Does Canada Have Too Much Business Regulation and Red Tape?

Dave and Benjamin Tal discuss why many Canadian businesses feel overwhelmed by regulation.

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You know what’s interesting? When you, when you think about Canada, this great country of ours, and you think about the nation building, we go back to putting the railroad in, and of course, that’s the thing that really got us going most. We could never do that now because of all the regulations, of course, that we’ve got province to province and on a federal basis, et cetera.

The red tape is overwhelming most businesses. Most small businesses can’t even keep up with it.

Absolutely. So of course, when you look at the global picture, there is a lot to complain about, but we are, we live in a wonderful country, in a rich country, free country. We have so much potential. But clearly, we have to make it easier to do business in this country. The red tape is killing us. Taxation, killing us. We have to wake up and basically use this crisis as an opportunity to focus on ourself and see what we can do in terms of potential growth, and we can do a lot.

Yeah, no, I agree with all of that. In fact, it’s interesting. When I speak to the small business community, I honestly get more complaints now about the regulatory environment than I do about the taxation environment for the first time in my life.

And it should be easy to solve, no?

Yes, it should be.

We know, uh, when Trump, uh, you know, took power, there was so much momentum about removing the, you know, inter-provincial tariffs. Nothing is happening now.

We’re not even… Are we even discussing it?

Exactly. Remember, there was so much focus on that.

They were meeting every two minutes, and disappeared. So let’s do that. That’s easy. Now, we should not exaggerate how much it will add, but at the margin, even a few decimal points will, I’ll take it

Absolutely. And you know, the thing is, much like we talked about rent control, most regulations are very well-intended and a lot are well thought through, but cumulatively now they have overwhelmed our economy and overwhelmed the business community.

Absolutely, no question about it, and we have to get rid of it. We have to speed up the way we do business. We cannot complain about productivity without looking at this red tape. They are connected.