There’s much talk lately about the need to reduce red tape. We live in a country in which people are swimming in it, just trying to keep afloat.

The latest red tape report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) says that small businesses estimate that dealing with red tape costs $11 billion a year.The report also says that regulation from our three levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – cost $38.8 billion in 2020. The total amount of time spent on complying with government regulations by all Canadian businesses was 731 million hours, the equivalent of 375,000 full-time jobs.

CFIB says the smallest businesses are hurt by red tape more than larger ones. The smallest businesses pay roughly $7,000 a year per employee to comply with government regulations. Larger businesses, CFIB reports, pay $1,237 annually per employee. So, being able to spread regulatory costs over more staff give the larger business a competitive advantage over the smaller ones.

Red tape is defined as excessive bureaucracy that slows getting things done and creates unreasonable costs to people and business.

We’ve all seen or read about examples: for instance some authorities requiring kids to have a business licence for lemonade stands. Or, the frustration and time lost trying to navigate government websites that are long, and complicated. 

And, most of us have seen those Taylor Swift-like lineups at Service Canada locations where people try to do business with the federal government, often for passports.  In 2022 people reported bringing lawn chairs and sleeping bags for day-long waits in Service Canada lineups.

The City of Toronto once decided that people wanting to obtain a new business licence could do so only on paper, in person and at one location.

Thankfully, reducing red tape is being recognized by governments and many jurisdictions are taking action to eliminate costly and time-demanding processes.

The federal government passed a Red Tape Reduction Action in 2015. The law requires that for every new regulation introduced, one existing regulation must be eliminated. That means every new regulation imposing an administration burden on business must be offset by a decrease in administrative burden.

The feds have reviewed the one-for-one rule and say it is working. However the review, published on a Government of Canada website, is roughly 3,000 words long, hopelessly bureaucratic and very difficult to understand.

A new study into why fewer Canadians are starting new businesses estimates there are 100,000 fewer business owners than there were 20 years ago. Only 1.3 individuals out of 1,000 started a business in 2022, compared with three out of 1,000 in 2020.

There are increasing calls to free small businesses from red tape and tax burdens. CFIB says that small businesses estimate that the burden of regulations could be reduced by 28 per cent without harming any public interests, which regulations are designed to protect.

A strong campaigner for removing the roadblocks that prevent creation of more small businesses is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest companies.

Stronach says that as of 2021 Canadian small businesses employed more than eight million people, close to 70 per cent of our total private sector workforce.

“We’ve placed so many obstacles in the way of small businesses and burdened them with countless regulations and rules that it’s no wonder so many small business don’t survive more than a few years after opening their doors,” he has written in a number of publications, including the Minden Times.

Governments are concerned about small business and have brought in numerous support programs to counter rules and regulations that are impairing small business growth. But Stronach says the way to help small business is to get out of the way: slash all the red tape and let small businesses take off and soar.

Sounds like a good idea. Most governments do seem concerned about lack of small business growth. 

Concern is not enough. We need real action from all forms of government. Red tape is a sickness that is weakening our economy and the only way to cure it is to eliminate it.

 Try as you might, it’s hard to ignore television commercials. Especially when you arewatching a lot of sports, as many of us were during the World Series and now the NHLhockey season.

Between all the exciting plays, the ads keep coming at you. You finally start to pay
attention to them.
I started paying attention to the ubiquitous burger ads. You know the ones where some
guy stretches his mouth open impossibly wide to bite into a large and luscious looking
hamburger offered by one of the many burger joint chains like Burger King,
MacDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Those TV burgers must be four to six inches thick when stacked with
beef patty, onions, tomato, lettuce, bacon, onion rings and whatever other condiments
the makers throw in. The only mouth big enough to handle that kind of a load belongs to
Donald Trump.
Those burgers are not what you get served at your favourite fast-food joint. They are
highly juiced up in elaborate ways to make your mouth water and send you out the door
to buy one.
The juicing up is done by “food stylists” employed to make burgers look drool-worthy in
advertisements. They use a variety of clever techniques, and some inedible products, to
make a burger look perfect for the camera.
When a burger is just lightly roasted it stays raw and without the 25-per-cent shrinkage
that comes with full cooking. It is big and juicy, but red. So a food stylist brushes it with
brown shoe polish to give it the fully cooked look without the shrinkage.
The fully cooked burger you get at the fast-food place is much smaller and less
appetizing looking. Most are just under 115 grams (four ounces) with less than half of
that being the actual meat patty.
That doesn’t mean the fast-food burger you get is not good. It’s just not as big, fresh
and appetizing as food stylists make them look for advertisements. And, that has
created some controversy.
A 2018 study by Cancer Research United Kingdom reported that teenagers exposed to
TV fast-food advertising eat up to an additional 350 calories a week in food high in salt,
sugar and fat. That’s 18,200 extra calories a year.

