Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate on behalf of the P.C. Party of Canada. Let me first congratulate the member for Surrey Central on his Bill C-202, an act to amend the Statutory Instruments Act, disallowance procedure for statutory instruments.
For our viewers, let me repeat the intent of the bill. This enactment would establish the statutory disallowance procedure that would be applicable to all statutory instruments, subject to review and scrutiny by the Standing Joint Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations. In so doing, this enactment would ensure that parliament would have the opportunity to disallow any statutory instrument made pursuant to authority delegated by parliament or made by or under the authority of the cabinet. In other words, the committee would have the right to really have some teeth and scrutinize the regulations that come before the committee.
This disallowance procedure is very necessary to hold the government accountable. Currently there is no provision to disallow badly flawed regulations.
We heard the member from the government side state that the committee could send to the government by resolution the suggestion or list of regulations that should be disallowed. Through the years I have been here, I have not experienced that.
I have had real experience and I have sat on the Standing Joint Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations. Back in 1997, when I first came to this House, I really found out how difficult it was to get rid of poorly crafted regulations, thousands of regulations, that came before the committee. One thing I realized was we were looking at regulations not one or two years old, but three, four, five and six years old.
My own opinion is that the joint committee really has no teeth. In other words, because it takes so much time to scrutinize the regulations that come before committee, it takes years and years of work before anything can possibly happen.
If the House is to have some control over the thousands of regulations that are written, then a disallowance procedure is a must. Surely there must be some regulations that are unnecessary. At this time there is no method to disallow other than reporting back to the House. A case in point are the regulations pertaining to Bill C-68. Many of the regulations under that piece of legislation are unnecessary and need to be rejected.
Over the last 30 years we have seen government abuse the use of orders in council to approve all kinds of regulations with no formal scrutiny. In my opinion this is a pure abuse of power.
The government members say that authority is delegated to the government. Yes, I believe they do have lots of delegated power and authority, but all authority needs to be scrutinized at all times.
Today in a world of framework and enabling legislation, which seems to be the kind of legislation we experience daily in this House, legislators have very little control over legislation. As the House knows, it is still the norm that ministers rarely table any regulations with the standing committees. The exception to that is the immigration committee which I sit on. In the last month we literally scrutinized Bill C-11 regulations, which was rather unusual to say the least.
Let me talk a little about regulations per se. As members know, regulations cover all areas of our life and they impact all of us daily. On the fiscal side certainly, regulations are a form of hidden taxation. As they raise the cost of doing business, Canadians end up paying relatively higher prices for goods and services.
They also kill jobs by making Canada less competitive. In fact on the agricultural side, farmers are always complaining, rightly so, about the new taxes they have to pay. Again a lot of it is assessment by regulations.
The government does not always consider whether a new regulation will meet its goal, whether it is the most cost effective method of protecting the public or whether it will have unintended side effects. I guess that is why we have a joint committee to scrutinize regulations, but again if that joint committee does not have real teeth to deal with bad regulations then it really is just exercise in futility.
In some cases less costly alternatives such as negotiated compliance are not considered. A regulatory environment that subjects the economy to regulations only where and when needed is critical to the creation of a vital and vibrant economy. However the regulatory burden imposed on Canadian business acts as a costly impediment on the productivity growth that is essential to an improved standard of living. We hear very little about regulations that impact the economy on the economic side.
The view of the PC Party is that governments should work toward the co-operative elimination of excessive regulations, overlap, duplication and waste in the allocation of responsibilities between the federal, provincial and territorial governments. We are probably the most over-governed and over-legislated country in the world. We love to create legislation without reviewing old legislation. A member from the opposition side asked why a lot of our bills did not have sunset clauses. That is an excellent idea.
Governments should implement an annual red tape budget which would detail the estimated total cost of each individual regulation, including the enforcement cost to the government and the compliance cost to individual citizens and businesses.
Governments should also establish regulatory service standards and devote the resources needed to meet those standards, thus ensuring they do not result in undue pressure being placed upon regulators to improve questionable products.
Governments should also work toward ensuring that user fees which are tied to regulatory approval are limited to no more than the cost of actually providing that approval. Further, those fees should be used to improve services allowing for greater regulatory approval.
In light of the effect it has on the economy of the country and on the lives of people, does it not make sense that all new regulations be scrutinized by the standing committees of the House? That at least should be a minimum requirement. We would require new regulations to be written in a way that is simple and easy to understand. All new regulations should be scrutinized by the standing committees, as I have just indicated.
A Progressive Conservative government would ensure that all proposed regulations are put on the departmental website for 30 days to allow for greater public awareness before they are published in the Canada Gazette .
In closing, regulations impact us daily but the problem is we really do not have an effective vehicle to scrutinize regulations and get rid of the ones that should not be there and that in effect do nothing for the country or for us as people of the country. The PC Party of Canada supports Bill C-202.