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We need our own ‘DOGE’ in 2025 to unleash Canadian economy

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From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

Canada has a regulation problem. Our economy is over-regulated and the regulatory load is growing. To reverse this trend, we need a deregulation agenda that will cut unnecessary red tape and government bloat, to free up the Canadian economy.

According to the latest “Red Tape” report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, government regulations cost Canadian businesses a staggering $38.8 billion in 2020. Together, businesses spent 731 million hours on regulatory compliance—that’s equal to nearly 375,000 fulltime jobs. Canada’s smallest businesses bear a disproportionately high burden of the cost, paying up to five times more for regulatory compliance per-employee than larger businesses. The smallest businesses pay $7,023 per employee annually to comply with government regulation while larger businesses pay $1,237 per employee.

Of course, the Trudeau government has enacted a vast swath of new regulations on large sectors of Canada’s economy—particularly the energy sector—in a quest to make Canada a “net-zero” greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter by 2050 (which means either eliminating fossil fuel generation or offsetting emissions with activities such as planting trees).

For example, the government (via Bill C-69) introduced subjective criteria—including the “gender implications” of projects—into the evaluation process of energy projects. It established EV mandates requiring all new cars be electric vehicles by 2035. And the costs of the government’s new “Clean Electricity Regulations,” to purportedly reduce the use of fossil fuels in generating electricity, remain unknown, although provinces (including Alberta) that rely more on fossil fuels to generate electricity will surely be hardest hit.

Meanwhile in the United States, Donald Trump plans to put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will act as a presidential advisory commission (not an official government department) for the second Trump administration.

“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” the two wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. “DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.”

If Musk and Ramaswamy achieve these goals, the U.S. could leap far ahead of Canada in terms of regulatory efficiency, making Canada’s economy even less competitive than it is today.

That would be bad news for Canadians who are already falling behind. Between 2000 and 2023, Canada’s GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) lagged far behind the average among G7 countries. Business investment is also lagging. Between 2014 and 2021, business investment per worker (inflation-adjusted, excluding residential construction) in Canada decreased by $3,676 (to $14,687) while it increased by $3,418 (to $26,751) per worker in the U.S. And over-regulation is partly to blame.

For 2025, Canada needs a deregulatory agenda similar to DOGE that will allow Canadian workers and businesses to recover and thrive. And we know it can be done. During a deregulatory effort in British Columbia, which included a minister of deregulation appointed by the provincial government in 2001, there was a 37 per cent reduction in regulatory requirements in the province by 2004. The federal government should learn from B.C.’s success at slashing red tape, and reduce the burden of regulation across the entire Canadian economy.

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

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FEMA Quietly Slid $59 Million Out The Door For Illegal Migrants To Put Their Feet Up At ‘Luxury Hotels’: Musk

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) handed out $59 million to “luxury” hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants, Elon Musk said Monday.

Musk — who leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary agency within the Trump administration tasked with weeding out frivolous spending by the federal government — said it was  his DOGE team that made the discovery. The top White House official said the payment was in violation of President Donald Trump’s executive order and efforts would be made to recover the funds. 

“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” Musk posted on X. “Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”

“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

The details around the alleged payout are not completely clear. FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, nor did a spokesperson for DOGE.

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in October denied the Biden administration was using FEMA funds for migrant accommodations, but in 2022 she suggested that the agency was assisting cities with the migrant crisis.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that placed a temporary suspension on refugee resettlement into the United States. The president additionally noted how some major cities, like New York City and Chicago, have requested federal aid to help manage the massive influx of migrants entering their jurisdictions.

The president additionally signed an executive order placing a freeze on federal grants and loans as it conducts a review of the government’s spending, but that order has since been blocked by the courts.

However, New York City officials have a long history of placing illegal migrants into four-star hotels as they’ve struggled to find accommodations for the sheer number of asylum seekers flocking to the Big Apple.

New York City began housing migrants in the four-star Collective Paper Factory hotel around August 2023 after it was reorganized into a Department of Homeless Services emergency shelter. The five-story Collective Paper Factory itself is equipped with a restaurant, a gym, a bar, meeting rooms for guests and communal spaces.

