The farce that was the day-long debate on the Red Tape Reduction Day Act is still vividly fresh, so maybe it’s not the time to ask how the effort is going.
There’s also the background fact that the B.C. Liberals’ war on red tape has been waged courageously for 14 years now, yet there’s still an apparently dire situation that needs a full-scale campaign against the red menace. They claim to have reduced the number of regulatory requirements by 43 per cent since 2001. That would leave the impression B.C. is now a libertarian paradise where almost anything goes.
But they return again and again to the theme of reducing red tape, most recently with another round of consultation. The push has morphed slightly from its original intent. It started out as a relentless hunt-and-kill mission to eliminate all regulations or processes that looked the slightest bit superfluous. They inventoried practically every rule on the books (404,000) and eliminated all the ancient relics, which gave them an impressive success rate, but probably didn’t change as many lives for the better as they claim. (It’s been 13 years since the ban against picking trilliums was lifted. But you can’t pick anything in parks, or on others’ private property, and you never could. So it’s hard to tell what difference it made.)
The new red-tape campaign is more of a drive for ways to make government more efficient, which is a much broader, more diffuse ambition. They threw a website up in October and opened it up for new ideas. They opened with a question: Are you frustrated by government?
When you ask that question and you happen to be in government at the time, you’re really asking for it.
They didn’t get the smoking denunciations of policies that you might expect with such an open-ended question. (Or if they did, they were triple-deleted.)
What they wound up with were more than 130 specific beefs about headaches that crop up in the workaday world of dealing with government agencies.
One takeaway from a browse of the suggestions is this: Government could vastly improve its performance rating and client satisfaction levels if someone could invent a voice-mail system that works properly.
“People are constantly being shuffled around rather than accessing the correct information within two phone calls. I have experienced many incidences in which I have been shuffled in circles between 5-10 times, just to get a simple question answered,” wrote one citizen.
Another said: “It is very difficult to phone a government office and actually speak to a person. I found this to be so when I wanted to call in and ask questions … and now as a government employee, I occasionally receive phone calls from exasperated residents who have been trying to phone in and speak with a real live person … They left messages and did not hear back or instructions did not give them the direction they required so they just started pressing buttons to try to get a human.”
Another warned: “I am starting to resent telephone trees (‘Press 1 for… 2 for …’).”
Another wrote about an encounter with a “Gordian knot of phone trees” and said her mother tried to get through but can’t see the buttons well enough to push 10-digit ID numbers.
“Why is it that I know there will be an unusually high call volume before I even pick the phone, but the organization doesn’t? If my call is so important to you, why not hire enough staff so that I am not more frustrated before I finally get to tell someone my problem? Must be tough on staff!”
If the government could upgrade its telephone system to remove that feeling of hopeless despair when the automated response kicks in, Red Tape Reduction Day would truly be something to celebrate.
Just So You Know: One person evidently navigated voice-mail hell, with its endless series of options, finally pushed the right button and made contact with the right human being. Staff looked into the issue and called back. But there was no answer, so they left voice mail. The taxpayer, who thought they had succeeded when so many have failed, said: “Ministry called. We couldn’t understand message.”
