Some called it the greatest beer run in Canadian history, a beer run for the ages, a beer run that in its very failure provoked questions about nationhood and the identity of Canada itself.
Back in 2012, Gerard Comeau, a power utility lineman, slipped back into his home province of New Brunswick in his Honda Accord with a trunk full of cheap beer bought in Quebec. The police stopped him, confiscated the beer and fined him for bringing too much of it into New Brunswick.
The soft-spoken Mr. Comeau fought back — all the way to the nation’s highest court — because of the questions his case raised. Didn’t Canada’s founding Constitution Act guarantee free trade across the land? Why were there so many barriers inside Canada, with each province and territory acting like fiefdoms? Why was it easier for a brewery in Quebec to export to France than to neighboring New Brunswick? Was Canada even a real country?
“If you’re going to be a country, you’ve got to be open to trade between the provinces,” Mr. Comeau, now 71 and retired, said. “But everybody’s separate right now.”
Though Mr. Comeau lost his case in Canada’s Supreme Court in 2018, recent geopolitical and national developments are nudging Canada in his favor.
Faced with President Trump’s economic tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney has made it a priority to remove barriers among Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories — regulations that block the free flow of goods or make it difficult to do business among provinces. Doing so would create a stronger national economy and make Canada less dependent on the United States, he has argued, vowing to launch Canada’s biggest economic transformation since the end of World War II.
Mr. Carney has vowed to eliminate federal barriers before Canada Day on July 1, but he will need the cooperation of the provinces and territories, which have their own barriers. Several provinces have already passed legislation or signed agreements with other provinces to remove them.
And, most significantly for Mr. Comeau, the New Brunswick government, which had successfully fought him all the way to the Supreme Court, recently announced that it would amend the province’s Liquor Control Act as part of an overall push to increase trade with other provinces.
Residents of New Brunswick would now be free to buy alcohol directly from elsewhere in Canada and bring as much as they wanted back to New Brunswick.
“Calling this Gerard Comeau’s revenge is fair comment,” said Arnold Schwisberg, one of the lawyers who represented Mr. Comeau.
Mr. Comeau’s Supreme Court battle made him a folk hero, with craft breweries creating new beers in his honor. For here was a Canadian Everyman fighting for a time-honored practice — buying cheaper beer, gas and countless other goods on a run across provincial lines or to the United States.
The price of alcohol — whose sales are managed across Canada mostly by provincial governments — can vary greatly by geography. In New Brunswick, people have long gone to stock up in Quebec where alcohol is cheaper.
“Everybody was following L’Affaire Comeau,” said Michel McGraw, the owner of Café Jukebox, a bar across the street from Mr. Comeau’s apartment in Tracadie-Sheila, a small French-speaking town on New Brunswick’s northeastern coast.
After the 2018 ruling, Mr. Comeau returned to a life of anonymity. He savored the small pleasures of retirement after 28 years at New Brunswick’s power company. He had been rereading every National Geographic issue since 1974, when one of his sisters gave him a gift subscription. (He was up to 1986.)
Every morning after waking up at 5 a.m., Mr. Comeau turned on the news, and recent headlines had made him crack open a printed copy of the judge’s ruling in his case. The sudden breakdown of free trade with the United States, Canadian politicians’ move to compensate by eliminating internal barriers, Mr. Trump’s hostile questioning of Canada’s viability as a nation — these were all themes raised by his court case.
“Canada is in a bind because we depend too much on the U.S. for trade,” Mr. Comeau said with a twinkle in his eye, laying the ruling on his kitchen table. “We need to create more trade inside Canada and with other countries, with Europe and Asia.”
The funny thing is that Mr. Comeau had never been much of a beer drinker.
When he was caught in a sting in 2012, the police found 354 bottles or cans of beer, as well as three bottles of liquor, in his trunk. That was well over the limit that New Brunswick residents could legally bring back — about 20 cans or bottles of beer, and one bottle of liquor.
Most of the beer was for co-workers at the power company. He was visiting a friend in Quebec, about a two-hour drive from Tracadie-Sheila, and asked his friends whether they wanted him to pick up some liquor — as many New Brunswickers did.
On a fine Saturday morning, Mr. Comeau had crossed a bridge back into New Brunswick — tailed, unbeknownst to him, by cops who had watched him load up in Quebec. Mr. Comeau was about to pass a beat-up Ford when he was pulled over. He was fined about $292 and was one of 17 people caught in the dragnet.
News of the sting outraged many in New Brunswick, including a criminal lawyer named Mikaël Bernard, who, as a teenager, had regularly bought cold ones in Quebec, where they were not only cheaper but the legal drinking age was also 18 years old, one year younger than in his home province.
“I thought it a little bit odd that there was this big police sting on beer, which of course is a legal product within my own country, and the amount of resources that were being utilized to ticket New Brunswickers,” Mr. Bernard recalled.
Mr. Bernard joined forces with Toronto-based lawyers, including Mr. Schwisberg, who had been itching to challenge interprovincial alcohol barriers on Constitutional grounds.
The lawyers placed an ad in a local newspaper offering to represent, pro bono, those caught in the sting. Mr. Bernard warned the half dozen who answered that the case could drag on for years and that it would attract news media attention.
Only Mr. Comeau was game, precisely because he, too, had Constitutional matters on his mind. A co-worker had done some Googling and found a section of Canada’s 1867 Constitution Act that appeared to guarantee the free movement of beer and other goods across provinces and territories.
“I’m not a computer man too much,” Mr. Comeau said. “But he showed me in the Constitution: Section 121.”
When Canada, a former British colony, became a country with confederation in 1867, Section 121 of its founding Constitution Act declared that all goods “would be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.”
Section 121 was written in direct reaction to the United States’ decision to abruptly terminate a decade-old free trade treaty with Canada a year earlier, in 1866.
“The Fathers of Confederation had seen their economic order upended,” Ryan Manucha, an expert on trade barriers at the C.D. Howe Institute, a research institute, said, referring to the participants in the conference that led to confederation. “So they needed a robust domestic economy.”
A New Brunswick court sided with Mr. Comeau. But after the province appealed, the case moved to the Supreme Court.
“We argued that the case went to the core of how Canada was originally conceived,” Mr. Schwisberg said.
The other provinces and territories joined New Brunswick in arguing that Mr. Comeau was wrong. The Supreme Court said in a unanimous decision that there was no Constitutional guarantee of free trade inside Canada. According to Canadian federalism, provinces “should be allowed leeway to manage the passage of goods.”
Still, Canada is now moving to remove those barriers — panicking, as it did in the 1860s, about the loss of the American market. But many remain skeptical, given the eternal tensions in Canadian federalism between unifying and decentralizing.
At the Fils du Roy, a gin distillery in Paquetville, New Brunswick, the co-owner, Sébastien Roy, said he exported to France and Switzerland — but not inside Canada because of interprovincial barriers. That would not change unless provincial governments willingly gave up their grip on alcohol, he said.
“That means that, effectively, I still won’t be able to sell my gin outside New Brunswick,” Mr. Roy said, “even though, yes, Mr. Comeau will now be able to go buy beer in Quebec.”
A couple of months after New Brunswick’s decision to lift the restrictions, Mr. Comeau drove to Quebec to pick up a friend. He also went on a beer run, a modest one this time, coming back with just one case of Budweiser.
Norimitsu Onishi reports on life, society and culture in Canada. He is based in Montreal.
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