Evidence of meeting #24 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was sandbox.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
Like any piece of legislation, there's parliamentary oversight to its usage, so this committee is one of the ways that oversight would be provided.
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
It's not set up exactly in that way, no.
Conservative
Tamara Jansen Conservative Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
The challenge we have as parliamentarians is how we decide what's in the public interest, especially because it's not defined in the bill.
Why isn't it defined in the bill? Why wouldn't they have made it very clear what is in the public interest?
Senior Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
“Public interest” is a term that's used quite commonly in other pieces of legislation, and it's not defined in that legislation either. It was a drafting decision that this would not be the place to define public interest.
Conservative
Tamara Jansen Conservative Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Would it make sense that, on behalf of Canadians, public interest would be defined so that we're not going to have any overreach on behalf of ministers who can make their own decisions as to what's in the public interest?
Senior Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
I can't comment on that. It's not defined in other pieces of legislation either.
Conservative
Tamara Jansen Conservative Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
I don't know if any of my colleagues have any other questions, but that's that's shocking to me, actually.
I have one more minute. Does anybody want to take that minute?
Go ahead, Mr. Patzer.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Is the one-year reporting requirement standard across other similar developed nations that use sandboxes?
Senior Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
Different countries have different regimes. For example, in Japan, they have a blanket sandbox regime that cabinet gets to decide, and there are no reporting requirements at all. The reporting requirements that we put into this piece of legislation are actually a fair bit more transparent than what other countries with similar types of sandbox legislation have.
Conservative
Jeremy Patzer Conservative Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, SK
Is there anybody who has a shorter reporting window, say, six months or quarterly?
Senior Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
Not that I'm aware of.
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
If I could add to that, in addition to that annual reporting—I failed to add this earlier—any time a new decision is made by a minister, they're also required to make their decision public as soon as it's feasibly possible. They need to provide information about how the decision was made, what the decision was and then also make public the information on how stakeholders can give feedback on the decision. There's the interim, more immediate part that happens minister by minister, and then there's the overall one-year report that will come to this committee, which is done by the President of the Treasury Board.
Conservative
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for appearing here today on an issue that is very important.
In my 10 years as a member of Parliament, I am often asked why the government is so slow and why we aren't innovative enough to address the issues of our time, with artificial intelligence being one of the examples of our day. How do you think these sandbox provisions, the regulatory framework, help the government be more innovative and more responsive in a timely manner to the problems of the day that Canadians expect us to tackle?
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
I do think sandboxes help in a couple of ways. Traditionally, to make a regulatory change, it can be quite a lengthy process, with 18 to 24 months being average. As I mentioned earlier, we are looking at the system itself. In the meantime, we're trying to find other avenues where we can make improvements.
Regulatory sandboxes make it easier to get an innovative technology or process tested in the Canadian market in a more temporary, time-restricted way. It's a faster authority to give, but it's often also scoped in to just test it out and collect data. Then, that information will be used in the future to make the permanent change in a much more effective way because you have that real-time data to make it.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you.
You said that you have done consultations with stakeholders. Can you describe the results of those consultations?
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
Yes. As mentioned, they happened in 2023. For the most part, stakeholders were quite positive and excited about this potential as a way to be more innovative and more agile and to get things to the market more quickly. There were a couple of concerns raised around, for example, transparency and the ability to maintain regulatory oversight during the sandbox. Some of those concerns informed the guardrails and the policies that were put in place in response, so they really helped to ensure that any of those concerns had mitigating measures up front.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you.
Just talking about the limits on the duration—we're talking about the efficiency and effectiveness of these sandbox projects—how would a regulatory framework or a sandbox project be managed with time? How are the scope and the length of a project established? How do we know that we have enough data? How do we know when to stop it and move on to the next phase?
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
Currently, there's a three-year maximum for the regulatory sandbox. That was really designed to be a bit of a middle ground—especially for some sectors that are quite complicated—to get a sandbox in place, to get a data collection method in place and to give enough time to test something without it going too long. It's really designed not to be really prescriptive because, as you can imagine, the realities of different sectors are quite different.
Then there's a maximum three-year extension available, and that's really intended to allow a transition. For example, if a regulator ran a sandbox for three years and decided that it was definitely how they wanted to do things, they could extend it to make it permanent without a regulator having to go back to the old way and come back to the new way again. We're trying to avoid any additional burden on industry as we do these.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you.
Lastly, I'll ask whether there are any exemptions to what gets tabled in the House by the minister or the President of the Treasury Board in terms of which regulatory sandboxes are used—out of national interest or things like that.
When we're talking about transparency, how transparent is this process to Parliament?
Executive Director, Red Tape Reduction Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
All regulatory sandboxes must be included in that annual report. If there are details about sensitive business proprietary information, those pieces might have to be removed, but all regulatory sandboxes will be included in the annual report.
Liberal
Marie-Hélène Gaudreau Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Let's go back to the definition of certain elements.
First of all, of course it's nice to say that we'll be able to act quickly. There are unnecessary steps, so we can be pleased that we will essentially streamline the entire public service workforce. That's true. However, it's wishful thinking to say that we're going to make a 180‑degree turn with a machine that big.
It's being said that it has to be done in the public interest, but there's no precise definition. “Public interest” can be very elastic. We can certainly say it's in the public interest, but whose public are we talking about? How? To what extent? How will you determine, in a given case, that it truly is in the public interest?
