Cut Red Tape? What Are You.....

...some sort of labor hating right wing ding dong. If red tape is cut the size of government will shrink and the beauracrats and unions will not allow erosion of their power base.

Gerald Chipeur: Top ten targets for the red tape commission


On January 13, 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that Rob Moore, the Minister of State for Small Business and Tourism, would chair a commission to cut red tape and reduce the regulatory burden on businesses.

Minister Moore is a lawyer and well suited to separate the wheat from the chaff. This exercise is necessary because all bureaucrats are slaves to the precautionary principle, which suggests that if a precaution can be taken, it should be taken. The problem is that they don’t take the overall cost to society into consideration.
For the past 25 years, my legal practice has focussed on helping businesses navigate the oppressive regulatory regime created by Canadian governments. There are three levels of bureaucracy in this country and each one produces its own set of red tape.

Here are my top ten recommendations for the Moore Commission:

Statutes and Regulations should not have everlasting life. All new statutes should have 10-year sundown clauses and all new regulations should have five-year sundown clauses, requiring the government to justify any red tape on a periodic basis;

Health Canada should be limited to international and inter-provincial matters. All regulation of retail business in a province should left exclusively to local authorities, as most of what Health Canada does falls under provincial jurisdiction;

Agriculture Canada should be shut down, as there is nothing Agriculture Canada delivers that cannot be delivered at the local level;

CRTC should be merged with Industry Canada. Technology has made this commission of little public benefit — shut it down and leave any necessary functions with Industry Canada;

Canadian Wheat Board should be dismantled. The modern world of international trade makes this agency irrelevant. It should be a crime to jail farmers for selling their own grain;

Canada Border Services Agency should be refocused. Canada should not duplicate the American paranoia about terrorists crossing our mutual border. Instead, we should unilaterally open our side of the border and reallocate border guards to the coastline;

Canada Revenue Agency should no longer regulate charities. The CRA has an inherent conflict of interest and has burdened charities with regulations that effectively deprive them of funds that are intended to help those in need. The Canadian International Development Agency should be given responsibility for charities;

Fisheries and Oceans forces maritime businesses to file confidential proprietary data and intellectual property and then destroys such businesses by distributing this proprietary information to their competitors. All government departments should be absolutely prohibited from distributing any private data without consent;

Parks Canada superintendents seem to resent any human activity in our national parks. All regulation of development in such parks should be left to local communities and not duplicated at the federal level; and

Canadian Air Transport Security Authority should be dismantled and the tax dollars redirected to real police work, as top security experts at Harvard University and in government agree that airport screening is of no value whatsoever.

The foregoing recommendation will, if implemented, do more for small business than all the billions in tax dollars expended to stimulate the economy over the last two years.

Gerald Chipeur, Q.C., is a Partner with Miller Thomson LLP in Calgary, Alberta.