regional development subsidies are exempted. So are farm quotas. Also energy and electricity transmission. And while discriminatory professional qualifications are supposedly verboten under the agreement, the provinces thoughtfully excluded from its application the very bodies that might conceivably be affected by it: the professions. The agreement, in effect, bans all barriers to trade, except trade barriers.

The whole thing is little more than an expression of mild sentiment -- provinces are enjoined to reduce internal trade restrictions "to the extent possible" -- a collective passing of wind in the direction of economic union that depends, first, last and always, on the goodwill of the selfsame governments that got us into this mess. The actual victims of trade discrimination, workers, firms and consumers, are effectively prevented from launching their own complaints. Even to change the agreement would require the consent of every province.

Yet the bleakest line of this black farce has yet to be written. For even the critics of the agreement are so locked into the provincialist assumptions on which it is based that they seek only to rebuild it on the same rotten foundations: in the process of inter-provincial negotiation of what ought to be a matter beyond question, the first principle of nationhood. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, for example, proposes to replace the unanimity provision with the "seven-and-fifty" formula familiar to constitution fans.

Oh, good. That's worked so well.

No other country in the world would tolerate this circus. In every other country of the world, internal trade barriers are simply outlawed. Period.

That applies as much to federations as to unitary states: the proposition hardly needs stating. In every other federation in the world, that is, it would be as unthinkable to put up barriers to trade between provinces -- "what, you mean protect ourselves from ourselves?" -- as it would seem to us to bar trade within a province, for the simple reason that in every other federation in the world, the "ourselves" with whom we trade freely and automatically is defined as the nation. Here, it is the province. Which is why in every other federation in the world, the job of enforcing the internal common market is assigned to the national government. Only in Canada is it left to the whims of the provinces.

This isn't about economics, in other words. This is about citizenship. When we allow so fundamental a principle of nationhood as the economic union to be negotiated between provinces, as if between sovereign states, we are not strengthening the nation. We are destroying it.