Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today and speak on my colleague's motion.
The streamlining of regulations has certainly for many years been a popular political topic in Canada. Governments have been talking for years and in spite of that relatively little has happened in streamlining and reducing overlap in regulations between federal and provincial governments.
As far back as 1978, Prime Minister Trudeau entrusted the Economic Council of Canada with the task of reviewing government regulations in certain sectors. Among other things, the study was to focus on the relevance and impact of regulations. The
council proceeded to look at a number of sectors, notably telecommunications and occupational health and safety. This seems to show, as my colleague mentioned, that over-regulation is certainly a problem in many sectors other than the energy sector.
The council generally recommended that routine regulations and agreements be codified and made public at all levels of government. The aim of this recommendation was to ensure a clearer grasp and understanding of the scope of regulations.
In the second recommendation, pertaining to products and development projects, the council recommended that in instances when responsibility for a particular sector was shared between the federal government and the provinces, a single department should be assigned responsibility for co-ordinating the activities of participating departments. Of course that is the single-window approach that the previous speaker mentioned. Businesses would thus waste less time than they do when they have to deal with all the departments of government.
In September 1984 Prime Minister Mulroney announced that he was setting up a ministerial task force to review all federal government programs with a view to making them simpler and more accessible. Nineteen study teams composed of public and private sector individuals were formed and mandated to review 989 programs accounting for expenditures of $92 billion. One of the study teams focused on regulatory programs.
Not specifically mentioned in the program review appended to the report is a list of federal programs considered problematic in terms of provincial relations. Problems identified had to do either with jurisdiction or overlap or with matters of information, policy, et cetera. Of the 134 registered programs identified, 86, or 66 per cent, were categorized as problematic in at least one province or territory, while 27, or 20 per cent, were found to overlap with provinces or territories. The task force observed the highest incidence of overlap in the case of environmental programs.
The study team reviewing regulatory programs concluded among other things that there was evidence of ongoing significant overlap and duplication between the two levels of government. It recommended that initiatives be adopted to improve the regulatory process. Specifically, it recommended that a study of overlap in the environmental sector be conducted. Moreover, the task force called for an immediate review of the overall burden imposed by the various levels of government. It concluded that Canadians were over-regulated and that it was important to cut down the number of regulatory levels.
So members can see that this is certainly not a new subject in Canada for political debate. It has been ongoing for years and years. It is the general consensus, I think, with all parties in Canada that all sectors are over-regulated. As we mentioned, today the energy sector is certainly one sector that is over-regulated.
In the spring of 1986 the government adopted a federal regulatory reform strategy. It called for all new regulations to be subjected to economic and social cost analysis. The public would henceforth be informed and involved in the regulatory process. For one thing, the process would not take so long. Furthermore, the current regulatory process would be streamlined to improve efficiency. These are very familiar terms, which we have heard many times.
One of the 10 guidelines for reform deals directly with the issue that interests us here. In the view of existing regulatory burden and the need to eliminate needless duplication, co-operation with the provinces was deemed to be a government priority.
To prove how serious it was, the government moved in the summer of 1986 to create the ministry of state for privatization and regulatory affairs. Although each department continued to be responsible for its own regulations, the office of privatization and regulatory affairs was put in charge of promoting the government's regulatory objectives.
With respect to program efficiency, considerable progress has been made since the strategy's adoption. For example, the average timeframe for regulatory approval has dropped substantially since the development of this office. According to the office, better inspection and enforcement mechanisms have been developed and overlapping regulations have been eliminated, at least to some degree.
Since 1987 the government has also released an annual federal regulatory plan. This publication gives an overview of forthcoming regulations. In each instance the purpose of the regulation is mentioned, along with the impact it will have.
The federal regulatory plan also includes a regulatory evaluation plan. In 1988 the office published a paper listing all of the regulatory reviews and reforms undertaken by different departments. In all, 77 initiatives were identified. In 1991 the office was disbanded and responsibility for regulatory affairs was assigned to the Treasury Board.
After this general history and overview, we are still left with the same problem in the energy sector as well as in many other sectors. The reality of the 1990s is that we do not want complex and bureaucratic solutions to the problem of over-regulation. We need to adopt a different philosophy. Our primary focus has to be to simplify and eliminate regulations wherever possible. For those that remain we need to share the administrative responsibility with other partners. While quality and service have to remain a primary objective, we expect there will have to be a significant shift in the degree and type of interaction between the federal and provincial governments that create these regulations, regulatory boards that oversee them, and the industry that must comply with them and in some instances be burdened by them.
The best way to examine the effects regulations have on a company is to look at a specific example of what I have been talking about up to this point. The National Energy Board was faced this year with an application by Foothills Pipe Lines Limited to construct the Wild Horse pipeline, which is an interconnecting link within Alberta from the Nova System to the proposed Altamont pipeline at Wild Horse on the Montana border.
The nature of the application and Foothills' approach to the National Energy Board raises fundamental questions with respect to the approval process for future pipeline facility expansion. Foothills' application stretched the limits of conventional National Energy Board facilities approval requirements in several important areas.
Under established approval procedures, a pipeline applicant must demonstrate that the facilities are needed, that there is a reasonable expectation they will be used for a significant portion of their useful life, and that tolls will be paid. The requirements are manifested in the demonstration of five aspects of supporting evidence: adequate supply in Canada to maintain incremental deliveries over time; a market assessment of sustainable demand for incremental gas volume; firm shipper contractual commitments for the new capacity for an extended term; specific contract market commitments to purchase the incremental gas; and specific dedicated supply to service these market commitments. The last two have been subject to some relaxation in other recent applications as long as a binding, firm shipper contract for the new capacity was in place. Where the application represents an expansion to existing facilities, rolled in tolling treatment has almost universally applied.
That is what Foothills was facing in the regulatory process in getting approval for this rather insignificant pipeline extension. What Foothills was seeking was pre-approval and certification to build facilities without demonstrable market support. As an alternative to outright approval, Foothills indicated that it would accept a conditional certificate that would require some further demonstration of shipper contractual commitments prior to construction.
As time is short, I will not go into more detail on that specific proposal. The point is that when the gas market was hot and Foothills wanted to build the extension on the pipeline to service that market the regulatory procedure was so complex and cumbersome that the market in reality was dried up before the regulatory approval system could be put into effect.
Therefore, in effect what we are talking about today is the streamlining of this regulatory process.