relieving the small business burden
Q What are the first tangible results you expect to see from this announcement?
Q There’s been a lot of discussion around the fact that business productivity in Canada lags that of the United States. Do you expect these new measures to help close the gap?
Last week, Tony Clement, president of the Treasury Board of Canada, visited a small distribution company in Mississauga, Ont. to announce Ottawa’s latest move to cut red tape for businesses in Canada. The new program, called the Red Tape Reduction Action Plan, will see Ottawa implement six systemic reforms and 90 department-specific reforms that were recommended by the government’s Red Tape Reduction Commission in January. The Financial Post’s John Shmuel sat down with Mr. Clement to ask how the new plan will help small businesses. This interview has been edited for length. For the full interview, please go to financialpost.com.
A What these reforms do, on a multi-track basis, is make sure that we’re changing the DNA of government when it comes to ensuring that the small-business impact of our decisions is taken seriously and that we try to mitigate the impact across the board wherever possible. That’s the intention. The impact for this will be that for small businesses across the country, they will have less burden. There will be less duplication when it comes to regulatory demands of government, there will be one-window approaches to information that is required. They will, as a result, devote less time and resources to meeting this administrative burden and more time focusing on their businesses. So that’s the ultimate approach of this and we’re using a number of different tools.
A Yes, I do. I think this is all designed to get people to create a new business, to grow the business, in addition to finding new markets. Part of the reason I was at Tandet Group [in Mississauga, Ont. to make the announcement] is because they do a lot of cross-border trucking with the United States. And one of our initiatives, one of the 90 initiatives we outline today, is ending the duplication of the cross-border red tape. So the example we used at Tandet this morning is, right now, if you’re a trucking company in Canada, in order to be a trusted trader and get across the border, you have to fill out a form in Canada and fill out a form in the United States. Now there’s going to be one form.
Q Do you plan to go beyond the current Red Tape Action plan to reduce paperwork even further for small businesses in Canada?
A I do. And, in fact, what we’re doing through my website at the Treasury Board is encouraging feedback from small businesses. Tell us how it’s going, tell us if there are other examples, unnecessary burdens and red tape. So we’ve got that feedback mechanism. I’m going to do a tweet chat, during small business week, October 18, meant to elicit some feedback as well. What we’re trying to do here is change the DNA on this. Change the culture in Ottawa so that when we do things in the future, we consider what impact it’s going to have on small businesses. We consider how that’s going to affect the ability of small businesses to generate jobs and economic growth in our economy. So that’s a real shift to force the system to take a broader view of the impact.
Q There’s always a discussion about how to spur more innovation in Canada. Do you think these new measures will help do that?
A Part of innovation is not only coming up with the idea, it’s also being able to commercialize the idea and find the markets. Obviously, some of the red tape we’re tackling today hinders the ability of small businesses to find the markets, to commercialize, to take the idea from the drawing board to actually being part of a new market. So I think it’s critically important for companies to innovate. You mentioned Canada’s challenges. We are a great and innovative nation. We want those innovators to innovate in Canada, rather than saying this is too tough, I cannot find the market, I cannot commercialize here because of all of these restraints, red tape, and duplicate of oversight and so on. And then they go somewhere else; the United States, Europe, Asia. We don’t want that to be the case.
Q You mentioned the importance of keeping entrepreneurs from leaving. Obviously, in some industries, such as technology, young entrepreneurs from Canada are tempted to go to places like Silicon Valley. Can you talk about how important it is to keep those people here and how these new measures might do that?
A Well, you know, the knowledge economy is important in and of itself, but the knowledge economy is also how we apply innovation to other areas of our economy, whether it be manufacturing, agribusiness, oil and gas or mineral extraction. All of these things require the knowledge economy in order to be competitive. So it really is a mainstay of how we’re going to continue to grow jobs in the future. You mentioned some of the folks in Silicon Valley. One of the things we did change when I was industry minister was Section 116 of the Income Tax Act. It created this burdensome obligation if you wanted to attract foreign investment in Canada for your tech startup. It was almost impossible to do because of the application of this one section of the income tax act. [Finance Minister] Jim Flaherty and I changed that. It makes it a lot easier for tech startups to attract foreign capital without these onerous restrictions kicking in, and my friends in the tech industry tell me it’s having a huge impact already.