Thank you very much for the question.
At CME, we regularly connect with our members on the ground in their communities. We also have bodies called peer councils, which is where small groups of small and medium-sized manufacturer owner-operators can compare notes on business challenges and help each other work through them. It's really an interesting and unique model.
I get the opportunity to join some of these calls or conversations, and it's remarkable to me how much time is spent in those conversations not talking about dealing with a workforce issue, what they're doing to capture new customers or how they're managing new technology implementation. So many of those calls are about comparing notes on how they're navigating regulatory burden compliance requirements and other challenges with all levels of government. They don't always distinguish between a provincial requirement, a federal one and a municipal one, but between all three levels of government, it adds up and it takes so much of their time.
There's a cost to their businesses, of course, in complying with these. There's the opportunity cost of all the other things they could be doing to grow their businesses. It's the one thing when we survey our members, which we do very regularly, to ask for their biggest concerns and what public policy changes would help them grow their business. Regulatory burden is almost always in one or two when we do those surveys. We consistently hear it, and the burden does continue to proliferate.
That's not to say the one-for-one rule and other initiatives at all levels of government haven't helped manage it or tend to some of the more problematic regulations, but, as I stressed in my remarks, what our members want to see is not to fix one or two problematic regulations. I know that's the easiest place to start. Tell us what's wrong and we'll try to fix it. In the time you fix one, another dozen pop up that are maybe based on a consultation process that didn't quite integrate or learn from what industry had to say. It's other requirements that pop up through ministerial guidance, legislation or elsewhere that add a new burden in the 12 or 18 months it might take us to fix one.
As I said, our members are looking for governments to indicate not only that they understand this is a problem but that they're going to do systemic reform to try to fix these challenges for the long term.