Also, dissatisfied customers have filed lawsuits against some major fast-food outlets,
claiming the companies make their menu items look bigger and better in advertising
than they really are.
A judge in the U.S. recently ruled in one case that there is no proof that McDonald’s and
Wendy’s sold burgers that were smaller than advertised. The judge ruled that the fast-
food companies’ efforts to make their burgers look appetizing are no different from other
companies who use “visually appealing images to foster positive associations with their
products.”
There are other cases still before the courts, including one against Burger King,
Burgers are not the only food that gets juiced for advertising. Glycerin is sprayed on fruit
and salads to make them glisten and look appetizing.
And, how tempting is an advertising photo of a plate of fluffy pancakes smothered with
warm maple syrup?
Looks delicious, but maple syrup is not used in photographing pancakes for advertising.
Maple syrup can heat up and become runny under photo lights and gets quickly
absorbed into the pancakes. So motor oil is used instead because it it is thicker, glistens
nicely and does not get absorbed by the pancakes.
Those ads featuring a milkshake parfait or slice of pie with dollops of whipped cream
don’t use real whipped cream, which melts and gets runny under hot lights. So
photographers use shaving cream, which doesn’t melt and is easily shaped to give the
desired look.
Ads can be deceptive and manipulative but fortunately we don’t have to eat what the
photographers are serving up.
The ads do encourage people, notably children, to eat the wrong things and various
jurisdictions around the world have discussed ways of restricting TV and online food
adds.
Sweden and Norway banned all ads to children in the early 1990s. Quebec also has
banned advertising to children during programs geared to kids.
Canada’s federal government has updated its code for food and drink ads that reach
children under 13 but little else.

“Politics will always break your heart,” Catherine McKenna once tweeted on the social media platform now called X.

She should know. She suffered a barrage of verbal attacks as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s environment and climate change minister, and lead minister on the contentious carbon tax. 

She resigned from cabinet and politics in 2021, saying she wanted to spend more time with her children, and working on climate change from outside politics.

Well, politics certainly broke a lot of hearts when Trudeau announced recently that heating oil will be exempt from the carbon tax. Other heating fuels such as propane and natural gas will not be.The exemption for home heating oil applies to all Canadians. However, most Canadians do not use it to heat their homes. Statistics Canada says that in 2021 only three percent of households nationally used home heating oil.

Most of Canada’s home heating oil users live in the Atlantic provinces – the Liberal stronghold that has helped to keep the Trudeau government in power. Two in five Prince Edward Island homes, one in three Nova Scotia households and one in five Newfoundland and Labrador homes use furnace heating oil.

The heating oil tax exemption is estimated to save each homeowner using heating oil $250 a year.

So is it possible the heating oil exemption is designed to encourage Atlantic voters to keep supporting the Liberals? You bet it is.

Proof of this shameful political bribery was provided by one of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers. Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings told an interviewer that if Westerners, who have complained that Atlantic voters are getting an economic benefit they are not, want similar benefits they should elect more Liberals.

More proof that politicians continue to get bolder, and dumber.

It’s not news that politicians favour their own party’s ridings, and swing ridings they believe they can win. But it’s not often that you see a politician blatantly telling voters to vote the right way or be left out of getting the goodies.

Making it worse this time was that Gudie seemed to do it with insulting contempt for western Canadians.

Trudeau has denied that the tax relief heavily favouring the Atlantic is about saving Liberal seats there, but even some of his own Liberals have scoffed at that. At least two cabinet minister are known to have opposed the exemption.

