B.C. gets top marks in the country for its efforts to reduce red tape, according to a report released Tuesday by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).
“B.C. is the superstar of Canada when it comes to this,” said Laura Jones, the CFIB’s vice president for Western Canada and project lead. “They’ve got probably Canada’s longest-running regulatory reform exercise ever, I would hazard a guess.”
The report measures each province’s commitment to eliminating regulation, or what Jones calls “unnecessary rules” and “rules that cost way more than they deliever in benefits.”
“Every dollar or every hour that a business is spending complying with unnecessary red tape is an hour that they’re not spending serving a customer or training their staff or coming up with a new idea for their business or getting home a little earlier for dinner,” she said. “And no one works for free, so those costs do get passed on.”
Jones noted the report incorporates research up to November 2010.
B.C. leads the provinces with a B+ rating, followed by Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador with B ratings. Failing grades went to Manitoba, Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
Jones noted B.C.’s reforms started when Premier Gordon Campbell came into power in 2001.
“When the premier came into office in 2001, he had made a commitment to cut red tape by a third in three years. He more than delivered on that promise,” Jones said. And once that was done she said, the reforms continued.
“They set a new target to have a zero increase – so every new reg. coming in, one has to go out,” she said. “It has proven to be an extremely effective check and they’ve now reduced [regulations] by 42% over their baseline.”
Jones said the CFIB is not too worried about the impact of Campbell’s resignation on regulatory reform, however, it is concerned the reforms would be abandoned if another government came to power.
“The reason that British Columbia gets a B+ and not an A+ is that they haven’t done anything to make sure that their reforms survive beyond this government,” she said. “You can’t guarantee that they’d survive, but we’d like them to take some steps that would make the reforms more permanent.”