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Results: 1 - 15 of 52
Laura Jones
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Laura Jones
2021-04-13 11:18
That's fine. Thank you.
I will speak to them and I think you have them in both official languages, so they can be distributed.
Regulatory modernization can be described as both excellence or competitiveness. Certainly, those terms were used interchangeably by the external advisory committee. It really includes three important things. One is red tape reduction. The second important thing is supporting innovation. Often new innovations require some regulatory support and doing that in a nimble way would be consistent with regulatory excellence. Finally, of course, there is maintaining high levels of health, safety and environmental protection, which are things that Canadians care about. Those would be the three things—a minimum of red tape, support for innovation and maintaining excellence in the outcomes that Canadians care about—that would be consistent with regulatory competitiveness or excellence.
In our view, this requires a sustained culture shift within government. The good news is that COVID-19 has created some of those conditions for the culture shift with more nimbleness and more focus, for example, on outcomes of regulation. However, there are some challenges in this regard. One of the challenges is that there's not a lot of great data available—particularly data from government—on either the cumulative regulatory burden or our progress towards reducing that burden. With the lack of data comes a lack of accountability. There's also a lack of reporting.
When we look at what data are available, the World Bank is one that's often cited, and Canada gets very low marks on that. To give you a sense of the data challenges there, for example for permitting, our rankings are based on a sole warehouse in Toronto. That establishes our ranking and how long it takes to get a permit and it establishes the ranking for the whole country.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has done some of its own research. You can see some of that in the report I have cited in the presentation. I'll run through a couple of stats to help you understand the challenge from that perspective. The cost of regulation to businesses of all sizes in Canada is now $39 billion a year. This estimate was done earlier this year. It doesn't include the cost of complying with COVID-19 regulations, which we know is significant for a small business. Of course, not all of that cost is red tape. The estimate of the amount of it that could be eliminated without affecting the outcomes we all care about is about $11 billion a year or about 28% of that total cost.
The other thing we find is that these costs are very regressive. The smaller the business, the higher the per-employee cost. I think that is something worth paying attention to.
Another finding from the report is that nearly two-thirds of businesses are now telling us they would not advise their children to start a business in Canada based on the current cost of regulation. This is up 15 percentage points from the last time we did this survey in 2017. Nearly nine out of 10 are saying that this regulatory burden adds significant stress to their lives. Eight out of 10 are saying excessive regulation significantly reduces productivity.
In terms of recommendations going forward, I think regulatory excellence is a huge opportunity for Canada to be more competitive and also to reduce the barriers for small business. We have three recommendations.
One is to make this a priority right across government, leveraging the new-found agility from some of the things we did differently in COVID-19. For example, approving a vaccine in a year was something that would normally take the better part of a decade.
The second recommendation is measurement. We need better measurement. Both British Columbia and Manitoba provide good models that the federal government could look at. We recommend reducing that burden by 25%.
Finally, we recommend setting up a place where citizens can highlight red tape, such as a digital portal where they could go. Those examples would be distributed to deputies who could take action on them.
Thank you very much.
Benjamin Dachis
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Benjamin Dachis
2021-04-13 11:25
Vancouver's cost of housing restrictions are by far the largest in Canada, resulting in a 50% extra cost that's on par with similar studies measuring the extra costs in places like Manhattan. At the other end of the spectrum, home-buying costs in Montreal have stayed pretty close to construction costs.
Why are housing costs so high elsewhere in Canada? We find that restrictions in extra costs on building new housing such as zoning regulations, development charges—which don't apply in Quebec, by the way—and limits on land development are dramatically increasing the price of housing.
What about small businesses? The World Bank conducts an annual “Doing Business” survey that's become the global standard of every country's regulatory and permitting burden. As Ms. Jones mentioned, among the 10 major measures of business regulation and process, the World Bank includes the process time to obtain a construction permit for a small business looking to develop a warehouse in Toronto. This is the only Canadian city that the World Bank considers, and I'll get back to how to fix that oversight that Ms. Jones mentioned.
It would take 248 days. It takes 28 days in South Korea, 36 in Singapore and 65 in Denmark or Finland. Major U.S. cities like New York and Los Angeles see approvals within two to three months, yet Toronto is over eight months.
How do we fix this? To expedite approvals, cities should increase their use of e-permitting. E-permitting is an online platform that connects all relevant building permit and planning processes. Such systems already have a proven track record of success across the globe and are starting to gain traction here. Leading by example, governments should also enact policies that set certain design and development standards for their own projects. The federal government could set an e-permitting system requirement and standard in conjunction with willing provinces.
The problem with e-permitting is not technological, but it is training people currently working in and with today's permitting system, both government and industry. Better training can be funded, in part, by the federal government.
However, e-permitting is just a technical workaround of convoluted permit rules. It addresses the symptom but not the cause. The fundamental root cause is too many different permit requirements for development approvals. Much of this is in the hands of provincial and municipal governments, so what can Ottawa do?
First, the federal government could require that infrastructure grants such as for transit or highways only go to areas in which development is expedited. For example, Ontario can designate affected residential or employment lands as subject to what is called the “development permit system”. This system eliminates multiple application streams and sets strict timelines for approvals. Ottawa can require that provinces adopt that or a similar approval process for nearby areas when they get a federal grant.
