Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee for allowing representatives of the Public Service Alliance of Canada to appear before you this morning.
My name is Chris Aylward. I'm the national executive vice-president for PSAC.
PSAC represents public service workers who provide a broad range of regulatory, inspection, and enforcement services for Canadians. Our members protect Canadian consumers, and work in the fields of health and safety, food safety, transportation safety, and environmental protection, among others. They are proud of the work they do to protect Canadians.
Our major issue with Bill C-21, an act to control the administrative burden that regulations impose on businesses, is that it is completely unnecessary. If members of Parliament and senators have passed laws and created regulations, we have to assume that they believed those laws and regulations were created in the public interest. The stated purpose of Bill C-21, the so-called red tape reduction act, is to eliminate one regulation for every regulation created, the one-for-one rule. If regulations are no longer deemed to be in the public interest after due consideration and consultation, the regulators have always had the ability to amend or delete them. In fact, they have done so on a regular basis. There is absolutely no need for the one-for-one rule. Everything that it claims to do can already be done.
Bill C-21 is filled with loaded terms like “red tape” and “administrative burden”. Laws and their accompanying regulations are important safeguards to balance rights in a democratic society. We should be proud that they exist and not paint them as red tape.
Administrative burden means anything that is necessary to demonstrate compliance with a regulation, including the collecting, processing, reporting and retaining of information and the completing of forms.
Why should it be a burden to obey the laws of the land? Why should it be a burden to make sure our citizens are protected?
Regulations in Canada have helped make this country one of the safest and best places to live. Canadians depend on regulations to protect our water, food, health, and consumer goods. Regulations ensure the safety of the roads we drive on and the environment we live in. They keep financial institutions, telecom companies, and other businesses in check. In the case of financial regulation, Canada's economy was sheltered from the worst of the 2008 global economic meltdown because our bank regulations were tougher than those in jurisdictions like the United States. Those regulations paid off and protected Canadians from the economic devastation that almost ruined some other countries.
Canadians also rely on their governments to enforce those regulations. Today, that reliance is in jeopardy. Not only are regulations on the chopping block, so are the people who enforce them. Federal inspectors in all sectors have seen their numbers and enforcement power reduced through successive budget cuts and freezes. For the past two years, for example, regulatory positions have been eliminated in beef research, aircraft service and maintenance, food-borne pathogen research, microbiological and viral disease research, civil aviation programs and road safety, cereal analysis, and aquatic ecosystem management and biosphere analysis. We are relying more and more on corporate self-regulation to the detriment of Canadians' health and safety.
Not only is Bill C-21 unnecessary, it will not adequately protect Canadians. While the bill says that the one-for-one rule must not compromise public health, public safety, or the Canadian economy, this is insufficient. It compromises a broader category of issues that concern Canadians, such as consumer protection and environmental protection. It could mean, for example, that our current strong financial regulations won't be there to protect Canadians in the event of future economic crises.
The immunity clause, clause 8, while absolutely essential if this bill becomes law, makes us wonder again why this bill is even necessary in the first place. This clause says that no action will be taken if this legislation isn't applied and that no regulation is invalid by reason only of a failure to comply with the act. As we understand it, the proposed legislation foresees that there will be occasions when the government will decide that the act can't and won't apply. If that's the case, and regulations can already be amended or deleted, what is the point of Bill C-21?
We believe there must be transparency around which current regulations will be traded away for new regulations. This is suggested in clause 9. However, clause 9 doesn't meet the test of transparency. Public or stakeholder consultation must occur openly before regulations are scrapped, not simply contained in a report after the fact. Our members believe that it is more important to the Canadian people that they spend time to actually inspect and enforce non-compliance.
For instance, in February of this year, in the case of Western Canada Wilderness Committee v. Canada (Fisheries and Oceans), the Federal Court declared that the Minister of the Environment and the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans acted unlawfully in delaying, for several years, the production of recovery strategies for four at-risk species. These species were threatened by industrial development, including the proposed northern gateway pipeline and tanker route.
The department's reasons for not meeting their legal obligations were staff shortages and not enough capacity. Yet between 2010 and 2017, Environment Canada will have cut, or plan to cut 21% of their staff, some 338 employees from the climate change division alone. At Fisheries and Oceans, there has been a further 30% cut of the staff who were responsible for the Species at Risk Act and the recovery and protection of all aquatic species in Canada.
ln 2014 there will be 60% fewer ground meat inspections than there were in 2013 at CFIA. This means that there will be less checking of fat content, filler, and fraudulent species claims. There will be no inspection of cooking oils. Less than half of the independent food retailers inspected in 2013 will be inspected this year.
Just last week the Transportation Safety Board said that the federal government isn't doing enough to enforce proper safety practices by Canada's railways, airlines, and marine operations. The board also said that there was an imbalance between auditing processes versus traditional inspections.
We agree with the Transportation Safety Board, and we believe that the Canadian public would agree. There needs to be more emphasis on real inspection and enforcement, not just on safety management systems. We certainly don't believe it's in anyone's interest to have public service regulators spending their time looking for regulations to cut just to meet the terms of this unnecessary bill. That would really be an administrative burden.
Bill C-21 is just one aspect of how regulations to protect Canadians are being undermined. First you eliminate the people who enforce the regulations, and then when you can no longer enforce them, you eliminate the regulations.
ln summary, we believe that Bill C-21 is unnecessary. At worst it is a make-work project that will mean regulatory and enforcement officers will have to spend their valuable time within a context of shrinking resources aimlessly looking for regulations to cut.
Thank you for your time.