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Sometimes red tape manifests itself in the form of small pebbles such as incomprehensible tax rules, excessively long mandatory Statistics Canada surveys, and government “service” agents who can’t answer compliance questions. Other times red tape takes the form of boulders in the river that can threaten the very existence of a business — inspections at the border holding up a retailer’s goods for weeks in the crucial pre-Christmas sales period; years of nebulous, expensive process to get to yes or no on a proposed project; and auditors issuing heavy-handed fines for trivial infractions such as the wrong font size.

None of this makes us safer, happier or wealthier.

A recent report by the Federal Finance Minister’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth rightly puts a lot of emphasis on the need for regulatory reform. To drive the point home, it includes data such as this gem: It takes 249 days to permit a new general construction project in Canada, which is 168 days longer than in the United States. The only country that did worse than Canada out of the 35 looked at was the Slovak Republic. And policy makers still wonder why our productivity lags our southern neighbours.

The Council calls for an independent, expert panel “to oversee a wide-ranging review of existing regulations.” That would be a good next step as long as the panel is willing to make bold recommendations and the government is willing to act on them.

Canada needs to get its river flowing again. The best way to do this is to get rid of the pebbles and boulders damming the river — and then put limits in place to stop excessive regulatory accumulation from happening again.

Laura Jones is Executive Vice-President and Chief Strategic Officer for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business