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First in a three-part series on how Canada’s heavy regulatory burden is choking competitiveness.

Ask Jean-Francois Boursier about running a business under Canadian regulations and he will likely tell you a tale of two paint shops.

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ADF Group Inc., where Boursier is chief financial officer, needed to build identical painting facilities on either side of the border: one at its steel fabricating plant in Terrebonne, Que., and the other in Great Falls, Mont.

The approval process for the Montana project kicked off in 2016 and it was authorized a year later. The Quebec shop was a different story.

“Between the time we started and the time we ended up with our final environmental permit was about two years,” Boursier said. “These are twin paint shops — the two of them, identical, built at roughly the same time. I’d say we paid between a half-million and a million dollars more in Quebec on a $9-million investment. That’s not counting the frustration.”

Much of the recent debate about Canada’s competitiveness has focused on whether Ottawa should chase U.S. corporate tax reductions by slashing its own rates. But Boursier’s tale illustrates a less often considered, but growing concern about their respective regulatory frameworks — the mass of government rules that protect the public when they’re working well, but unnecessarily hinder business development, supply chains and operations when they’re not.

“Canadian businesses have a very legitimate issue on tax competitiveness, but we don’t just compete on taxation right? We also compete via regulation,” said Craig Alexander, Deloitte Canada’s chief economist. “And in Canada, we have significant areas where regulation is impeding competitiveness.”

Fixing those regulations is a longstanding problem that some say assumed greater urgency after U.S. President Donald Trump introduced a package of measures he touted as “the most far-reaching regulatory reform in history.”