Can the feds really cut red tape within 60 days?
In the 2025 federal election, the Liberal and Conservative parties both released platforms making repeated commitments to reducing “red tape” in a range of areas of federal regulation. The Conservative platform further committed to reducing regulations by 25% within two years and introducing a two-for-one rule, requiring that any new federal regulation be accompanied by the elimination of existing federal regulations with at least twice the value in compliance costs.
Since the election, several voices have pressed the government to move ahead with red tape reduction, with some even calling for Canada to keep up the U.S. in wielding a chainsaw to red tape. Trump has promised a far more aggressive ten-for-one rule, and DOGE has been reporting on changes to the count of words in American federal regulations.
That’s right. To take this model, if you just amended the following sentence in the Canada Business Corporations Regulations:
“10 An electronic document is considered to have been provided when it leaves an information system within the control of the originator or another person who provided the document on the originator’s behalf.”
to instead read:
“10 An electronic document is considered to have been provided when it leaves.”
then, by the DOGE definition, you would have lightened the regulatory burden on businesses (in this case, specifying how to meet deadlines for sending documents electronically). But of course, you wouldn’t have actually lightened the red tape. Regulations have subjects (who has to follow the rules) and objects (what do they have to do, or not do, to be in compliance). If the rules are badly written or miss details, then even smaller/shorter/fewer regulations will increase the costs of complying (or administrative burden).
Efforts in the Government of Canada to reduce administrative burden have been frequently focused on red tape experienced by businesses, and small businesses in particular, when interacting with federal programs and services. For example, a 2011 Commission on administrative burdens for business led to a new one-for-one rule that capped the volume of regulations federal government bodies could introduce by requiring that an equal count of regulations be repealed. The policy was later made a legislative requirement in the Red Tape Reduction Act (SC 2015, c.12), which remains in effect today.
In the first mandatory annual report (in 2017) to Parliament, the President of the Treasury Board reported that the policy had resulted in a net reduction of 14 regulations over the fiscal year 2016-17. As of the 2023 version of this same annual report, the policy had resulted in a net reduction of 1,799 regulations, suggesting that maybe officials had gained more capacity to identify outdated or duplicative regulations. However, according to the same annual reports, in 2016, there were 136,579 regulations on the federal books. In 2022, the count of federal regulations had grown to 148,770, suggesting perhaps the policy may not have had the desired impact on the volume of regulation.
In practice, a one-for-one rule, a two-for-one, or ten-for-one rule has to have so much flexibility that government departments and agencies can largely avoid it. For example, in Canada’s current system, departments and agencies have up to 24 months to find something to cut, and they can spread things out across a Minister’s entire portfolio, including other agencies, tribunals or Crown corporations. This flexibility creates opportunities for federal officials to risk manage the regulatory reduction obligation by pacing and spreading any increase or decrease over multiple federal organizations, even saving up counts of cancelled regulations as an intangible asset for later use. Otherwise, eventually, some Ministers can’t have any new regulations or any new laws requiring regulation. In any case, the annual reporting requirement, and the tracking it relies on, itself appears to have created a form of internal administrative burdens for federal public servants. And, at the end of the day, until and unless Parliament is willing to repeal a lot of legislation and/or stop passing new laws, it seems like government might need to maintain and introduce a fair chunk (in new regs or words in regs, pick your preferred metric) just to make sure that Canadian businesses and individuals can follow the laws of the land.
In 2022, an internal review of the Red Tape Reduction Act found that most of the regulations cut under the policy were regulations that did not impose an administrative burden and therefore concluded that there was “no direct link between the number of repealed regulations and the control or reduction in administrative burden”. External stakeholders who were consulted for the review stated that the policy had not meaningfully reduced the administrative burdens they experienced.
So, can we at least agree that “cutting” here can’t be measured in counts of regulation or words in regulation? In fairness, the Carney team did not commit to that kind of blunt metric. Instead, the platform promised:
"We will require all relevant federal departments [...] to undertake reviews and to report on progress, within 60 days, on steps to eliminate outdated or unnecessary rules, reduce duplication or overlap with provincial rules, and streamline the administration of rules and the delivery of regulatory decisions.” - Liberal Party of Canada, 2025 election platform
My read of that promise is that it would require a few things to be successful:
a clear-eyed assessment of regulatory requirements and also of equivalence, to be clear on where federal officials can accept external validation of compliance;
a user-centred consultation to understand where the friction points are in delivery and administration.
There might be cases where re-writing rules to say “tell government once” or “tell government the same way” makes a lot of sense. For example, if your company has submitted an application for a new pharmaceutical drug or medical device to one high-capacity regulator, then it would save you a lot of effort and time (and help patients benefit from your innovation sooner), if other regulators in the same space could accept roughly the same application, or even coorindate and share information to expedite the internal review process. That, for example, has been the aim of regulatory cooperation between Health Canada and the FDA in the United States, starting in 2003. Reader, I leave it to your judgment whether you continue to have confidence that such cooperation is still suited to maintain the twin aims of patient safety and administrative efficiency, given the new leadership in Health and Human Services and staffing cuts at the FDA. Of course “tell government once” could also easily apply to individuals and families. For example, when dealing with the loss of a loved one, it might be a real reduction in red tape to not have to report the death over and over and over again if only intergovernmental and interdepartmental information sharing could be enabled. But, dear reader, I digress…the consensus view seems to be that it’s only the business red tape that we should worry about.
Even if it is business we’re focussed on, policymakers should be heeding the feedback from the 2022 review that the experience of users is that the compliance journey can be rough. Users have to spend to learn what applies and how to comply. Users have to spend to produce the documentation and proof of compliance, including professional fees and expert advice. Users have to spend psychologically in the stress, anxiety and frustration of dealing with systems that don’t seem built to be easy to use and threaten coercion if they make a mistake.
So, for this red tape reduction to be a real exercise, federal officials have to be empowered to honestly ask difficult questions, like:
Which regulations and rules are “unnecessary” to achieve the same policy requirements? Are these required in law? Can we change the legal framework?
Which rules and regulations are duplicative and of what specific other equivalent rules and regulations? And are those other rules and regulations easier, harder or similar in their administrative burdens for subjects?
Is the rule or regulation the problem, or is it the technology (e.g.: the glitchy online form, the fuzzy user guide, the goofy snitch line, the unuseable self-serve database, the payment methods accepted, the absence of a human to speak with ) by which the rule or regulation is enforced? What do users say, and can you make adjustments to meet their needs?
Given that officials are required to enforce rules and regulations, often by statute or on pain of disciplinary action, what new capacities will regulatory/administrative branches of government gain so that they can do the work faster, easier, but without sacrificing accuracy?
Will government also publicly communicate that some degree of failure will be acceptable in the name of streamlining? Look, so long as most of the food certified is ok, and that most of the patents registered aren’t fraudulent, or that most federally-incorporated Canadian corporations file their annual corporate information with Corporations Canada, we’re golden, right? No? OK, then I come back to the question of what new capacities are we adding to get better and faster without loss of accuracy? Yell more is not a strategy.
I think the heavy lifting of going through those kinds of questions is really, really, REALLY worth doing. I think it would benefit businesses, government officials and the taxpayers who underwrite the whole system. But I think that approach would have to take more than 60 days.
When the Government of Canada eventually does report back on progress in meeting that election commitment, I would suggest looking for signs that it was a real exercise and not a count of regulations cut, or worse, words cut. If those are the metrics, in my view, that would be a red flag that the red tape persists.