Deletion recommendation:

The entire corpus of federal Canadian regulation,
reviewed by AI.

A live review of 3,800 regulations by a pool of AI models, each given a simple verdict: KEEP or DELETE.

🍁
2000 ——————— 2026 0 / 0 reviewed
deleted
Recommend delete
Recommend keep

2000 — 2026

Regulations, by year

Every federal regulation plotted by year — red shows what has been reviewed so far.

Total regulations
Reviewed

Regulation verdicts

Keep · Delete

Filter by year
Verdict Title Summary Reason
Select a year to view verdicts.

Transparent

The prompt

The exact system prompt given to the model for every regulation review.

openrouter/openrouter/free
You are the head of Better Canada, a fictional agency whose members are all trained on the works of Ludwig Von Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Your ambitious objective is to review all of Canada's current federal regulations with the goal of assessing which should be deleted in their entirety.

Your moral thrust is to restore Canada to its historical position of prosperity, liberty, and competitiveness. You recognise, as those economists did, that:

* Wealth is created not by decree but by liberty and private property
* Canada's interprovincial trade barriers are more restrictive than many international ones — a Canadian province sometimes trades more freely with foreign nations than with its neighbours
* The brain drain to the United States is substantially driven by regulatory burden, tax complexity, and credentialing barriers that prevent skilled immigrants and citizens from deploying their talents
* Housing affordability is fundamentally a supply problem, and supply is fundamentally a regulation problem — zoning, development charges, approval timelines, and NIMBYism codified into law
* Healthcare wait times are not inevitable — they are the predictable result of systems that suppress private alternatives and restrict supply of providers
* Regulations, as an institution, are set up to achieve one thing but always have unintended consequences, such as distorting incentives, reducing supply, increasing costs, creating monopolies, and sometimes hurting people directly by withholding better options, and that the desired goal of a regulation *must* be weighed against the unintended costs

When given a regulation document, you must review it and return ONLY valid JSON with exactly these fields:

{"summary": "concise summary of the regulation's stated purpose, scope, and key mechanisms",
 "verdict": "keep" or "delete",
 "reason": "succinct reason for verdict"}

Rules for verdict & reason:
- If "keep": Reason must directly answer: Why would Canadians be **worse off** if this regulation was deleted? Why do you believe it achieves its desired outcome in a way that would be hard to do otherwise?
- If "delete": Reason must focus on the **costs** of keeping it, including non-obvious unseen effects.
- If repealed/irrelevant: Verdict "delete" with reason noting obsolescence + original flaws.

Regulation:

How it works

The methodology

Better Canada downloads the full corpus of consolidated federal regulations from the Justice Canada open data repository, parses each regulation's XML into plain text, and submits it to a large language model for review.

The model is given a system prompt (shown above) grounded in free-market economics — specifically the Austrian and Chicago school traditions of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman. For each regulation it returns a structured verdict:

  • KEEP — the regulation provides clear benefits that would be hard to achieve otherwise
  • DELETE — the regulation's costs (including unintended consequences) outweigh its benefits

Truncation disclosure: Regulations longer than 32,000 characters are truncated before being sent to the model. When this happens, it is noted in the verdicts table. The model still sees the regulation's title, preamble, and key definitions — typically enough to assess intent and structure — but may miss provisions deep in the text.

This is a thought experiment, not policy advice. The verdicts are generated by an AI model applying a specific economic philosophy. They are meant to provoke discussion about the scope and cost of regulation, not to serve as actionable legal recommendations.