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For all the merits of eliminating the costly bureaucratic obstacles to investment, the B.C. Liberals' recent bill to ease the approval process is more about ribbon-cutting than cutting red tape. The Significant Projects Streamlining Act fast-tracks projects deemed provincially significant. But what will be used to define significant? Who will decide? While Deregulation Minister Kevin Falcon has said a project should have broad benefits for the economic, social or environmental well-being of B.C., nowhere is this written. How wide is broad, what's a benefit or well-being? It's left to Cabinet to decide. Thus, anything with an Olympic 2010 sticker on it will get automatic entry.

One can also assume a new library in the Interior or a hockey rink in the north won't be provincially significant enough to warrant a fast-tracking. The government has done a commendable job of cutting red tape to date, eliminating tens of thousands of regulations that caused B.C. to suffer a net loss of 469 companies between 1994 and 1999.

But it's imperative, for risk-takers and investors, that the regulatory burden be unburdensome and predictable. Bill 75 does the opposite. It makes the approval process unpredictable, unfair and potentially costly.

-- David Hanley, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, B.C. branch