Regulatory reform, NDP style

Regulation represents, in microcosm, the role of government in society, which makes it controversial. Simply put, regulation involves the imposition of constraints mainly on the behaviour of private individuals and organizations, but sometimes also on other parts of government, such as the Public Utility Board regulation of Manitoba Hydro. In simple terms, legislation makes law, and regulations are the rules that put those laws into practice.

Politicians of all stripes stridently declare their opposition to the “red tape” of regulation and other administrative requirements and promise to eliminate it. This is disingenuous. Governing complicated, interdependent and dynamic societies cannot happen without regulation. And more often than not we get the red tape we demand when we insist that governments address serious problems.

A balanced, smart approach to the assessment of regulation is required. It starts with a recognition that many rules support economic activity and advance important environmental, health and safety, and consumer-protection objectives. And of course there are also some regulations that are poorly designed, duplicative, unduly complex or outdated. There is both an objective factual dimension to regulation and a psychological dimension which involves how organizations and individuals perceive such rules.

Both of Manitoba’s two main parties talk about “regulatory reform,” a phrase which sometimes refers to the removal of unnecessary constraints on businesses and individuals, and other times refers to greater transparency and accountability in the regulatory process.

Driven by an ideological preference for less government and supported by business allies, former PC premier Brian Pallister was a crusader for deregulation who in 2017 appointed a task force on the elimination of red tape. His government eventually passed legislation which instituted a mainly mechanistic, mathematical approach. Initially, for every new regulation proposed an existing regulation had to be eliminated and, by 2021, the required ratio was two regulations dropped for every new one.

In 2024 the newly elected NDP government, whose ideology saw government as a positive force, replaced the PC legislation with its own bill which it claimed represented a shift from a simplistic number counting process to a more productive focus on the “real world” impacts of regulation. Measuring regulatory outcomes can be difficult and the numbers do not speak for themselves in terms of what should be done with particular regulations.

The NDP promised that If a rule did not contribute to positive outcomes, it would be simplified or removed. At the end of January, the NDP minister for innovation and new technology, Mike Moroz, released the first regulatory accountability report (2024/25) required under the law.

That report generated little or no media coverage, which is unfortunate because it contains some useful information on three areas of high interest to Manitobans: health-care reform, affordability issues, and safety in communities and workplaces. In a readable format, the report describes how technology has been used in several policy fields to achieve significant improvements.

Only one example can be mentioned briefly in the space available here. In collaboration with Doctors Manitoba, unnecessary “red tape” for doctors has been cut by more than 10 per cent, which resulted to a time saved equivalent of 227,000 additional doctors appointments.

Critics might dismiss the described reforms as operational and incremental, but that would be unfair. In complex systems, like health care, smaller, continuous changes based on new knowledge and new technologies, outnumber bigger, periodic sweeping system-wide reform attempts and, as the above example suggests, they can have positive impacts on the everyday lives of citizens.

A leading critic of regulation is the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB ) which regularly ranks governments across the country on the reg­u­lat­ory “bur­den” and the commitment of governments to deregulation. Previously it awarded the Pallister government an A+ grade, whereas its most recent survey assigned a failing F grade to Premier Wab Kinew’s NDP government. Excessive regulation, they claimed, was leading to reduced investment and lower job creation.

CFIB reports over the years will leave some readers with the impression that they never met a regulation they didn’t hate. That would be unfair, but it is clear that the CFIB approves only those rules that their business clients can accommodate within their bottom lines and are not seen as a nuisance requirement. From their ideological perspective, constraints on the freedom of private sector entities should be kept to a minimum.

Given rapid change, it is clearly desirable that governments periodically take stock of existing regulations to determine whether they continue to serve their original purposes and are cost effective in serving those purposes. Deciding which regulations are necessary and on balance beneficial versus those which are unnecessary and costly is partly in the eye of the beholder.

In the eyes of this beholder, the outcomes-based approach to regulatory reform adopted by the Kinew government is preferable to the action-forcing mechanisms of the Pallister government, which risked discarding regulations which remained necessary and could be improved.

Paul G. Thomas is professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba. He once served as an advisor to the national task force on smart regulation.