August 2001
Regulatory activity in Canada
Previous attempts to quantify regulatory activity in Canada have identified a clear growth trend. The Economic Council of Canada (1979: 15) reported that the number of federal regulatory statutes in force increased from 25 in 1870 to 140 in 1978 while the number of provincial regulatory statutes in force increased from 125 to 1,608 over the same period. Between 1970 and 1978, the federal government enacted 25 new regulatory statutes while provincial governments enacted 262 new statutes. The Council attributed the regulatory explosion of the 1970s to the growth of social regulation. Stanbury studied the next period of time and found that, between 1979 and 1991, the federal government enacted 33 new regulatory statutes (Stanbury, 1992: 15). In 1996, The Fraser Institute took a different approach to quantifying the growth of regulation by publishing counts of the number of regulations made each year by governments in Canada (Mihlar, 1996: 10): the federal government and provincial governments in Canada, excluding Quebec, filed an average of 4,549 regulations each year from 1975 to 1994.
In this section, the information found in The Fraser Institute's 1996 study is updated and expanded to show, for the period from 1975 to 1999:
- the number of regulations in force, excluding regulations that amend other regulations, according to federal, provincial, and territorial indexes of regulations.
- the number of regulations passed each year by federal, provincial and territorial governments
- the number of pages of regulations that appear in official federal, provincial, and territorial periodicals of regulations usually called Gazettes.
Number of regulations
The black bars in figures 1 to 13 show the number of regulations (subordinate legislation) made in each year by the federal government and by each province and territory. Over the 24-year period between 1975 and 1999, over 117,000 new federal and provincial regulations were enacted, an average of 4,700 every year. Since 1975, the federal government alone has made 25,000 regulations (see table 1). While these data provide some sense of the amount of regulatory activity in Canada, they must be interpreted with some caution. As explained in section two, the data include regulations containing rules that are not intended to change economic behaviour and they exclude statutes containing rules that are intended to change economic behaviour. Moreover, one should not assume that all regulations generate equal amounts of regulatory activity.
Pages of regulations
The grey bars in figures 1 to 13 show the number of pages it takes to publish the number of regulations shown by the black bars. Because governments can make a small number of long regulations or a large number of short regulations, pages of regulations are graphed next to the black bars showing numbers of regulations. Since 1975, federal, provincial, and territorial governments in Canada have published over 505,000 pages of regulations (tables 1 to 13; Nunavut, for which there is no table or graph, published 14 regulations in 17 pages in 1999 [Department of Justice, Nunavut Territory, May 2000]). The federal government alone has published 110,000 of these pages (table 1). Federal, provincial, and territorial volumes from 1975 to 1999 contain, on average over 20,000 pages per year, and measure almost 31 metres or 10 stories when stacked.
In theory, the greater the number of pages, the greater the amount of regulatory activity (Priest and Wohl, 1980: 86). But, several caveats must be kept in mind when using data about pages of regulations to quantify the amount of regulatory activity in Canada. As with the number of regulations, pages of regulations will include regulations that are not intended to change economic behaviour and exclude statutes that are intended to change economic behaviour. In addition, federal, territorial, and some provincial volumes of regulations are published in both English and French, inflating the number of pages they contain. Their page layouts, page sizes, typefaces, and type sizes vary over time and among jurisdictions. Furthermore, variations over time and among jurisdictions in what regulations include affect what the volumes contain. For example, regulations do not include appointments, except in Nova Scotia and Sask-atchewan. Regulations also do not include proclamations that bring into force, repeal, or suspend statutes or parts of statutes from operation, except in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan.
Normally, regulations must be published shortly after they have been registered. However, Cabinet may do away with publishing some or all parts of regulations if it or the civil service thinks that their length makes them unsuitable or too expensive to print, as long as they are available, or will be made available, to those whom they affect. Yukon's government frequently publishes the orders-in-council that bring regulations into force without appending the regulations themselves (Regulations Clerk, Yukon Territory, personal communication, July 10, 2000). The civil service may also eliminate from published versions maps, illustrations, plans, diagrams, photographs, charts, tables, and similar things that the regulations include. For these reasons and because human error might have occurred, this study likely under-estimates the number of regulations made and pages of regulations published from 1975 to 1999.
Number of regulations in force
The black lines in figures 1, 7, 10, and 11 show how many regulations, excluding amending regulations, are in force at the federal level, and in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, according to indexes of current regulations (tables 1, 7, 10, and 11). Alberta is the only jurisdiction that shows a declining trend in the total number of regulations in force. In the 1990s, the number of regulations in force in Alberta declined by over 40%, to fewer than 1,000. At the federal level, and in Ontario and British Columbia, the number of regulations in force increased. The increase was most dramatic in British Columbia, where the number of regulations in force has increased by almost 50% since the mid-1980s, from fewer than 1,600 to well over 2,200. The number of federal regulations in force has also continued to grow, though less spectacularly. The data for Ontario show an increasing trend between 1975 and 1999, as well as a cyclical pattern that might be explained by that province's consolidating and replacing its regulations in 1980 and 1990.
As with the other measures of regulatory burden, some caveats apply to using the total number of regulations in force as an indicator of regulatory activity. First, indexes of regulations are frequently incomplete. Second, not all regulations that are technically in force are in active use. In Alberta, the civil service accelerated the decline in the number of regulations in force when, between 1995 and 1998, it isolated regulations that were no longer in active use and saw to their formal repeal (Registrar of Regulations, Province of Alberta, personal communication, June 20, 2000). Third, some amending regulations would have been drafted as new regulations and vice-versa but for their drafters' convenience (Registrar of Reg-ulations, Province of Ontario, personal communication, August 1, 2000).
Most regulations made each year amend other regulations. That is why, for example, there were "only" 2,900 federal regulations in force (excluding amending regulations) in 1999, even though the federal government made 25,000 regulations (including amending regulations) from 1975 to 1999. It is important to recognize that individuals and businesses in the private sector find regulations' constant and rapid amendment more onerous than their mere existence, as it aggravates uncertainty (Economic Council of Canada, 1979: 3).
Index of Tables and Figures in this chapter:
Table 1 & Figure 1: Number of federal regulations, pages, and regulations in force (1975-1999)
Table 2 & Figure 2: Number of regulations and pages in Newfoundland and Labrador (1975-1999)
Table 3 & Figure 3: Number of regulations and pages in Prince Edward Island (1975-1999)
Table 4 & Figure 4: Number of regulations and pages in Nova Scotia (1975-1999)
Table 5 & Figure 5: Number of regulations and pages in New Brunswick (1975-1999)
Table 6 & Figure 6: Number of regulations and pages in Quebec (1975-1999)
Table 7 & Figure 7: Number of regulations, pages, and regulations in force in Ontario (1975-1999)
Table 8 & Figure 8: Number of regulations and pages in Manitoba (1975-1999)
Table 9 & Figure 9: Number of regulations and pages in Saskatchewan (1975-1999)
Table 10 & Figure 10: Number of regulations, pages, and regulations in force in Alberta (1975-1999)
Table 11 & Figure 11: Number of regulations, pages, and regulations in force in British Columbia (1975-1999)
Table 12 & Figure 12: Number of regulations and pages in Yukon (1982-1999)
Table 13 & Figure 13: Number of regulations and pages in the Northwest Territories (1979-1999)
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