From paperwork to administrative hassle

It must be admitted, in the digital age, individuals and companies are much less confronted with filling out tons of documents as was the case just twenty years ago. However, this leap into modernity has not gained us anything since digitization has quite simply made us move from the era of administrative red tape to that of administrative hassle.

We have all noticed it in our daily lives, we go through much less paper than we did in the past. We fill out fewer forms, we exchange less paper correspondence, we pile up fewer flyers or reports of all kinds, our work surfaces are smoother…

However, this relief remains quite artificial since we have still not succeeded in relieving ourselves of the bureaucratic burden that weighs on the lives of individuals and businesses every day because of abusive regulations or unnecessary administrative formalities, in short, what we has long been associated with paperwork.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) reminds us of this state of affairs again this week, for the fourteenth consecutive year, as part of its Red Tape Awareness Week.

For a long time, paperwork topped the list of irritating aspects that affect the lives of small business owners in Quebec and Canada, just behind the tax burden they have to bear.

Last year, the administrative burden was the second most important concern for business leaders after the labor shortage. This year, inflation is poised to take the top position as the new drag on business growth.

But red tape remained a source of irritation for individuals and businesses in 2022, and CFIB targeted the one that plagues physicians in their daily work to demonstrate the gains that could be made by reducing the administrative burden on medical professionals. health in their daily practice.

Based on a study in Nova Scotia that showed Nova Scotian doctors spent 10.6 hours over a 53-hour week filling out a variety of forms, including complex claims for insurance companies, the province found that physicians wasted 38% of their time performing unnecessary administrative tasks that could be filled by support staff or simply eliminated.

This freed up time could make it possible to significantly increase the time devoted to carrying out patient consultations, which last an average of 20 minutes.

Based on this model, 18.5 million hours of superfluous administrative tasks could be devoted to carrying out 55.6 million consultations, across the country. The 22,000 Quebec physicians alone would spend 11 million hours a year filling out paperwork.

By eliminating 38% of superfluous administrative work, 4 million patient consultations could be added to the balance sheet of our doctors, which would thus make a significant contribution to relieving congestion in the Quebec health care system.

Canada, heavyweight of red tape 2023

This year, the federal government, and more specifically Service Canada, has been named the 2023 heavyweight in the country’s paperwork burden for its management of passports, according to a national survey carried out on behalf of the CFIB.

As we know, the end of the restrictive measures that limited travel abroad due to the pandemic generated a large crowd in the offices of Service Canada. An influx that was miserably managed while long queues of people who simply wanted to renew their passports multiplied across the country.

According to the CFIB survey, 80% of new passport applicants experienced frustration while 33% of respondents had to make multiple trips to Service Canada, 27% had to miss work, 23% were forced to postpone their trip.

Applicants had to wait an average of 68 days to receive their passport or renew it, a fiasco for more than 1 million Canadians, underlines François Vincent, vice-president of the CFIB.

The inefficiency of the federal bureaucracy was not limited to the management of passports alone. Service Canada has also stood out for more than a year for its inability to respond within the usual timeframes to many employment insurance applications, Radio-Canada reported on Wednesday.

We are talking about waiting times of more than 50 days, compared to a usual average of 28 days, while the number of employment insurance claimants is at its lowest level in Canada for nearly 30 years.

We can add to the list of federal bureaucracy and red tape all the management of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, from that of Roxham Road to that of visitor visas. As my colleague André Dubuc reported today, the number of people on social assistance has skyrocketed in the past year in Quebec because of the delays that asylum seekers must endure to obtain a work permit from the federal government, 10 months on average.

A reality that is all the more depressing since this ineffective and inefficient bureaucracy enjoys permanent and almost eternal supervision, we have just learned, from the consulting and process optimization firm McKinsey. Luckily McKinsey is there, it’s hard to imagine what the reality would be like otherwise.