Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
As you can see, I'm accompanied by a number of colleagues who'll be helping me during the presentation.
I'm going to provide a brief overview of the initiative we'll be discussing today. In its fall 2018 economic statement, the government committed to introducing an annual regulatory amendments bill. That bill starts this year, in 2019.
The purpose of the bill is to modernize regulatory requirements to better reflect the realities of the new digital economy, to relieve the administrative burden of regulation in Canada and to lower barriers to investment and innovation in this country. To that end, it is necessary at times to amend the act. This bill will allow us to amend several at a time.
The first bill will be presenting changes to 12 acts across a variety of sectors. In a moment my colleagues will start to outline some of those sectors. These changes will help to cut costs to both regulated parties and to regulators in a bid to make regulation more efficient. Many of the changes will respond to long-standing irritants that have been raised by business to regulators and many of the changes will also support a more innovative, flexible and agile regulatory framework. This is one of multiple initiatives that the Treasury Board Secretariat is pursuing on behalf of the government to support a regulatory competitiveness and innovation agenda.
I'm now going to turn to my colleagues to go through the individual changes to the acts. I believe we're starting with a repeat performance.