Just two days before Trudeau announced the exemption, Housing Minister Sean Fraser told the House of Commons that exemptions would make pollution free again. A month earlier, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said it would be unfair to carve out exemptions that would benefit only Atlantic Canada. 

Liberal support in Atlantic Canada has been plunging. In early 2022 polls showed Liberal support in the Atlantic was more than double the support for Conservatives. Polls this fall show a huge reversal with the Conservatives with 39 per cent and the Liberals 30 per cent.

More and more Canadians are beginning to agree that climate change is real and requires immediate action. There is less agreement on how to reduce climate change.

Putting a price on carbon changes – in other words a carbon tax – is considered by many to be a good approach. However, there is hardly universal agreement and the topic is destined to be a controversial subject for some time to come. It likely will be a key issue in provincial elections and the next national vote scheduled for 2025.

The Liberals hold a minority government kept in power by the New Democratic Party. Not much is expected to change that, but in politics there are no guarantees.

One way or another there will be a federal election sometime in the next two years. Many political commentators say the carbon tax, and the way Atlantic voters were exempted from it, will kill the Liberal government.

But there are two scenarios that the commentators say could save it. One, Trudeau will kill the tax for all Canadians, And two, Trudeau will resign as prime minister to allow a new leader to give the party a new look that will be acceptable to more Canadian voters.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

There is much controversy over whether mental illness is a significant cause of mass shootings, which are becoming a common occurrence, notably in the gun-crazy United States of America.

Whenever another mass shooting occurs, many conclude that mental illness was to blame.

Two of last week’s most horrific mass shootings – one in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and the other in Lewiston, Maine are examples. When you read about a Sault man shooting to death a woman, his own three children, then himself how can you not think ‘this guy was mentally ill.’

Or the Maine massacre in which a man went on a rapid-fire rampage in a bowling alley, then a bar. How can someone kill 18 people, wound another 13 and not be mentally ill?

The Maine killer had been treated for mental illness earlier this year, but the Sault rifleman was not known to have anything wrong with him mentally except a bad temper.

The general public tends to link mental illness with mass shootings and other violence. Psychiatry experts, however, say severe mental illness is not a key factor in most mass murders.

A study by Columbia University in New York reports that only five per cent of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. The experts, however, have a much narrower definition of mental illness than the general public.

The experts consider severe mental illness as schizophrenia or psychotic disorders and not lesser problems like depression and substance abuse. Most of us think anyone acting beyond what we consider normal as a bit crazy. Our federal government also has a wider definition of mental illness, reporting that one in three Canadians will be affected by mental illness in their lifetime.

Mental illness is a major problem worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that roughly 450 million people currently struggle with mental illness. It is considered to be the leading cause of disability worldwide.

But all the talk about it being a major factor in mass killings is a red herring that takes attention away from the real issue – guns. Without mental illness there would still be mass shootings. Without guns there would be no mass shootings.

Soldiers, law enforcement, hunters and sport shooters are the people who should be allowed guns. There is no need for anyone else to have one. And there are plenty of rules and regulations to ensure that those allowed to have them use them safely and responsibly.

Instead of debating how much of a factor mental health is in mass shootings we should be discussing how mental illness is affecting so many other aspects of our lives. 

Numerous surveys and studies report that world unhappiness has increased to record highs. They point to a growing trend in which negative feelings such as worry, sadness and anger rose by 27 per cent around the world between 2010 and 2018.

WHO estimates that one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds. More than 4,000 Canadians kill themselves every year – an average of 11 a day.

Canadian medical authorities say drug overdoses now account for more deaths than automobile accidents.

The overall problem of mental illness – not just how it might affect mass killings – needs to become a No. 1 priority for our society. What’s making the world so unhappy and how do we change that?

The role of digital media is a good place to start examining the problem. Time on the Internet, gaming, texting and social media have taken us away from two key elements for creating happiness – exercise and being with friends.

Too many people spend more time in front of screens than on exercising or having face- to-face contact with friends. Also, digital media gives us more contact with the negative and destructive side of humanity than with the good things happening around us.

People say things online that they would never say in person. Things that often lead to hurt feelings, bullying and other nastiness that feeds mental health issues.

We need to become more informed and thinking intelligently about all these issues if we don’t want to live in a world that falls deeper into despair.