Cutting Red Tape for All Canadians Bill

Honourable senators, I rise on Bill S-7, the cutting red tape for all Canadians act. As Senator Petten outlined last week, the bill amends 255 clauses across 31 statutes in 11 departments to update processes and eliminate redundant rules.

I support clearing out regulatory irritants. However, this is not the first iteration of this recurring bill, as its sponsor suggested. In 2018, the previous government committed to introducing an annual regulatory modernization act. The first iteration, Bill S-6, was tabled in the Senate in March 2022 and was subsequently studied and passed in under three months. Bill S-6 then sat for a year before it received even the slightest mention — there hadn’t been a syllable — in the House of Commons.

Two more years passed before it reached committee, where it went straight to the bottom of the priority list. In January 2025, it died a sad and lonely death upon prorogation. So the annual bill, meant to reduce red tape, took four years to appear and three more to slowly die of neglect. The cause of death was likely parliamentary — rather than bureaucratic — red tape, though we can’t know for certain because the autopsy report is still winding its way toward approval.

On the plus side, the government estimates that Bill S-7 will save businesses and the government about $264 million over the next decade — roughly $26 million a year. To put that number in context, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimated that red tape cost businesses $17.9 billion in 2024. When passed, Bill S-7 will trim that red tape bill by a virtually microscopic 1/700.

Picture that estimated red tape burden as the fuel needed to drive from the beautiful Point Pleasant Park in Halifax to the gorgeous Stanley Park in Vancouver. Bill S-7 wouldn’t even get us off the Halifax Peninsula. Colleagues, we have a long way to go.

So far, this annual regulatory modernization process is akin to bailing a lobster boat with a teaspoon: The intention is laudable, but the process is anything but, as the fate of this bill’s predecessor made clear. Still, I’m glad that the Treasury Board’s Red Tape Reduction Office is prioritizing this government’s determination to tackle the mountain of outdated laws and regulations that have accumulated over decades. However, the combination of political will and the best intentions of public servants is still not enough to meet the moment. We need new methods.

That’s where my attention is focused. I absolutely support Bill S-7’s top-down fixes, but we must also implement a bottom-up approach that supports and accelerates regulatory modernization.

To this end, I have four points.

First, Canada’s regulatory burden is suffocating. A 2025 Statistics Canada study called Regulatory Accumulation, Business Dynamism and Economic Growth in Canada found that federal regulatory requirements grew by about 37% over the 15 years between 2006 and 2021, roughly 2.1% a year. Put another way, if Canada’s rule book were a garden, we spent 15 years planting but never pulled a single weed. It sounds like my house. Over that period, the accumulated regulatory burden was associated with slowing GDP growth by 1.7%, lower employment growth, lower business investment and fewer business start-ups. To be fair, Statistics Canada cautioned that the study measured costs, not benefits, and it counted rules rather than weighing them, but even the count is sobering.

Internationally, in terms of product market regulation, Canada sits around 26 of 38 OECD countries, behind most of our G7 peers. We score poorly on licensing and administrative burden and on interprovincial barriers. We have trade agreements with Europe and Asia, often making it easier to sell across an ocean than a provincial border.

And the problem isn’t just quantity. Too many regulations are outdated. Our competitiveness is undermined when laws still require paper filings and fax machines belong in a museum, not an office. Too many regulations are “command and control” by design. They dictate a specific process rather than the desired outcome, leaving no room to innovate because innovating would mean breaking the rules. Best practices define the risk to be managed or the required safe outcome and let innovators find better ways to get there. Meanwhile, risks are accelerating, especially in our digital world. In this environment, stagnant regulations actually introduce risks because they leave Canadians unprotected, undermining our competitiveness, productivity and sovereignty.

Second, our modernization process is too slow. Yes, Bill S-7 repeals more than 160 outdated orders under the Agricultural Products Marketing Act. This saves public servants the equivalent of six months of work. And amendments to the Canada Border Services Agency Act allow temporary exemptions so that the Canada Border Services Agency can test new technologies with industry partners.

The Treasury Board’s Red Tape Review identified hundreds of inefficiencies and has already removed more than 120 regulatory irritants. These are welcome. But they are patches. An omnibus cleanup bill every few years — or every decade at the pace of the last Parliament — does not and cannot keep pace with a world that changes every few months. We keep fixing leaks one at a time while the pipes continue to rust. We need a new approach that meets the scale of the problem, not a continual cycle of patchwork fixes.

Third, deregulation is a product of regulatory stagnation. Well-designed rules support growth and investment. They protect property rights and safety, and they build market trust. Nobody wants to board a plane that was built and maintained in a deregulated system. Inefficient regulation slows growth by raising the cost and risk of doing business. Burdensome compliance eats time and money. Complex or uncertain approvals delay or deter new projects.

This reality undermines an innovative company’s ability to survive, while a thick moat of complex regulations shields incumbent monopolies from the very competition that compels them to innovate, introduce new products or services and improve prices. The cumulative effect of excessive, outdated, poorly designed and stagnant regulations is the fuel that powers calls for deregulation. It’s likely why the government introduced bills like Bill C-5 and Bill C-39.

Put simply, Canada’s complex and outdated regulatory regimes are seemingly forcing this government to deregulate in order to get the economy moving. Until we fix how we regulate, we will keep swinging between too much and too little — a pendulum that creates uncertainty and erodes trust across our economy and society.

