Mr. Speaker, I am going to have to speak rather quickly in order to talk about everything that could be relevant to the question. I would like to revisit a question I raised in the House in October 2012, when I said the following:
Mr. Speaker, the economic recovery is still fragile and, yesterday, instead of announcing tangible solutions to support SMEs, the minister hauled out of mothballs his worn-out promise to reduce red tape, which has not produced any results in six years.
Yesterday's announcement certainly cannot be called a recovery plan. It is nothing more than a normal goal for a modern country, and it does not hide the lack of a real vision to help our SMEs and stimulate the country's economy.
We are waiting for a real plan for SMEs. What is the minister waiting for to come up with one?
I would like to revisit this important question. I will now share a few highlights of the response given by the Minister of State for Small Business and Tourism. First he congratulated me on my appointment, and I thank him for that. Then he went on to say, “I have been waiting since April to be asked a question about entrepreneurship.”
Let me quickly tell the minister that that is not true, because I had already put questions to him regarding excessive fees for credit cards weeks and months before, but the minister had not bothered answering my questions.
The minister then said, “For us, entrepreneurship is a priority, not just today but every day.” Again, this is a kind of cynicism that, unfortunately, is very prevalent in this government. It also appropriates economic issues as though not all members of this House were hoping to see the Canadian economy get firmly back on track.
The minister added, “That is why we are reducing the amount of paperwork that governments impose on entrepreneurs.” What a surprise, he used the plural and said “governments”. Why? Is the federal government preparing a plan that will impose standards on the provincial governments? We do not really know, but there is still not even a hint of a plan for small and medium-size businesses.
The next day, my colleague, the industry critic, said, “We want to make things easier for our SMEs, but the the application of random principles like the abolition of a rule before creating another seems much more like improvisation. This is not an economic recovery plan.”
On the government's website, in a January 2012 document entitled Cutting Red Tape and Freeing Business to Grow, we can read the following under the heading “Message From the Minister of State (Small Business and Tourism)”: “This is why we are proposing to give the Office of the Auditor General of Canada the mandate of reviewing and reporting on the government's progress in reducing regulatory administrative burden through its One-for-One Rule...”.
Plus one minus one equals zero. We cannot reduce by adding one rule and taking away another. Yet this is the basis for the minister's announcement in the introduction to this document, which has some good points. So we are talking about the Red Tape Reduction Commission that worked on this issue. Why did the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology not study this matter? Why was that mandate given to a committee outside of Parliament?
Some very good people sit on that committee, including Bernard Bélanger, the president and chairman of the board of Premier Tech. There are essential recommendations on Web 3.0. That is very important, because if we integrate Web 3.0 properly, we could at last see small and medium-size businesses reduce their paperwork. However, we do not really know how this could be achieved.
However, on the website of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, there is an explanation of the administrative reforms. These reforms are broad—and they are referred to as highlights—and so many requests will be made to regulatory bodies, that I am afraid we will have red tape on the red tape related to the process designed to reduce red tape. On the face of it, it really looks like a mess. Therefore, we need answers.
This evening, we have four minutes, and I hope someone on the other side of the House will be able to give us some real answers about how red tape will be reduced.