The “chic” Square Hotel was converted into housing for migrants. Other “upscale” hotels in the Big Apple have also been converted into migrant housing in the past as city officials continue to deal with the migrant crisis, including The Row, which has also been described as a “four-star hotel.”

“A 4-star hotel is considered luxury lodging,” according to Kayak, a company that provides hotel booking services. “Guest rooms are noticeably more spacious, with top-quality linens, pillowtop mattresses, bathrobes, slippers, minibars, and upscale toiletries, plus equipped kitchens.”

NYC’s Department of Homeless Services was reportedly seeking a contract with local hotels to provide roughly 14,000 rooms in order to shelter migrants through 2025. City officials anticipated spending on migrants in need of housing for the current fiscal year and the past two years combined will exceed $2.3 billion, with a significant amount of these costs going toward hotel rent.

The Big Apple — a sanctuary city jurisdiction with strict laws restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has become a major destination for the massive number of illegal migrants who’ve flocked into the United States. Roughly 230,000 migrants have arrived in NYC since the spring of 2022, according to data provided by the mayor’s office.

FEMA underwent an internal investigation in November after it was uncovered that a supervisor reportedly instructed disaster relief workers deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton to avoid houses with Trump signs.

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Judge blocks Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury records

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From LifeSiteNews

The emergency ruling comes as 15 Soros-installed AGs seek to block Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from access to information that would reveal how activist groups in blue states have been funded by the U.S. government.

In a stunning and sweeping emergency injunction that has even stunned the people who demanded it, a Manhattan-based district judge has just removed Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent from his authority over the Treasury Department; blocked any political appointee from accessing records within the Treasury Department; blocked any “special appointee” of President Trump from records within Treasury; and demanded that all information previously extracted be destroyed.

The emergency injunction, signed by District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan, was determined without any input from the Trump administration and applies until Friday, February 14, 2025, when U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas will hear the full arguments of the lawsuit.

The emergency ruling comes as a result of 15 (Soros-installed) attorneys general from New Jersey, New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Vermont all filing suit in New York seeking to block Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from access to information that would reveal how activist groups in their states have been funded by the U.S. government.

READ: Judge blocks Trump plan that would put thousands of USAID staff on paid leave

From Reuters:

The lawsuit said Musk and his team could disrupt federal funding for health clinics, preschools, climate initiatives, and other programs, and that Republican President Donald Trump could use the information to further his political agenda.

DOGE’s access to the system also ‘poses huge cybersecurity risks that put vast amounts of funding for the States and their residents in peril,’ the state attorneys general said. They sought a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access.

The judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, said the states’ claims were ‘particularly strong’ and warranted him acting on their request for emergency relief pending a further hearing before another judge on February 14.

‘That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,’ Engelmayer wrote.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat whose office is leading the case, welcomed the ruling, saying nobody was above the law and that Americans across the country had been horrified by the DOGE team’s unfettered access to their data.

‘We knew the Trump administration’s choice to give this access to unauthorized individuals was illegal, and this morning, a federal court agreed,’ James said in a statement.

‘Now, Americans can trust that Musk – the world’s richest man – and his friends will not have free rein over their personal information while our lawsuit proceeds.’

Engelmayer’s order bars access from being granted to Treasury Department payment and data systems by political appointees, special government employees and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department.

The judge also directed that anyone prohibited under his order from accessing those systems to immediately destroy anything they copied or downloaded.

The order by the judge is transparent judicial activism; it will almost certainly be overturned and nullified by later rulings. However, it creates blocks and slows down the goal of DOGE and the objective of the Trump administration.

On what basis do states think they can sue the federal government to stop the federal government from auditing federal spending? How can a judge block the executive branch from executing the functions of the executive branch? This lawfare activism is ridiculous.

Within the ruling:

… restrained from granting access to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees, other than to civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties within the Bureau of Fiscal Services who have passed all background checks and security clearances and taken all information security training called for in federal statutes and Treasury Department regulations… [Emphasis added.]

So the unelected bureaucracy is in charge and not the secretary of the Treasury?

Reprinted with permission from Conservative Treehouse.

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