Are we Overregulated?

 

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
  - Honore de Balzac

I’m reminder of the old saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Now we seem to be trying to do that very thing.

We are consistently hearing the cry that there are too many regulations, too much red tape, too many laws.  The plea is usually from the business community who want more unfettered ability to enhance their business. The oil and gas lobbies are particularly adept at this. It’s one of the reasons that we have so few environmental laws and regulations (believe it or not). We now have our governments advocating and legislating the same thing.

But there is another side to this argument.  If we examine these laws and regulations, we can usually find that there is a reason these were put in place in the first place. The original laws now called the Criminal Code were based on the biblical ten commandments. They have been updated to their present form to account for newer criminal activity. Laws against fraud were undoubtedly developed to counter people and institutions carrying out such things. As fraudsters became more sophisticated, so the laws had to be amended to deal with this growth. The Indian Act, plus the requirement to involve the indigenous peoples which some governments want to override for “growth” (read exploitation), was designed, even in its current flawed approach, to protect that indigenous population from just the type of things that are now being promoted.

As for environmental laws and regulations, they go back to before there was any thought of climate change.  The need for clean water and air was the initial requirement. Anyone who visited Hamilton or Pittsburgh in the 1950s would understand that.  Because of regulations and public interest, both Hamilton Harbour water and Pittsburgh air have now been cleaned up. We did the same thing while forestalling the demise of the ozone layer.  We now pretty well take these laws and regulations for granted. The current requirement is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit climate change.  Climate change is largely caused by the refining and burning of fossil fuels, and this is where the current need for environmental laws is needed.  So, it becomes a question of wanting profit in the short term or leaving a legacy of a stable environment for future generations. Where do you think those who want to get rid of these laws and regulations stand?

So, let’s not throw the baby (environment, lands, people) out with the bathwater (laws and regulations).

“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”
  - George Santayana