Fourth, “standards by default” is a crucial modernization tool. In the spring of 2022, during my third reading speech on Bill S-6, I proposed a new approach called “standards by default.” It prioritizes the use of consensus-based standards by default, with unique regulations used only by exception — for example, when no standard exists to manage a specific risk.

I first raised this approach with the Standards Council of Canada in the fall of 2019, and over the years, I received a somewhat lukewarm response. By contrast, the Secretary-General of the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, confirmed that several jurisdictions rely on it, including the EU and South Korea.

Since Bill S-6, I’ve benefited from expert advice from groups including the Centre for International Governance Innovation, or CIGI, and the Digital Governance Council. Senator Woo, who was the sponsor of Bill S-6 in the last Parliament, and I met with regulators, where the then-President of the Treasury Board Anita Anand voiced her support for this approach.

Consensus-based standards keep our cars on the road, our planes in the sky and our homes safe. They underpin profitable international trade. Standards exist in every sector and are developed transparently and inclusively, and they are regularly revisited as risks and opportunities evolve. Anyone can sit at the table, regulators included. The difference is that regulators contribute to the agenda; they don’t control it.

Compare how we develop standards with how we develop regulations. Consultation is typically exclusive and features one-on-one meetings controlled by officials in an Ottawa-centric process. Varying perspectives disappear into a black box where trade-offs are made and the regulation is drafted by bureaucrats and ministerial advisers. More recently, “What We Heard” reports are sometimes provided, which is a positive step but insufficient.

Most importantly and most expensively, the publication of a new regulation in the Canada Gazette effectively fires the starting gun on a marathon of lobbying. The traditional process is less of a consultation and more like a surprise party nobody wants or enjoys.

It has three major flaws:

First, one-on-one consultations do not allow competing voices to openly debate contested perspectives, live and on the record.

Second, the regulator, not regulated entities, must make the trade-offs between competing perspectives. Doing so requires sophisticated domain expertise that is harder to acquire and maintain in our increasingly complex world.

Third, lobbying favours organizations with the most experience and resources, disadvantaging smaller, newer and often more innovative stakeholders.

The “standards by default” approach works because it cites a standard that manages the same risk as an existing regulation. The standard is identified as being equivalent to the legacy regulation. As the default shifts toward agile standards and away from unique and too often stagnant regulations, our public servants are freed to step outside the Ottawa bubble and engage more openly with innovators and regulated entities.

Two weeks ago, a host of positive improvements were introduced in an updated version of the Cabinet Directive on Regulation. These included a reference to the use of standards in section 3.4. The focus was limited to using standards to better support interjurisdictional alignment. I remain optimistic that this step will be the first of many that will prioritize a much more streamlined approach to how we regulate across the Government of Canada.

Colleagues, I’d like to conclude by emphasizing that Bill S-7 is a small piece of a massive puzzle. To fully meet this challenge, we must introduce agility into our regulatory modernization and red tape reduction processes. As such, at committee, I ask that we don’t just study the individual amendments in Bill S-7, as worthwhile as they are. Let’s also ask witnesses how Canada can do a much better job of maintaining up-to-date regulations across the whole of government.

In its Spring Economic Update, this government framed red tape reduction mostly around major projects, transport and housing. The challenges go far beyond those priorities and into every corner of government. Stagnant and burdensome regulations not only fail our most innovative and competitive businesses, but we also now see that they lead to sweeping deregulation, which can undermine trust.

Colleagues, if we’re going to meaningfully address Canada’s oversized and outdated regulatory burden, we have a long journey ahead.

On that hypothetical drive from Halifax to Vancouver, let’s not just aim to get off the Halifax Peninsula; let’s make sure we reshape our processes so that we can efficiently access the tools, expertise and capacity to reach our destination. For me, that is a country with a reliably modern and agile regulatory system that supports us all.

Colleagues, I urge you to quickly send the cutting red tape for all Canadians act to committee, prioritize it there, identify ways to modernize regulations faster and urge our colleagues in the House of Commons to actually start — and finish — the job this time. Let’s reduce both bureaucratic and parliamentary red tape.

Thank you, colleagues.

Certainly.

Thank you, Senator Woo, for the question. It is a very important one because it touches on a key strategic point that I haven’t heard discussed in this city, which is that patents are a form of intellectual property, or IP. We value and understand that patents, brands and trademarks are all forms of intellectual property that we, as a country, need to worry about protecting. But if we do not build businesses that can comply with international standards, our ability to trade will be severely limited.

Our aim should not be to merely comply with “made in Canada” standards, which would certainly be far better than our regulatory development process, but in certain areas, we need to choose to become the best in the world and compete using those international standards. We need to be at the table, be in the room and make sure that those international standards are inclusive of Canadian industry in key sectors. That’s because, if we don’t, we’re going to find ourselves locked out of key markets.

We can’t, necessarily, have a strong presence at every table. Instead, we have to choose our sectors very strategically and be at those tables where we think we have a global competitive advantage. Let’s not spread ourselves too thinly across every international committee.

We see that China and the United States are stepping up in a major way to control — effectively — these international standards bodies. There’s a huge risk to Canada in that regard because we could find ourselves playing the role of standards takers rather than standards makers, and that means that those standards may not actually provide our businesses what they need to thrive and excel globally.

Your point is a good one. We need to be very strategic across the whole system and take advantage of all of the Canadians who volunteer their time to be a part of standards bodies globally. Instead, as a country, we have cut back our support for them.

I wouldn’t always be asking for extra time if I could speak that concisely. Yes. One hundred per cent.