It all started three years ago with a sandwich that wanted to be free.

In the Western Canadian town of Lloydminster, a business learned that it would break the law by making sandwiches at a supermarket and selling them a few blocks away. A ham and cheese, a BLT or a club, it didn’t matter.

“If it involved meat, this is where it became an issue,” said Gerald Aalbers, the mayor of Lloydminster. “Everything from a chub of bologna to a piece of roast beef.”

In Canada, meat and other food products cross provincial lines with great difficulty. Even after being inspected in one province, they must get federal certification before being shipped to another province — an insurmountable financial hurdle for many small businesses and part of a wider system of trade rules that Prime Minister Mark Carney says hobble the country’s growth.

Ordinarily, any goods would move freely inside the same city. But because of a twist of history, Lloydminster happens to straddle the border between two provinces — Alberta and Saskatchewan — and must answer to two sets of regulations. A sandwich prepared on the Alberta side of Lloydminster could not be sold legally across the street in the Saskatchewan side without a federal seal of approval, and vice versa.