The recent SCOTUS overturning of the Chevron rule was an overdue move

If only Canada would follow suit

“Regulatory capture” is a term used to describe the phenomenon in which administrative bodies created by legislation (e.g., the SEC or in Canada the OSC or its provincial counterparts, the FDA or Health Canada, and so on) find themselves infiltrated by or corruptly involved with the groups they exist to regulate such that the impose policies that benefit those they were created to control. In recent years, activist groups rather than industry bodies have joined the ranks of those “capturing” regulators to persuade them to interpret their role broadly and impose ideologically based rules on the entities they regulate.

In the United States, the so-called “Chevron” rule followed jurisprudence where courts deferred to the expertise of the regulator in interpreting statutes where the language of the particular statute was either unclear, ambiguous or did not deal with the issue at hand. In effect, appointed officials supplanted the legislative bodies in effectively enacting regulations that had the force of law.

This odd outcome meant that laws could be in force that no elected body had enacted, by-passing the voters entirely. That possibility was too good to ignore for activists in areas like environment, ESG or competition. Bureaucrats are no less immune to bribery or ideology than elected representatives, but elected representatives answer to the legislative body they have joined and bureaucrats answer to no one but other bureaucrats with few exceptions.

Over-ruling Chevron was a signal from the Supreme Court of the United States that administrative bodies should stay in their lane, eliminating their ability to stray into areas not established by an act of Congress. It will drive the left wing into a frenzy of complaints, and deal a blow to the bloated bureaucracy they have established that wants to regulate everything.

This chart from Doomberg shows the massive expansion of regulations imposed by bureaucrats and not elected officials over the past 30 years. With 120,000 new “regulations” enforced as if they were statutes, it is small wonder U.S. industry struggles domestically and has moved much of its output offshore.

The inevitable result will the left tying up the courts with a plethora of challenges to efforts to remove needless regulations, with just about as much of a strangulation effect as the regulations themselves, but that is what socialists want - to hamstring the free market with costly regulations that suit the ideology of appointed officials and are not subject to the protections of adversarial debate in any legislature.

The decision to over-rule Chevron was a small step in the right direction. Maybe unde a Trump administration many of the synecures comprising the bureaucracy will be axed, thousands of overpaid zealots wanting to “change the world” with their socialist dogma will be unemployed, and the mountain of needless regulation dismantled in a few short years. Once Trudeau is ousted, Canada could follow suit.

I hope so. We need to clean house in Canada as well.