That's fine. Thank you.
I will speak to them and I think you have them in both official languages, so they can be distributed.
Regulatory modernization can be described as both excellence or competitiveness. Certainly, those terms were used interchangeably by the external advisory committee. It really includes three important things. One is red tape reduction. The second important thing is supporting innovation. Often new innovations require some regulatory support and doing that in a nimble way would be consistent with regulatory excellence. Finally, of course, there is maintaining high levels of health, safety and environmental protection, which are things that Canadians care about. Those would be the three things—a minimum of red tape, support for innovation and maintaining excellence in the outcomes that Canadians care about—that would be consistent with regulatory competitiveness or excellence.
In our view, this requires a sustained culture shift within government. The good news is that COVID-19 has created some of those conditions for the culture shift with more nimbleness and more focus, for example, on outcomes of regulation. However, there are some challenges in this regard. One of the challenges is that there's not a lot of great data available—particularly data from government—on either the cumulative regulatory burden or our progress towards reducing that burden. With the lack of data comes a lack of accountability. There's also a lack of reporting.
When we look at what data are available, the World Bank is one that's often cited, and Canada gets very low marks on that. To give you a sense of the data challenges there, for example for permitting, our rankings are based on a sole warehouse in Toronto. That establishes our ranking and how long it takes to get a permit and it establishes the ranking for the whole country.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has done some of its own research. You can see some of that in the report I have cited in the presentation. I'll run through a couple of stats to help you understand the challenge from that perspective. The cost of regulation to businesses of all sizes in Canada is now $39 billion a year. This estimate was done earlier this year. It doesn't include the cost of complying with COVID-19 regulations, which we know is significant for a small business. Of course, not all of that cost is red tape. The estimate of the amount of it that could be eliminated without affecting the outcomes we all care about is about $11 billion a year or about 28% of that total cost.
The other thing we find is that these costs are very regressive. The smaller the business, the higher the per-employee cost. I think that is something worth paying attention to.
Another finding from the report is that nearly two-thirds of businesses are now telling us they would not advise their children to start a business in Canada based on the current cost of regulation. This is up 15 percentage points from the last time we did this survey in 2017. Nearly nine out of 10 are saying that this regulatory burden adds significant stress to their lives. Eight out of 10 are saying excessive regulation significantly reduces productivity.
In terms of recommendations going forward, I think regulatory excellence is a huge opportunity for Canada to be more competitive and also to reduce the barriers for small business. We have three recommendations.
One is to make this a priority right across government, leveraging the new-found agility from some of the things we did differently in COVID-19. For example, approving a vaccine in a year was something that would normally take the better part of a decade.
The second recommendation is measurement. We need better measurement. Both British Columbia and Manitoba provide good models that the federal government could look at. We recommend reducing that burden by 25%.
Finally, we recommend setting up a place where citizens can highlight red tape, such as a digital portal where they could go. Those examples would be distributed to deputies who could take action on them.
Thank you very much.