Politicians are fond of saying they favour deregulation, but often are thwarted by civil servants who have all kinds of reasons why they ought not to lose their jobs and power.
This is surely the case with at least three areas of federal regulation of products farmers use- livestock medicines, pesticides and genetically-modified crops.
In all three cases, there are full-blown bureaucracies in Canada, the United States and Europe basically reviewing exactly the same research and company data to come to decisions. Often those decisions are identical, but just as often Canada lags behind others in granting approvals. That leaves our farmers - and our public - behind in the adoption of new technology which is often safer and more effective than the older products. This is especially true for pesticides.
Why not simply accept United States decisions as the Canadian standard? Anything approved in the U.S. could be automatically approved for sale in Canada; anything restricted or banned could also automatically be restricted or banned in Canada. In fact, restrictions and bans already apply to anything Canadians want to export to the U.S., so in practice the U.S. dictates terms to Canadian farmers and businesses.
Canada could keep our researchers busy, but focused on issues of particular concern to Canadians. Canadians could have considerable impact in all three regulatory areas by presenting their research and arguments to U.S. regulators - in fact, more impact than they have now.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the politicians who win this election to implement this proposal as a deficit-fighting approach to deregulation. But it sure would make sense to a lot of Canadian farmers and businessmen, and the consuming public would probably be even better safe-guarded than they are now.
