Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan used to say that the scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Audiences loved that line because it really hit home. However well-intentioned our government officials are, they usually end up making everything a little more difficult, a little more costly and a little more complicated.
About 10 minutes up the road from my office is a new eight-storey, 422,000-square-foot facility built by the local regional municipality. The new administrative office, which cost more than $200 million to build, will oversee a variety of public services and house 1,500 government employees.
What worries me most is what many of these civil servants will be doing day in and day out: creating and implementing a host of new regulations that govern everything from waste management and water usage to roads, public transit and economic development.
The same process is taking place in municipalities and government offices all over the country, and it’s one of the reasons why the bureaucracy in Canada has been growing like a weed for many decades now.
When I was chairman and CEO of Magna back in the 1980s, we would open three to four new factories a month. That would simply never happen today because the build-up of red tape over the past four decades has significantly slowed down the approval process.
The number of regulations governing businesses 50 years ago was, in my estimation, about one-quarter of what it is today. And yet, everything functioned very well back then. Companies built factories and homes and shopping centres that were safe and structurally sound. They sold products and provided services that were not harmful to consumers. And they did it with far fewer rules and restrictions.
If that’s true, then why do we need so many regulations? We could easily slash half of the regulations that are on the books and nothing would change for the worse.
The one exception in terms of removing regulations would be any rules or laws related to workplace safety and the environment. In my view, those should be untouchable. But everything else should face the chopping block.
Needless regulations are like the cholesterol of our economy, and they’re clogging the arteries of commerce. When businesses get gummed up by red tape, products and supplies no longer move quickly or efficiently.
Product orders and shipments get backlogged. Project approvals get put on the back burner. And the entire production process — from patents to customer deliveries — begins to slow down. That translates into lost productivity and lost profits for businesses, and higher costs for consumers.
How much money is wasted every year because of over-regulation and needless rules? According to a 2021 report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, excessive red tape costs small businesses in Canada about $11 billion annually. That figure does not include the unnecessary regulatory costs borne by large corporations.
The same study showed that more than 90 per cent of small businesses thought it was important for the federal government to reduce red tape, but none of them were exactly holding their breath: only 15 per cent believed the government would do anything to lower the burden.
A senior director of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce appeared before a Senate committee hearing in Ottawa last year and pleaded with the government to streamline regulations with a greater sense of urgency. He suggested that government regulators give greater consideration to the economic impacts on businesses when drafting regulations.
I would go one step further and suggest that government stop drafting new regulations altogether — we have more than enough already — and instead spend its time combing through the current tangle of rules and regulations with an eye to slashing the total number by at least half.
I was a vocal advocate of last year’s trucker protest in Ottawa. I defended the truckers because they shined a light on government overreach and intrusiveness, which has been growing for many years now and which dramatically escalated during the pandemic.
Canadians who are tired of the government always on their backs about this or that owe the trucker convoy a big thank you, even if they may not have approved of the way the truckers took a stand.
If we freed businesses from the regulatory straitjacket that constrains them and removed a lot of the red tape that makes life more difficult for everyday citizens, everyone would benefit. Our economy would grow faster, and the quality of life enjoyed by Canadians would be better.
We need to tell politicians and bureaucrats who are hungry to monitor and regulate every aspect of our lives to back off.