A quick idea for how to save government some money

The federal government can save itself some money rather quickly by doing a couple of changes.

1) Transfer the Canadian Forest Service to the management of BC. The feds could offer to cover part of the existing cost on an ongoing basis. BC has the largest forest industry in Canada and it make sense for one government to operate the forest service. I also mean that the feds give BC all of the Canadian Forest Service to BC, let BC offer the federal forest services to all of the provinces.

In that transfer, it would make sense for the feds to move all of the research aspects of the CFS to universities, though the majority of it should be located at UNBC in the heart of the national forest industry.

2) Delegate all the functions of DFO to BC on the west coast. On the east coast this is not nearly as easy because there are five provincial governments with an interest. Here in BC it would be simple to combine DFO with the existing provincial fisheries staff and create one department to monitor all aspects of fishery issues in BC.

I can here the objections to this second one already, there is a fear that the provincial government would not manage the fish as well as the feds. In my opinion the provincial fishery staff have done a great job with limited resources and the feds have been the problem. I admit that working for First Nations for most of the last 15 years has soured me on DFO.

Neither of these ideas will save a huge amount of money for the federal government, but the simple reduction of duplication will save money and reduce costs.

There are other aspects of the federal government that could be better managed by provincial governments. A smart and responsible government in Ottawa would look for as many aspects of the federal government to contract out to provincial governments to manage on behalf of the federal government.