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| Separation will mean less government - Thursday, June 26, 2003 at 09:08 |
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Power to slow regulatory flood - Wednesday, June 25, 2003 at 09:35 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The scope and reach of government regulations is staggering. Almost every aspect of our daily lives -- from the type of threads permitted in seatbelts (and the number required per square centimetre) to the television channels we may watch to the size of holes in baby bottle nipples -- is governed by a federal or provincial regulation. Ottawa alone adds approximately 1,200 new regulations annually, running to more than 5,000 pages, and almost none are ever brought before the House of Commons for review by Canadians' democratically elected representatives. That's an average of nearly four new 3 1/2-page regulations each and every day. Many are merely proclaimed by Cabinet without scrutiny by Parliament -- until now. Before heading into summer recess, the Senate last week passed Bill C-205, a private member's bill introduced by Gurmant Grewal, a Canadian Alliance MP from Surrey, B.C. The bill establishes a joint Commons-Senate committee with the power to review and even revoke unnecessary, intrusive or confusing rules. Not just Cabinet-decreed regulations are covered, but also those promulgated by a myriad of government agencies, such as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, the Canadian Dairy Commission, even the federal firearms registry and Transport Canada. While this is at least the 11th attempt in the past two decades to tame the regulatory dragon -- or at least permit MPs and senators some oversight of the regulatory process -- Mr. Grewal's was the first successful bid, thanks largely to changes in the rules governing private members bills; rules that make all such bills votable and reduce the number of procedural games the government may play to block their passage. An estimated 640,000 public sector workers in Canada -- federal, provincial and municipal -- are employed full-time in drafting and enforcing regulations, according to the Treasury Board. That's nearly one-in-five government, hospital, municipal or school board employees. According to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, at least 300,000 private sector workers (nearly 3% of the private workforce) are kept busy complying with the more than one million active federal and provincial regulations. Mr. Grewal estimates that 80% of federal rule-making is now done through undemocratic regulation; only 20% originates with Parliament. Regulation is a powerful symptom of Canada's growing democracy deficit. And it is expensive for Canadian consumers, too. Federal regulation alone is estimated to added $60-billion annually to the cost of goods and services. The cost to the average family of four is nearly $6,500 a year, just from Ottawa's regulatory mania. Add in the provinces' and local governments' fetishes for decrees on workplace ladder-rung widths and lawn-pesticide spraying hours, and the total bill is nearer $12,000. That is almost as much as the average working-class family pays in taxes each year to the three levels of government. Regulation is a hidden form of double taxation -- make government policy without recourse to any legislature, then make businesses pass the compliance costs on to their customers in the form of higher prices, rather than charging a tax for the policy upfront. Most new regulations don't even live up to the regulations that are supposed to govern their creation and implementation. Four years ago, a Fraser Institute study found that nearly two-thirds of new federal regulations were proclaimed without a cost-benefit analysis -- a violation of Treasury Board rules. Nothing has changed since. For instance, while the Liberal government claims it has cost-benefit analyses for its outrageous $1-billion firearms registry, it has never released them, causing opposition members to wonder if the studies contain all the necessary calculations, or whether they have been completed at all. Governments' increasing reliance on regulation rather than legislation is unfortunately only one example of the decline of Canadian democracy. Of the more than $180-billion Ottawa spends each year, just over $50-billion (or not quite one-third) is brought before the Commons for approval. The bulk is statutory spending authorized by legislation passed previously, often a decade or more in the past. Judges, too, each year add to the number of laws they make from the bench, over the heads of parliamentarians and provincial legislators. And in just the past decade, Ottawa has handed unaccountable federal foundations -- such as the Canadian Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation -- more than $7-billion in endowments, even though these organizations' boards are not appointed by Cabinet, their budgets are not approved by Parliament and their activities are not subject to review by the Auditor-General or the Information Commissioner. Acquiring for the Commons-Senate regulations committee the power to overturn the most egregious regulations will not immediately reverse the trend away from democratic accountability in Canada, but it is a crucial first step. |