Shafqat Ali, president of the Treasury Board, has announced that the Canadian government is proceeding with a red tape review to modernize outdated regulations across federal departments and agencies holding regulatory responsibilities.
“Canada’s new government has a mandate to spend less and invest more,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a news release from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. “To that end, we will remove red tape by eliminating outdated regulation.”
According to the news release, the review seeks to:
- help the government be leaner and more focused
- reduce costs
- improve efficiency and productivity
- make government services more effective
- unlock more private capital to benefit Canada’s workers and businesses
- improve the country’s economic growth
“It’s time to make government more efficient, make its processes more effective, and to catalyze more private capital so we can build the strongest economy in the G7,” Carney said in the news release.
“Regulations play a key role in protecting the health and safety of Canadians—but to stay effective, they must be regularly reviewed,” Ali added in the news release. “Cutting unnecessary red tape is essential to unlocking Canada’s full economic potential.”
The recently established Red Tape Reduction Office will oversee the review. According to the news release, Canada’s government ministers will:
- review the regulations in their portfolios
- suggest steps and measures to remove inefficient red tape, including eliminating excessively complex regulations, decreasing duplication with provincial rules, and improving access and delivery of services
- report to Ali on their departments’ progress and plans within 60 days
Relevant data
In the news release, the federal government shared 2024 data from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), which estimated that the total cost of regulation from all three government levels to businesses was $51.5 billion and attributed about $17.9 billion to red tape.
The CFIB’s data also determined that, on average, a Canadian business spent 735 hours or 92 days on regulation and 256 hours or 32 days on red tape.
In the news release, the Canadian government noted that it has:
- eliminated $26 million in annual net administrative burden in the 2023–24 fiscal year
- decreased the annual net burden by around $82 million since the 2012–13 fiscal year
- removed 22 more regulations from the books than the regulations it added
- attained a total net reduction of 238 titles since the 2012–13 fiscal year
Red tape law
The federal government explained in the news release that the Red Tape Reduction Act, 2015, aims to control growth via the one-for-one rule and only considers administrative burden and other specific kinds of burden.
In the news release, the Canadian government noted that the legislation requires regulators to:
- repeal an existing amount of burden if introducing a new regulatory administrative burden
- repeal an existing regulation in two years when introducing a new regulation imposing a burden on businesses