Evidence of meeting #129 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was different.
A video is available from Parliament.
6:05 p.m.
Conservative
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
Charles Sousa Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you, Chair.
My question is for Laura Jones.
Let's talk a bit about the regulatory bodies.
There's been a lot of chatter and opposing views regarding politicians being the ones making decisions when it comes to matters like provincial regulatory affairs around securities law. Sometimes I see certain politicians get into the decision-making of a securities regulator, especially when it comes to innovative engagement. The Bank of Canada, for example, is an area where politicians are making claims that they want to be the governor and promote other forms of currency, it seems.
From your vantage point, how do you see the integrity of the system, especially on the Canadian regulatory side—the legitimate side? People come to Canada for certain reasons. One of them is that they're safe from interference. I would like to know your thoughts on arm's-length relationships with regulatory authorities.
6:05 p.m.
Chair, External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness, Business Council of British Columbia
I think we're fortunate to live in a country where we have good institutions and standards around that. Of course, it's important that we're always mindful of this. Having healthy debates and conversations about this is part of it. However, respect those boundaries. You mentioned the ones between the Bank of Canada and politicians. Healthy boundaries have been set up for good reasons, and respecting those is important.
We certainly didn't hear a lot of concern about this, if that's your question, among people who were coming to talk to us at the external advisory committee on regulatory competitiveness. It wasn't high on the list. It wasn't on the list, in fact. I don't think we had anyone raise that, specifically.
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
Charles Sousa Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
I am concerned about competitiveness. I think all of us want to lessen the cumulative burden of regulatory initiatives. However, in order for our companies and institutions to be competitive, especially when they're competing with other parts of the world.... I think that's one of the reasons we're having this discussion. There are some safety codes we want. There are voluntary standards provided by industry. I think we sometimes equate those with regulatory issues.
Do you distinguish between those?
6:10 p.m.
Chair, External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness, Business Council of British Columbia
It's important to be a little more nuanced about this. It isn't always the case that reducing regulatory burdens will increase competitiveness. In some cases, our competitiveness is enhanced by the fact that people have a lot of faith in Canadian products being safe and healthy. I know this gets advertised, for example, in Asian markets around some of our fishery and agriculture products. That's a huge competitive advantage. They come from Canada—a country known for its health and safety.
At the same time, we can't always equate more rules with more safety, either. It's finding that regulatory excellence.
6:10 p.m.
Liberal
Charles Sousa Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
I agree with you. I believe it's a fine balance to protect people's safety while being competitive.
Mr. Greco, in 2008 we had a huge global financial meltdown.
How did you feel about Canada during that time? How did you feel about our financial institutions during the time of that downturn?
6:10 p.m.
Senior Director, Manufacturing and Value Chains, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Yes, at the time, our financial institutions were resilient. I think a bipartisan effort happened—efforts by the Ontario government and the federal government. It was as a result of those efforts, I think, done in a non-partisan way. It got us out of that financial crisis.
6:10 p.m.
Liberal
Charles Sousa Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
We certainly had a manufacturing crisis. We had to renew, regroup and bring back a lot of employment, and we did. In fact, a lot more employment came back. A lot more manufacturing was reinvested into Canada, especially in the auto industry, because of some of the collaboration among governments in regulatory affairs when it came to protecting the financial services industry and consumers.
Would you agree with that?
6:10 p.m.
Senior Director, Manufacturing and Value Chains, Canadian Chamber of Commerce
I remember in Ontario, when we did pension reform, for example, I think that was definitely a positive step in the right direction. However, Mr. Sousa, I think that there were challenges with manufacturing, going back as far as four, five or six years. It wasn't all perfect either in terms of the loss of manufacturing jobs and where we were at in terms of sustained economic growth.
6:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
That's your time, I'm afraid, Mr. Sousa.
Mrs. Vignola, please.
6:10 p.m.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Jones, Corinne Pohlmann appeared before the committee on April 10. One of the things she talked about was making a distinction between two types of regulations. There are the regulations that are necessary, particularly for health and safety. Then there are somewhat unjustified regulations, which place an undue burden on small, medium or large businesses.
How do we distinguish between necessary and justified regulations and regulations that become an undue burden? Where is the dividing line between the two?
6:10 p.m.
Chair, External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness, Business Council of British Columbia
That is another very good question.
I think in some cases it's obvious. When we look at the Nova Scotia example I gave earlier, employers, doctors, patients— everyone was agreeing that the sick note requirements were not adding any value, and they were taking a lot of time. That's an example of the obvious.
Sometimes, your definition of what's needed might be my definition of red tape, and that's where you get into healthy debate. I think in all cases it's important to ask what objective we are trying to achieve and whether this particular set of rules is doing that effectively.
If we go back to those first principles and we look at data and evidence, then that's very helpful. We can also look at where things are duplicative. If we have two or three rules trying to do the same thing, maybe one will accomplish the goal, and that's often an example of where you can find that line between necessary regulation and red tape.
6:10 p.m.
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
Thank you.
In addition, business owners told me that they did not understand why they were being asked certain questions. The information should already be available, either from the Canada Revenue Agency or from Canadian business registries.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to lighten the paperwork load by allowing interdepartmental communication in some cases?
6:15 p.m.
