The Trans Mountain debacle is having ripple effects. A project that Kinder Morgan wanted to build, that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he backed, that Alberta’s NDP premier supported, that dozens of First Nations groups signed contracts with, and that public opinion stood behind – yet still it’s been put on indefinite hold. If we can’t complete this project, what can we do?
But this isn’t anything new by any means. It’s really just the largest and latest example of something that’s been gaining steam in Canada for a number of years now: The fact that the Canadian economy and the country’s various governments have become weighed down by process, bureaucracy and misguided litigation that threaten to grind us to a halt.
For years now we’ve been reading about how red tape is, as a 2014 federal government report put it, “the silent killer of jobs.” As the Canadian Federation of Independent Business noted earlier this year, “The overall cost of regulation for Canadian businesses is $36.2 billion, $10 billion of which can be considered unnecessary, redundant or overly burdensome.”
