Professor Wolfgang Alschner has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant for a new project that brings together expertise in law, economics, machine learning, and computational social science to examine the regulatory differences that exist across Canada and explore how they might be reduced or better harmonized. Entitled “Mapping Interprovincial Trade Barriers,” the project aims to develop innovative tools capable of identifying and mapping regulatory divergences at an unprecedented scale.
The project comes at a critical moment for Canadian economic policy. Recent international trade tensions, including new American tariffs, have intensified calls to strengthen interprovincial trade and build a more integrated Canadian economy. Governments across the country have responded with new legislation, mutual recognition agreements, and initiatives aimed at reducing barriers to the movement of goods and services across provincial and territorial borders.
But much of the current discussion around interprovincial trade barriers remains focused on a handful of well-known examples, such as alcohol sales or trucking regulations, alongside broad economic estimates of their overall impact. Professor Alschner’s project seeks to move beyond anecdotal evidence to create a far more detailed and systematic picture of Canada’s fragmented regulatory landscape.
The project will leverage advances in computational legal analysis and deep learning to compare regulatory texts across jurisdictions and identify meaningful divergences between otherwise similar rules. Over three years, the research team will assemble a comprehensive corpus of provincial and territorial regulations, extract regulatory requirements, classify them by industry sector, and use custom-built artificial intelligence tools to detect regulatory inconsistencies at scale.
Importantly, the project is not designed to determine what regulations provinces should adopt. Rather, its goal is to provide policymakers, businesses, and the public with better tools and evidence to understand where regulatory barriers exist and how greater harmonization might be achieved.
The initiative reflects the growing “computational turn” in legal and social science research, combining traditional legal analysis with data science, programming, natural language processing, and machine learning. Professor Alschner, a leading scholar in computational legal analysis, is joined by collaborators Patrick McLaughlin, an expert in computational regulatory analysis and economics, and Professor Diana Inkpen, a specialist in machine learning and natural language processing.
Beyond producing scholarly publications and new datasets, the project will create a bilingual interactive dashboard that will allow the public to explore interprovincial regulatory barriers across sectors and jurisdictions. The team also plans to publish reports and public-facing analysis to help inform ongoing policy debates surrounding internal trade and economic integration in Canada.
SSHRC Insight Grants support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities. The goal of the Insight program is to build knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world.
The Faculty of Law congratulates Professor Alschner and his collaborators on the launch of this important initiative!