Steve: I notice here, looking at some of your recent publications, I can just see some of the kinds of issues that you're concerned with. For example, here's one called "Making Red Tape Transparent: A Regulatory Reform Model for Western Canada." So, I would imagine that many small businesses, overwhelmed by the amount of red tape and paperwork that the government seems to want to impose on the businesspeople who create the wealth in this society. How much success have you had with that issue?
Laura: Well, red tape is a huge issue for our members, so we've been pushing-one of the things we've been pushing for is more accountability and transparency, with respect to the regulatory burden that governments impose on small business-well, on all of us, but small businesses in particular bear the brunt of this burden. We have had some success. British Columbia is actually the first province to actually measure the regulatory burden and report those measures to the public on a regular basis, and we're pushing that now across the country, saying, "All governments need to be accountable," and in BC, incredibly, when they first started measuring, they came up with four hundred thousand regulatory requirements, and this is just at the provincial level alone! So you can imagine why small businesses are feeling overwhelmed with their obligations. I mean, everything from workers' compensation, provincial sales tax, then there's federal sales tax, there's employee relations standards, all of this kind of thing that takes valuable time away from running a business. Steve: Now, I notice that you're down here as one of the authors of this paper, so I guess it's a field that you're particularly knowledgeable about. I think a lot of Canadians are concerned about the efficiency of their government. I sense that a lot of the resistance to taxation is not that people are against the principle of paying taxes in order to contribute toward common benefits, even including helping the weaker members of society-but I think the overwhelming impression is that government operates inefficiently, wastefully, imposes unnecessary regulatory hurdles and hoops, and so forth. Do you think-and I guess we have had a, perhaps a culture here, of allowing the government to simply grow and regulate whatever they feel like regulating, and one regulation in BC and another regulation in Alberta, and so forth-do you think that we can roll that back? Is it realistic to expect that we can push back the sort of grasping of power that the government has been able to get away with over the last so many years?
Laura: Well, I think it's a tough job, but I think it is realistic to think that we can get governments to be more accountable, with respect to the regulatory burden that they impose on us. In British Columbia, we have a model now where that's starting to work, and actually, the government did reduce the total number of regulatory requirements by one-third, from that initial close to four hundred thousand regulatory amount that I just mentioned. They have also committed to not increasing the regulatory burden for the next three years, but the key here is that we have a government that is now measuring and reporting publicly. Incredibly, British Columbia is the only government in the whole country doing that, so if we're going to have accountability, first we're going to have measurement. We do have that when it comes to-I mean, we can say we don't have enough of it-but we do have some of that when it comes to how governments spend our taxpayer dollars. I mean, they do have to report annually in a budget, and tell us what they plan to do with our tax dollars. We all know what the tax rates are, so there is some public accountability with respect to taxation and spending, and we need to get that same accountability when it comes to regulations, and CFIB is one of the only groups actually pushing governments to do that, and really calling for governments to be more accountable.
Steve: Well, I understand the importance of measurement. I also see here the term "transparency," and I guess there is a lot of duplication or confusion as to the reasons for these regulations and just what is required, so that for measurement, hopefully you'll make the regulations more clear and more transparent, and eventually, do you think we might reduce the amount of regulation that we deal with? Laura: I think that's the ultimate goal, is to reduce the unnecessary regulation. Some regulation is actually good, and nobody wants to see the total number of regulations go to zero; that would be ridiculous. But what we do want to do is reduce overlap, reduce unnecessary regulation, and I think in this province at least, we are moving in that direction. It's not a battle that we're going to win overnight, but we are, as we get more accountability and more transparency, it's going to be easier to push in that direction, so it's a critical fight for CFIB and for CFIB's members. Steve: And, of course, CFIB's members are all, by definition, independent business. They're in the business sector.
