MONTREAL — The accordionist started playing in the lobby at 7:32 a.m., and the Prosecco popped an hour later, just before dancers took to the stage to stomp to Eye of The Tiger. Treasury Board President Anita Anand’s message to the crowd gathered for the Conférence de Montréal struck a more sombre tone: Canada is drowning in bureaucracy.

“Decades and decades of legislation and red tape” have encumbered Canadian businesses, Anand said. She pledged to help remove the stuff, both in the country and in dealings with the United States—before “barriers to trade get to the level of trade dispute.” She said the government should serve as an example to businesses big and small, and touted the importance of AI in the drive for efficiency. 

In taking a hawkish stance on red tape—“regulatory modernization,” as she called it—Anand was doing more than addressing one of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s favoured lines of attack on the Liberal government. She was echoing a long-standing complaint of businesses themselves: bureaucracy is a drag on wages and productivity.  

Productivity and barriers to it proved dominant themes on the first day of the conference. 

Quebec: an example—and a laggard: The province, said Quebec Finance Minister Eric Girard, was just as surprised as everyone else at the rise and extent of inflation. It has protected the purchasing power of its citizens better than any other province, he said, and has the highest worker-participation rates for women in the country, thanks to its long-established public daycare system. 

Its biggest problem, Girard said, was productivity. “If we were to summarize Quebec in two numbers, Quebec is 22 per cent of the population of Canada, but only 20 per cent of its economy. As long as we’ve had economic statistics, this gap has existed. So it cannot be attributed to one particular event.” He said the province must increase productivity by 1.5 per cent a year to catch up with the rest of the country. He also singled out public-sector employees across the country. “The public sector also has a responsibility to be more productive,” he said. 

Europe, a cautionary tale: Red tape is not, of course, a Canada-only phenomenon. Jean Schmitt of Paris-based Jolt Capital, which invests in mid-cap “deeptech” companies, said overbearing regulation has stifled the sector in Europe, particularly in the field of medical devices. 

“Initially you were doing your first approval in Europe because it is easy, and then you would go to the U.S. after making some money. Now, you create a medical device in Europe and you move straight to the U.S. because it’s much easier to get approval,” Schmitt said. “People are starting to figure out that all industries are in trouble.” 

Jolt, which has just over US$542 million under management, announced it is opening its first headquarters outside of Europe in Montreal.