Red tape reduction is consistently cited as a top three priority for small business owners. Each year, we dedicate one week in January to raise public awareness about how excessive regulations and red tape affect business owners and everyday citizens, and challenge politicians and bureaucrats across the country to take action to remove unnecessary burden. CFIB first launched Red Tape Awareness Week 15 years ago.

This year, Red Tape Awareness Week takes place January 27 - January 31, 2025. 

Red tape refers to government laws, policies and rules that are excessive, duplicative and/or unnecessary, and generate a financial or time cost to comply with.

While government spending and taxes get a lot of scrutiny on a regular basis, regulation is too often an afterthought. Red Tape Awareness Week attempts to rectify that by putting a spotlight on the laws, rules and regulations that govern our everyday lives to ensure they deliver the desired results while minimizing wasted time, money and stress for those that are complying.

Regulatory modernization means staying on top of outdated or redundant rules. Eliminating them where possible and improving them where necessary, as well as ensuring that they are simple to understand and easy to follow.

Red Tape Awareness Week 2025 will focus on prioritizing red tape reduction to tackle the productivity crisis and improve affordability for Canadians.

The 16th annual Red Tape Awareness Week lineup includes a new report on the cost of regulation; the announcement of the Paperweight Award “winner”; the 2025 Red Tape Report Card; an update on the 2024 red tape challenge “Flushing out the Nonsense”; and the Golden Scissors Award winner announcement.

The centerpiece of Red Tape Awareness Week is our Red Tape Report Card.

The report card grades the federal and provincial governments in three key categories: regulatory accountability (are governments measuring and tracking their regulations?); regulatory burden (how many regulations are there?); and regulatory leadership (is red tape reduction a clear priority for the government?).

CFIB wants to ensure governments are actively progressing and improving in these categories. In some provinces that means asking governments that do not know how many rules and regulations exist to begin counting them. In provinces that have that covered, it may mean focusing on reducing that number where possible or improving leadership by creating dedicated ministries or offices for red tape reduction. Overall, we are looking to all Canadian governments to reduce the regulatory burden on both small businesses and citizens.

The 2024 Red Tape Report Card uses an index approach to measure and rank the regulatory performance of Canada’s governments based on three priority areas of regulatory activity (or subindexes), which encompass 12 indicators. These indicators represent either a composite of multiple scores, or a stand-alone value. The methodology for the 2024 Red Tape Report Card will mostly mirror the methodology used in the 2023 version.

For more details on how scores were calculated, refer to the methodology section in appendix A of the report.

The Golden Scissors Award is a prestigious CFIB award that recognizes individuals or teams who have successfully motivated others to take action or produced meaningful, positive results in cutting red tape.

The Paperweight Award is an award no one wants to win. It shines light on some of the worst examples of useless and excessive regulations for business owners across the country.

For the Paperweight Award, CFIB looks at news stories, member feedback and examples raised by governments and opposition parties as being particularly bad instances of red tape. Internal deliberation determines which example or examples win and are featured as Paperweight Award winners.

The Golden Scissors Award works the same way (though rarely via examples from opposition parties), and CFIB assesses internally which examples had the biggest impact in reducing red tape.

The Government of Canada (Canada Border Services Agency) took home the Paperweight Award for hitting a small costume shop with a wardrobe full of paperwork and fees all because of two small word changes, creating an unlevel playing field between big and small businesses. Read more at cfib.ca/paperweight.

The Council of the Atlantic Premiers received the Golden Scissors Award for making physician red tape reduction a priority through its Atlantic Physician Registry, saving physicians time, providing a better work-life balance, and opening space for additional patient visits. Read more at cfib.ca/goldenscissors.

Visit cfib.ca/redtape and follow CFIB’s social media channels to stay up to date on our initiatives.