Frank Stronach: The 500-pound gorilla of government bureaucracy on our backs

I’ve always said that when it comes to business, if the overhead is too high and there’s way too much administration up top, it doesn’t matter how hard the employees work, the company will simply not be competitive. The same holds true for governments. Countries with high overhead — in other words, bloated bureaucracies and high levels of government spending — will simply not be competitive in the global marketplace.

Unfortunately, Canada is one of those countries. According to the Fraser Institute, federal, provincial and municipal government spending was equal to more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product in 2018. Since then, following several years of record spending, that percentage has almost certainly increased, likely moving that figure closer to 50 per cent. That’s an incredible percentage for what is supposed to a capitalist country.

The reality is that Canada’s federal and provincial governments have grown too large — and they continue to grow year after year. The more we feed the gorilla of government bureaucracy, the bigger it gets. Not only are we suffocating under the weight of massive government overhead, we’re paying for that overhead through high rates of taxation. It’s no wonder the average citizen is finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet and businesses are struggling to make a profit.

One of the great dangers any democratic society faces is the enormous buildup of bureaucracy over time as government grows and extends its reach into all aspects of our lives. As a society, we’ve strayed from the core principle that government should only provide a minimum number of essential services. Instead, we’ve embraced a philosophy that government should do everything — regardless of whether or not certain individuals can look after themselves, and regardless of whether or not governments can afford to do so.

One of the key factors driving the growth of government is the relentless flood of new regulations. The more regulations you have, the more bureaucrats you need to administer them. No one would propose that we should do away with laws to protect the environment or to safeguard human health. But most of the mountain of government rules and regulations that have been created over the years can be simplified, streamlined and made less complicated.

We need to halt the build-up of government bureaucracy, begin reducing the massive size of government and rein in out-of-control government spending.

There are no magic bullets or overnight cures. Reducing government spending requires focus, persistence and an iron-willed determination to straighten out our financial affairs. To ensure that the job gets done properly and without any political bias, I would entrust the identification of government waste, duplication and mismanagement to a task force of citizens from a wide range of backgrounds.

I would also create a task force dedicated to reducing the number of laws and regulations that govern virtually every aspect of our lives — regulations that are choking productivity.

We also need to start shrinking the size of the bureaucracy. That doesn’t mean we take a chainsaw to every government department and agency. But we can go about the process of downsizing government in a measured way.

The problem is that it is exceedingly difficult to reduce bureaucracy because of all the entrenched interests that are feeding off the government trough. But if we took immediate action — if we incrementally reined in government spending and gradually started reducing the bureaucracy — we would begin to create the framework for long-term economic recovery and growth, lower taxes, less red tape, less government interference and more individual freedom.

We’d finally get the 500-pound gorilla off our backs.

National Post
fstronachpost@gmail.com

Frank Stronach is the founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest global companies, and an inductee in the Automotive Hall of Fame.

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