A Regulatory Balanced Budget in Canada

Financial Post: Canada is now the first country in the world to require that for every new regulation introduced one of equivalent burden must be removed.

C-21, has been operating as policy for several years already, which means that the costs of new rules must be quantified and equal or greater costs removed. It essentially caps the cost of rules coming directly from regulations.

This is not quite as radical as it sounds. As I understand it, the law applies only to new bureaucratic rules and regulations not to legislation. Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to force regulatory bureaucracies to operate within a budget so that new rules are promulgated only when the new rule is expected to be an improvement over existing rules taking into account all costs.