Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.National regulatory reform would encourage investment, promote economic growth, and lower costs for Canadians
Canada's Regulatory Overburden
Canada is struggling with declining economic prosperity. At the same time, governments across the country, and in particular the federal government have introduced significant new regulations. The trends are not unrelated. Regulations impose costs on business and serve as a deterrent to business investment in several major elements of Canada’s economy.
Canada’s regulatory load is substantial and growing: from 2009 a nadir in the count of regulations measured between 2006 to 2018 showed that the number of restrictive regulations in Canada grew from about 66,000 to 72,000 by 2018.
The last few years have seen a vast swath of new regulations at the federal level. These are regulatory initiatives that have sweeping effects on large sectors of Canada’s economy—particularly the government’s central focus on climate change—and making Canada a Net-Zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter by 2050.
While some regulation is certainly necessary for the orderly functioning of a modern society, too much of even good things can be bad for you, and Canada’s regulatory overburden harms all Canadians by stifling economic growth and business investment. Canada’s next government would do well to take a page from British Columbia and establish a national regulatory reform effort patterned on the BC model of reducing the absolute number of regulations.
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Kenneth P. Green
Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
Kenneth P. Green is a Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of over 800 essays and articles on public policy,published by think tanks, major newspapers, and technical and trade journals in North America. Mr. Green holds a doctoral degree in environmental science and engineering from UCLA, a master’s degree in molecular genetics from San Diego State University, and a bachelors degree in general biology from UCLA.Mr. Green’s policy analysis has centered on evaluating the pros and cons of government management of environmental, health, and safety risk. More often than not, his research has shown that governments are poor managers of risk, promulgating policies that often do more harm than good both socially and individually, are wasteful of limited regulatory resources, often benefit special interests (in government and industry) at the expense of the general public, and are almost universally violative of individual rights and personal autonomy. Mr. Green has also focused on government’s misuse of probabilistic risk models in the defining and regulating of EHS risks, ranging from air pollution to chemical exposure, to climate change, and most recently, to biological threats such as COVID-19.Mr. Green's longer publications include two supplementary text books on environmental science issues, numerous studies of environment, health, and safety policies and regulations across North America, as well as a broad range of derivative articles and opinion columns. Mr. Green has appeared frequently in major media and has testified before legislative bodies in both the United States and Canada.… Read more