Part 1: Making Ontario work better for people and smarter for business

There is a real need for meaningful change when it comes to reducing the regulatory burden in Ontario. Before we were elected over a year and a half ago, there hadn’t been significant progress in over a decade. As a result, our province is saddled with unnecessary, and often outdated, rules and regulations that get in the way of business and prevent our communities and families from thriving.

Effective regulations ensure we have strong rules in place to protect us and our environment — at work, at home and at play. That’s why as we work to ease the regulatory burden, we are doing so in a meticulous way to ensure that health, safety and environmental protections are maintained or enhanced where necessary.

Ineffective regulations are ones that serve no purpose yet cost people and businesses valuable time and money. Perhaps they served a purpose in 1950, but simply haven’t kept up to date. In other cases, regulations that were meant to apply in one situation have led to unintentional consequences.

Today, soup kitchens and other community feeding programs must comply with rules and regulations for equipment, infrastructure and food handling that are comparable to rules for full-service food restaurant chains and large institutional kitchens. Organizations that are busy helping those less fortunate don’t always have the resources to jump through hoops and decipher which rules apply to them, and which do not — nor should they have to.

A grocer must pay careful attention to where bananas are located in the store, because if they’re sold in the ready-to-eat section, an inspector may force them to label that banana with either a calorie count sticker or nutritional facts table.

With advancements and improvements to vehicle standards, we made driving in Ontario work better for families by ending the costly Drive Clean program. Now, we’re focused on making driving more efficient for Ontario’s hardworking professional truck drivers.

Each year, Ontario trucks must complete multiple inspections in order to operate on our roadways. The Ministry of Transportation first requires an annual safety inspection, which can take up to three hours. Following the safety inspection, transport trucks are then subject to emissions testing by the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks to ensure they are meeting Ontario’s high environmental standards. Both tests are important. But doing them separately makes no sense and takes Ontario transport trucks off the road when they could be out delivering made-in-Ontario goods. 

These are some of the types of unnecessary and outdated regulations we’re working on removing, streamlining or clarifying. In the case of the “arbitrary banana rule,” it’s clear that some of our regulations aren’t clear or just don’t make sense. For professional truck drivers, a single test is simply less time consuming and more cost effective. And as for our soup kitchens — well, we just have an obligation to do better.

That’s why we’re looking at making the necessary changes that will help our businesses, help our communities, and set Ontario up for success.

We’re looking for red tape that’s holding businesses and people back from achieving their full potential — because in far too many cases onerous, unnecessary rules are deterring investment, deferring dreams and putting people out of business.

We’re taking a whole-of-government approach to getting out of the way of business success. We want to create a competitive business climate that attracts investment, grows our economy and makes Ontario open for business and open for jobs.