Yes, it has been measured.
Thank you for that question. It's very good—and we didn't even talk beforehand.
In this report, we identified overall average costs for firms with let's say 12 to 15 employees. Those costs are about $18,000. Costs in a very small firm are up to $3,300 per employee. And this report was done in 2004.
We did a groundbreaking study, “Rated 'R': Prosperity Restricted by Red Tape”, which talked about the overall paper burden of all levels of government—federal, provincial, and municipal. We think this is a major issue that should be attacked by this minority government. When we did the study, our researchers had a 15-page formula, which we got them to distill down to a page, and we worked with Stats Canada and people in the Privy Council Office, who looked at our methodology and said it was fine. In just looking at business, we found that the overall paperwork and regulatory compliance burden was $33 billion a year.
What we handed out to you was one page from that report, which talked about the most burdensome federal regulations. If you look at the top four, they're all related to the CRA. There are two in particular: the GST-HST is the number one compliance burden issue, with 71% saying it's important and burdensome; and 60% say that payroll taxes, such as the CPP, QPP, and EI, are important; and 57% say income taxes are. When you layer on top of that the change in rules—the complexity of the rules, and not knowing what the rules are, and not getting interpretations—they really do hurt in terms of compliance costs. When the compliance costs and decisions are more difficult, they create uncertainty. When they create uncertainty, they hurt productivity and growth.