Within 36 hours of launching a website asking for public input, Alberta's Associate Ministry of Red Tape had 1,400 submissions. By mid-August, the associate ministry was up to over 2,400 submissions.
“There seems to be quite an appetite for us to get at this. I still think that there's a lot more to come in,” Associate Minister Grant Hunter told the Gazette in a recent interview about the associate ministry.
Completely new to the province, the associate ministry formed with the changing of government earlier this year. Hunter said the goal is to reduce regulatory burden in Alberta by one-third within four years.
“We also want to become the lowest compliance cost jurisdiction in North America,” Hunter said.
“If there's a cost to regulation that a business has to incur, then that's what is called compliance cost.”
Hunter said the ministry is trying to find best practises in the world and apply them in Alberta.
“We want to make sure that we're competitive with especially places like Texas, North Dakota, Saskatchewan – these resource-heavy areas that are competing for investment, and we want to be competitive with them. So the foreign investors say, we want to go back to Alberta.”
The associate ministry, which falls under the treasury board and finance ministry, relies on both internal and external mechanism to help reduce red tape in the province.
“We're asking each of the departments, each of the ministries to be anxiously engaged in this process – to look within to be able to find out, are they being efficient and effective. And we're also asking for public input as well. So we will ask for businesses to give us input.”
Hunter said he started the process of looking into reducing red tape when he was a member of the opposition and saw the success other jurisdictions had when they started taking red tape seriously.“Those jurisdictions that did their studies that show that they were able to increase GDP by anywhere between 0.8 per cent to 1.4 per cent,” Hunter said.
While he noted there is nothing inherently wrong with regulations, Hunter said the province needs to start asking why they are writing regulations.
“We need to actually write legislation that will affect the bad actors and it will free up our job creators that are the other 90 or 99 per cent,” Hunter said.
St. Albert MLA Marie Renaud said she wants to make sure the ministry is working in a transparent way so Albertans know clearly what the ministry is up to.
“I'm sure there's tons of regulation that's really dated, that causes more problems than it solves that should be gone absolutely ... but at least make sure that there’s transparency,” Renaud said.
But Renaud said she is concerned about deregulation simply for the sake of creating fewer government rules. The MLA said it is important to do proper consultation on deregulation so you are able to discover unintended consequences that could result from the removal of the red tape. Renaud also noted that the removal of some red tape may require a different level of oversight to be introduced to allow for accountability.
