Agriculture and food figure prominently in a long-awaited
review of Ottawa’s regulatory burdens on business.
As with its general recommendations for all departments, the
Red Tape commission says the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Health Canada and
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada ought to keep tabs on how they each, and
together, impact businesses, particularly small and medium-scale businesses.
They ought to develop a service-based culture and, to that
end, should post service performance standards by the end of this year.
They ought to review their regulations with a view to more
co-ordination among departments and with provincial governments to eliminate
overlap and reduce the burden on businesses.
And they ought to consult with business before they change
regulations or adopt new ones. For every new regulation, they ought to drop an
existing one.
If the commission’s recommendations are adopted, farmers and
food processors could expect:
-
Faster approvals for new pesticides and
veterinary biologics.
-
Relaxation of regulations on low-risk
fertilizers.
-
One-window engagement with all departments when
dealing with issues such as registering a pesticide, gaining approvals to
produce and market novel foods and gaining approvals for new technologies.
-
Equivalency with the United States for dairy
product sanitary standards.
-
Equivalency with the provinces on meat
inspection and dairy products and integration of laboratory networks.
-
Improvements in inter-departmental approaches to
food safety and bio-safety containment.
-
Faster approvals for food-product labels.
The commission basically says bureaucrats ought to put
themselves in the shoes of the businesses they are regulating to consider how
costly and time-consuming their requests are, and whether small and
medium-scale businesses can realistically meet the requirements.
That includes requests for information.
The commission says departments ought to co-ordinate their
websites to make it easier for businesses to determine all of the regulations
they need to meet to satisfy the federal government. I take that to mean that if you want to register a genetically-modified crop variety, you ought to be able to see from a visit to any one of the following - the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada or Health Canada - what each of them will require.
The commission also says government regulators ought to keep
a close eye on international standards so they can keep Canada in step so
businesses can remain competitive.
It recommends that all departments pick the 20 per cent of
regulations considered to be most burdensome and review them within a year. The
next year they should pick the next 20 per cent and so on until all regulations
undergo review with a view to reducing and simplifying them.
The commission’s recommendations are on the Treasury Board website.
