The Adversarial Relationship.

I have drafted over 20 pieces of legislation. Legislation or laws are incredibly tricky to structure. A law will be scrutinized by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Every word, every definition, every provision will be analyzed and any gap will be found.

When a government does a law, it's usually because it wants to implement something. Say it wants to implement X. It will then spend one or two years carefully drafting a law that will implement X. This means having a policy advisor draft the policy, the policy will then be reviewed, the policy will then be translated into drafting instructions, which will then be acted on by a team of legislative drafters.

It's a lot of work, so the government must really want to implement X, right?

The thing is, members of the private sector typically don't want x, because x will incur a cost or some kind of effort in order to comply with. So members of the private sector will scrutinize and analyze every single word, every single meaning of the law, to see if there's a way of avoiding X. A good example of this is a new tax law or some kind of climate requirement.

The thing is, no definition can be airtight and no law can be so complete as to have no gaps. So gaps will be found and members of the private sector will take advantage of those gaps. It's just a fact of creating legislation.

What does this do? Well, this leads to a game of cat and mouse, or whack-a-mole, or trying to catch a slippery fish in water. Between the government who wants to implement X and the private sector who wants to avoid X.

This then leads to an adversarial relationship between the government and the private sector. Every single suggestion that the private sector sends our way, we look at it with doubt and skepticism. Civil servants, especially those doing policy, are trained over the years to see the private sector as a tricky, conniving Law avoiding entity.

There's a lot more to this discussion, of course, because this adversarial relationship impacts every relation and interaction between the private sector and government. More on this tomorrow.