The idea behind the one-for-one rule is that at the federal level, there is something called the “standard cost model”: For every regulation that is introduced, regulators try to eliminate one that places a similar cost or burden on businesses.
This is important, because we don't do a very good job in Canada of getting rid of regulations that are no longer necessary, that may be redundant or that may no longer really work. It's a way to keep the folks who create the regulations looking at the whole pile of them and figuring out which ones are still important: Which ones should we keep, and which ones should we get rid of because they are less important and they are a burden? Maybe we can move in a different direction. That's the idea.
It's not that you have to be strict about it; it's about getting the people who create the regulations to think differently about regulations—not just creating them and creating them, but managing them and thinking a little bit more: Do we really need a regulation, or can we manage this through some other means? Is this regulation that has been sitting here for 30 years, but that nobody really ever looks at anymore, still necessary? That's what we don't do well in Canada.
This is just a means of putting those constraints on the regulators and forcing them to think a little bit more about the overall picture of the regulatory burden on businesses. Every department can argue that every regulation on its own is important, but nobody thinks about the whole burden and the impact that it has on what people are going to do.
The fact that almost two-thirds of small business owners—