The phrase “job killing regulation” is beginning to enter Canadian discussions about environmental laws and Bill C-38 – the Budget Implementation Bill which would repeal several laws that protect nature, democracy and marginalized society. This phrase has been embraced by politicians in the U.S. who are seeking to gut environmental laws there, despite having been discredited by a number of studies. It would be unfortunate to have this inaccurate and misleading phrase become a prominent part of Canadian political discourse (more below on why it’s inaccurate and misleading).
“Job-killing regulation” – a favourite of U.S. politics
The phrase “job-killing regulations” has in very recent years become a meme among Republican politicians in the current, dysfunctional American political environment:
It is a seemingly immutable law of modern Republican rhetoric that the word "regulation" can never appear unadorned by the essential adjective: "job-killing."
As in nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney, after winning the Illinois primary: "Day by day, job-killing regulation by job-killing regulation, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, this president is crushing the dream."
Or House Speaker John Boehner denouncing "the president's job-killing regulatory agenda" last month after the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new limits on coal-fired power plants.
Or Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann who, during her presidential campaign, said EPA should be renamed the "Job-Killing Organization of America."
Hating regulation is an old argument, but the phrase is a relatively new trope. A Nexis search of U.S. newspapers and wires shows that the words "job-killing regulations" appeared just a handful of times in 2007 -- but several hundred times in 2011. [Emphasis added]
Before turning to see why it’s simply false to assert that environmental laws kill jobs, let’s see whether this type of rhetoric is showing up in Canadian politics.
Importing the phrase into Canada
Interestingly, while the use of the phrase “job killing regulations” is not yet rampant in Canadian Parliament (although 2 of 6 mentions of the phrase found in an Open Parliament search were in 2012), the adjective “job killing” is a very popular adjective in Parliament. Until 2008 it was a relatively little used phrase (8 times in 2008), but in 2009 its use in Parliament skyrocketed to 87 times. We’ve seen 25 uses of it so far in 2012, and we’ve almost 2/3rds of the year to go. It’s most often used to describe taxes, rather than legislation. Occasionally MPs have used it as a personal attack, describing protesters, or other people or ideas that they wish to vilify.
Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, recently explained that the decision to eliminate the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy (NRTEE) related to that body’s alleged support for a carbon tax that he says would “kill and hurt Canadian families” (despite the fact that the NRTEE never made such a recommendation). Since it seems doubtful that the Minister intended to suggest that a carbon tax would directly kill Canadian families, it seems likely that this is a reference to the job-killing regulation/taxation theme.
Although a large majority of references to “job-killing” comes from the Conservative MPs, some Opposition MPs have tried to make use of the frame, criticizing government policies that they say will kill jobs.
However, while so far most Parliament “job-killing” accusations have focused on taxes, rather than regulations, outside of government we are beginning to hear cries of “job killing regulations” in regard to the debate on the 2012 Budget Bill, Bill C-38, and the environmental laws that it seeks to replace.
Notably both the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (in support of Bill C-38 and environmental de-regulation) and CUPE (against Bill C-38), have caught the bug.
But at least some MPs are beginning to affix the “job-killing” label to environmental regulations. At the top of the results from a Google search for “Canada + Job Killing Regulation” were a number of versions of the following statement:
Canada’s economic development has for too long been held hostage to an archaic system of job-killing regulation that does nothing to protect the environment. … Our regulatory system is one of the biggest impediments to strong economic growth in Canada. The current review system is a maze of rules and reviews that have been introduced piecemeal throughout the years. …
This is part of a longer statement which has been published by individual MPs Gord Brown (MP for Leeds & Grenville), Rob Merrifield (MP for Yellowhead), Earl Dreeshen (MP for Red Deer), and David Tilson (MP for Dufferin – Caledon) as their own op-eds or press releases, but which was presumably (since they cannot all have written it) generated by some common source, perhaps a communications person in the Conservative Party of Canada.
Is this the start of a broader use of the term in Canada? We hope not. While the phrase may be catchy, it is polarizing and is simply incorrect.
Environmental regs are not tied to job losses
Despite the rhetoric, there is very little evidence showing that environmental regulations have a negative impact on jobs. U.S. government statistics on what business listed as the reason for lay-offs demonstrated that environmental regulations were not a big factor:
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that very few layoffs are caused principally by tougher rules. … Whenever a firm lays off workers, the bureau asks executives the biggest reason for the job cuts.
In 2010, 0.3 percent of the people who lost their jobs in layoffs were let go because of “government regulations/intervention.” By comparison, 25 percent were laid off because of a drop in business demand.
Indeed, some studies suggest that environmental regulations can actually improve employment. For example, analysis of clean air laws in the U.S. found that they would not only save lives, but could result in modest job creation: “The jobs-impact of the [Toxics] rule will be modest, but it will be positive.”
What’s really going on here is an attempt to scare Canadians who are concerned about the economy and jobs into sacrificing our desire for a clean environment.
And it’s a false choice.
Ultimately laws to protect the environment are about, um, protecting the environment, not job creation (seems obvious, doesn’t it), and industry calls to gut laws that protect the environment are about big profits for the companies that benefit, not about job creation. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Integrity, at the New York University School of Law, found that claims of large-scale job creation, or job destruction, associated with environmental regulation were generally overstated. In Regulatory Red Herring: the role of Job Impact Analyses in Environmental Policy Debates, the Institute noted that the studies about the impacts of environmental regulations on jobs often said more about the assumptions of the people doing the study:
In one revealing example, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity estimated that two EPA rules on power plant emissions would trigger a 1.4 million job loss; meanwhile, using a different model and different assumptions, the Political Economy Research Institute predicted the same two rules would generate a 1.4 million job gain.
Summing up
So in conclusion:
- Strong environmental laws = good.
- “Job-killing regulations” = a polarizing U.S. political myth with little basis in reality.