Chair, External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness, Business Council of British Columbia
I think there is. I know that in the past there have been some privacy concerns for people not necessarily wanting government departments to share information, but I think that's an area where we need to continue to advance and check in with Canadians. Appropriately, I think a lot of Canadians would be fine with sharing information if it were to simplify forms. We have to be careful about that balance with privacy, but I think that's an area, certainly, where things could be simplified.
6:15 p.m.
Conservative
6:15 p.m.
NDP
Taylor Bachrach NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I like what Ms. Jones said about defining the regulatory objective. One of the objectives around which there's a lot of regulatory development is the need to reduce climate emissions.
I am curious about the B.C. Business Council's perspective on this, because we see two main approaches. We see a pricing approach—an attempt to send a market signal that will drive emissions reductions—and we see mandatory performance-based regulations. In British Columbia, there's a zero-emission vehicle mandate; there are methane emissions regulations, and there is the building step code, which I mentioned earlier.
Which of these two policy tools does the business council feel should receive the most emphasis, assuming that the council supports the objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with our targets?
6:15 p.m.
Chair, External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness, Business Council of British Columbia
Yes, of course.
In very general terms, the pricing approach would be preferred, but a pricing approach that is revenue-neutral and whereby we're taking the revenue from carbon taxes and putting it into tax reductions in things like income tax reductions is the approach that we would, in very general terms, prefer.
I think the worst scenario is to have the pricing, and then layering on of regulations, where sometimes there is duplication, and we haven't considered the unintended consequences of when we have multiple different rules trying to do the same thing. That's what we would want to avoid.
I think we have to balance it. We would say that we want to balance that with making sure that Canadian exports remain competitive, because that's very important to our standard of living in Canada.
6:15 p.m.
NDP
Taylor Bachrach NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Earlier, you said you accepted that while much of the focus of this study is on increasing regulatory efficiency and removing regulations that are unnecessary, like the examples you provided, at times there is the need for new regulations to be developed.
I wonder if you could give a couple of examples of new regulations that the business council would support and feels are necessary.
6:15 p.m.
Chair, External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness, Business Council of British Columbia
When you think about new...where you might be likely to have less regulation than is optimal is in that lower quadrant that we're talking about in the diagram I gave you. It would tend to be in emerging industries. That's where you get debate. When you think about how long it took to put some regulations in place around vaping products or things like that, we're sometimes slower than we need to be with emerging products.
I would say that where we're more likely to be over-regulated than under-regulated is in industries that have been around for a while. That's where we need to be modernizing our thinking, but it's with those emerging products that we may tend to under-regulate.
Again, I think regulatory excellence provides a really good North Star for it, and getting better at measurement will also help us more quickly identify where we are.
June 12th, 2024 / 6:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thanks, Mr. Bachrach.
Before we get into committee business to discuss my stuff, Mr. Greco and Ms. Jones, thank you very much. You were wonderful witnesses. We learned a lot, but there's a lot more we have to pick up on. Both of you mentioned various studies and reports, and examples like Nova Scotia. Please, if you have any of those that you wish to share with the committee, I welcome and encourage you to send them to our clerk. He will have them translated and distributed to the committee as part of our report. I sincerely thank you.
I'll dismiss you both. Hopefully, we'll see you again. Perhaps it will be as we continue the study in the fall.
Thanks very much. You are dismissed.
Yes, I will get to you, Mrs. Block.
Colleagues, this is the plan for the last couple of days.
On Monday, we have the PBO for an hour on the supplementary estimates. My intent and hope is that in the second hour...there was the indigenous procurement motion that we brought forward, I think, about a month ago. It's the one that led to all of those documents, so we're going to discuss that a bit.
On Wednesday, if we are sitting, and I think we will be, we have Minister Anand for the second hour on the supplementary estimates. Minister Duclos rightly declined, as there are no supplementary estimates (A) for PSPC, so we'll have Minister Anand for the second hour. We'll probably start at 5:30.
Regarding the shipbuilding study and the trip that never seems to end, I presented the budget at the Liaison Committee and unfortunately both of them were shot down, so there will not be travel for that. I encourage you, though.... Several of us, over the years, have visited the shipyards separately. They are very welcoming. We cannot do it as a group, but I would recommend that you do it separately.
Mrs. Block, you had something before we go.
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
I did, Mr. Chair. Given that we are in committee business, I have a motion that I would like to put forward at this time. I have it in both official languages, and we'll distribute it now.
I move:
That the committee hold at least three meetings to study the office holdings and real estate assets of the Government of Canada and that the government invite PSPC officials, Treasury Board officials and National Capital Commission officials to testify.
If I may, my motivation for moving this motion is really twofold.
The first motivation is the recent decision by the government to have public servants return to their offices for three days a week and what we are hearing in the public about the concerns that are being raised about office space for public servants across the country.
Secondly, we also have the ongoing process of the government looking at converting government buildings into housing.
I believe it's part of our mandate as OGGO to take a look at these things, as Public Services and Procurement is the central purchasing agent and real property manager. It would be, I think, important for us to have a handle on what could be happening with those assets.
I know we will likely not get to these meetings until the fall, but I thought we should get this on the books so that when we return, we can begin a study looking into this issue.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thank you.
Are we fine with this, colleagues?
Mr. Kusmierczyk.