However, as Ms. Jones noted, the World Bank study only applies to the City of Toronto. What about other places like York Region or Ottawa? The World Bank only measures the permitting cost in the largest municipal government in the country, unless the government specifically requests that the World Bank take on a subnational study. The federal government could pass a motion asking the World Bank to apply its cost of doing business study across the country.
With that, I look forward to your questions.
View Julie Vignola Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you very much.
I'm going to talk about supply. I find it extremely interesting to hear you talk about innovation and respect for ideas.
Your businesses and customers use the buyandsell.gc.ca website to do procurement business with the government. I believe many of your clients have used this site over the years. Is this site up to date enough to protect the data?
Mr. Balsilie, do you think the buyandsell.gc.ca website is effective, innovative and up-to-date?
Jim Balsillie
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Jim Balsillie
2020-05-25 15:45
I haven't used the site, so I can't really provide you with a thoughtful answer. I'm sorry I can't comment on it.
View Julie Vignola Profile
BQ (QC)
Mr. Paterson, your company probably used the site, given the changes in productivity and so on. Is this site innovative?
David Paterson
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David Paterson
2020-05-25 15:46
I can tell you that I had occasion to use it just recently, because were participating in a research program that the government put forward to improve the site. They asked users to walk through different scenarios and give feedback on how easy or hard it was to use.
In particular, we looked at PPE. If you were to try to procure masks, visors or other things from the government, we looked at how easy it would be to go in and learn about those things.
I think we found some really good improvements, and we always constantly need to improve.
View Julie Vignola Profile
BQ (QC)
I see.
So the site is not as effective for current needs. Did I understand you correctly?
David Paterson
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David Paterson
2020-05-25 15:47
We found some very good ways to improve it. I give the government credit for going out and looking for ways to improve it.
View Brian Masse Profile
NDP (ON)
View Brian Masse Profile
2020-05-21 18:23
Okay. You'll be happy to know that I did google that while I was waiting for my turn here.
I want to follow up with something from yesterday which I thought was important. It was from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. I do want your opinion on this.
What I found interesting about the testimony last night from Mr. Holland, which was good, was it showed that it considers itself—and probably is—the gold seal or standard of registering Internet sites using the .ca brand. I'm fairly naive in the sense that I thought that the Government of Canada.... When I hear “.ca” I think it really has some standards, but there is no follow up to the authenticity of the activity of those who actually have that brand later on. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
To me, part of cleaning up fraud, attacking fraud and preventing fraud is the preventative work. I just find it odd that you could then use a platform like yours later on to perhaps be the sounding board or the morphing of something that may be very real and true at first into fraud later on. Is there any involvement of Google with regard to screening any of that?
Colin McKay
View Colin McKay Profile
Colin McKay
2020-05-21 18:24
I am parsing what you just said. In terms of domain registry and actual geographic location, that process involves CIRA in the first step, and then ICANN, the international registry, secondarily.
For most websites, I think what you first turn to is actual criminal law enforcement, especially in cases of fraud, physical harm or misrepresentation.
View Brian Masse Profile
NDP (ON)
View Brian Masse Profile
2020-05-21 18:25
If I could just interrupt, they are overwhelmed right now.
I know you are going to get cut off, and my point is that we're overwhelmed and might need a more comprehensive solution, but thank you.
Thanks, Madam Chair.
View Majid Jowhari Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses for coming in and providing a lot of helpful information.
I'm going to start with CIRA.
Mr. Holland, you've indicated that roughly 2,000 .ca domains have been registered since the start of COVID-19. Can you share some statistics around the following: How many of them have been registered within Canada? Is it possible to register a domain from outside of Canada, and if so, how many have been registered? Also, with regard to these 2,000, you mentioned that most of them are legit. How many of them have you found to be not legit?
Byron Holland
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Byron Holland
2020-05-20 15:47
There's an important policy we have in place, which I think merits attention vis-à-vis your question, and that's our Canadian presence requirements. All .ca domain names must be registered by somebody or an organization with a legal tie to Canada, and so every single domain name is bound to Canadian legal jurisdiction and Canadian law.
In terms of the domain names that have been registered with COVID-related terms—and we use a fairly wide search when we do that to make sure we capture them—we've had, as I mentioned, just over 2,000.
I'm going to ask our corporate counsel, Albert Chang, who's also here, to comment regarding some of the specifics in terms of the reviews we've done that have turned up suspect domain names.
Albert.
Albert Chang
View Albert Chang Profile
Albert Chang
2020-05-20 15:48
As Byron mentioned, we do a daily review of all the COVID-19-related domain name registrations, and the specific terms that we're looking at are “COVID”, “coronavirus” and “pandemic”. To date, since January, we have seen 2,000 of these COVID-19-related domain names. We do a review every day, and it's 2,041 as of yesterday.
Out of these 2,000 domain names, we've identified only 20 that do not have a Canadian address. Under an autoprocess called the registrant information validation process, we email those individuals, those domain name holders, and ask them to confirm their identity and to confirm that they meet CIRA's Canadian presence requirements. In circumstances—
View Majid Jowhari Profile
Lib. (ON)
So roughly 21 out of the 2,000 did not pass your test?
Mr. Albert Chang: That's correct.
Mr. Majid Jowhari: Once you identify that, what is the next step? How do you inform the registrant that they're not allowed to operate? Also, how is an individual who is now trying to access the .ca domain informed that it is a fraudulent domain?
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