Protectionists, start your engines. On Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a “Buy Canadian” procurement policy that prioritizes Canadian suppliers for all manner of federal spending, including a second set of national “major projects” he’s announcing on Thursday. “We will build Canadian, by becoming our own best customer,” Carney intoned. Ottawa will allocate nearly $186 million in new funding to the policy, including “streamlined support for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses trying to break into the federal market.”

At first blush, this sounds incredibly patriotic: make things at home, spend our tax dollars on our own businesses, support Canadian jobs. But it also represents a retreat from the free trade policies that have served Canada so well, while doing nothing to co

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