Industry committee  I guess what I would say is that in my general remarks I spoke to the architecture of regulatory reform within government. I'd really like to double down on that and impress upon this committee what instilling a culture of continuous improvement starts with, and I gave the elemen

Industry committee  For small businesses, it's simply so that they get payment in a timely fashion and that there should not be undue delays in receiving payment. For some of our small contractors, getting timely payment is the difference between making it and breaking it.

Industry committee  Yes. The concern that we have is related to what's happened in British Columbia. The current government has put in place—they call them community benefits agreements, but they're really project-labour agreement frameworks, where certain public projects will be designated as Build

Industry committee  My point is simply that the federal dollars shouldn't be going to provincial projects that the Government of British Columbia designates under their union-only procurement framework. The project should be tendered in a manner that keeps it open to non-union and non-affiliated uni

Industry committee  Yes, we're supportive of that. We signed a letter with something in the order of 20 different trade associations that made that pitch, so we're highly supportive of that. To the greatest extent possible, that kind of legislation should be harmonized across all jurisdictions as we

Industry committee  Yes, where it stands now is net zero. That's the way it's couched in policy, so it's essentially a one for one. If you introduce a new regulation, you have to find one somewhere else to come off the books. It creates—or it did in my time— a fair bit of competition between agencie

Industry committee  Yes. It's a friendly sort of competition. You do not want to be seen as an agency to be larding on more regulation than absolutely necessary to accomplish your public policy objectives.

Industry committee  In B.C., from 2001 through 2005, there was actually a minister of state for deregulation who had a secretariat to put in place the accounting regime and database that tracks regulation from year to year. A lot came out in the first four years, as I mentioned in my remarks, and th

Industry committee  The last number was 49%.

Industry committee  Yes, there was an overall measure of the quantum of regulation on the books within government that took place. The baseline was originally 2001—

Industry committee  That is correct.

Industry committee  That is correct.

Industry committee  That's right.

Industry committee  Yes, there's a recent report from the World Economic Forum that places Canada's competitiveness amongst 140 countries at 12th overall, but for the burden of regulation, we're 53rd.

Industry committee  That's correct.