Paperweight Award: “Celebrating” the worst red tape in Canada

Notices about notices. Bureaucratic committees for food trucks. The prospect of fines for incomplete government surveys. 

These are just some of the over-the-top regulations that we’ve heard about from members this year, and we’re giving them the highest (dis)honour: the Paperweight Award, which recognizes government departments or agencies who have made life difficult for business owners by adding significant, ridiculous and destructive red tape.

This year, business owners were invited to have their say on the worst of the worst. The Business Owners’ Choice, winning by several hundred votes, is…

Finance Minister Bill Morneau, for adding more complexity and uncertainty to the tax code by imposing a subjective ‘reasonableness test’ on business owners who share income with family members.

The other Paperweight recipients for 2018 were:

• Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, for insisting a contractor buy a brand new ladder because his old one had a worn-out label.
• New Brunswick Liquor Control Act (on behalf of all interprovincial trade barriers), for taking Gérard Comeau to the Supreme Court of Canada for buying cheap beer in another province and bringing it home. 
• Ontario Labour Minister Kevin Flynn, for ramming through a new set of rules dramatically increasing small business’ costs and providing compliance details just weeks before the rules came into effect.
• Quebec’s Labour Department, for requiring businesses to post a notice notifying employees they will soon be posting another notice. 
• Montreal Urban Community and the City of Brossard, for creating wildly different sets of regulations around the required thickness and composition of plastic carry-out bags.
• Smithers, B.C., in an encore performance of last year’s Paperweight, for forcing another business, this time a not-for-profit, to build a “sidewalk to nowhere.” 
• National Capital Commission, another repeat offender, for making children fill out a three -page contract indemnifying NCC of any legal liability before opening up their lemonade stand. 
• Ontario’s Liquor Control Board, for approving, then disapproving a beer product because its label resembled an ancient Greek symbol associated with medicine. Similarly, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation threatened legal action against a craft distillery for using a stylized 1940s highway sign as their logo. 
• Statistics Canada, for forcing business owners to spend time answering lengthy, complicated surveys or face fines and even jail time. 
  Update: Stats Can has informed us that jail time is no longer a penalty for incomplete surveys! (The Stats Can website has not yet been updated to reflect this). However, fines are still a possibility. 
• Quebec’s Ministry of Health, for insisting pharmacies disclose their pricing structure to consumers, creating reams of paperwork and undermining their competitiveness. 
• Nova Scotia’s Labour Standards Division and Labour Board, for failing meet its own standards to disclose details of a complaint made against a business in time and then refusing to give the business owner time to contest it. 
• City of Ottawa, for setting up roadblocks for food trucks with bureaucratic red tape and creating a “food truck selection committee.”
• Canadian Border Services Agency, for unreasonable delays and poor communication when inspecting goods, causing business owners financial hardship and unnecessary stress. 
• Finance Minister Bill Morneau, for adding more complexity and uncertainty to the tax code by imposing a subjective ‘reasonableness test’ on business owners who share income with family members. 

Find out the full story behind these notorious Paperweights. 

About Red Tape Awareness Week: Each year, we dedicate one week in January to raise public awareness about how excessive regulations and red tape affect you, and challenge politicians and bureaucrats across the country to take action.