Letter from the table: A permit measured in weeks

To the members of the Red Tape Council,

I support the Small Business Impact Standard. I am writing because I have learned that a permit delay is not an abstract wait on a screen. It can be rent, a cancelled booking, and money paid before a business can open.

On 5 January 2026, I signed a lease for a small commercial unit in Victoria. The unit needed an entrance alteration and some interior work before it could be used. I asked the City of Victoria what approvals were needed and was advised that the planned work required a building permit. I understood why: work on a commercial space has to meet building and safety requirements. I was not asking to skip those requirements. I was trying to find out how to meet them, and when I could reasonably plan for the result.

I submitted the application on 3 February. I had arranged the work in stages so I would not pay a contractor to begin before the permit was in hand. On 18 February, I received a request for additional drawings and clarification. I hired someone to prepare the revised material, paid C$1,180, and resubmitted on 4 March. The application was eventually approved on 17 April.

That is a little over ten weeks from submission to approval, with more than three weeks between the resubmission and the decision. I am not claiming the City acted improperly, or that every day of review was avoidable. The plans needed attention, and a thorough review matters. What I lacked was a dependable way to understand the remaining steps and plan around them. I could make calls and check the information available to me, but I could not turn that into a reliable opening date.

The costs accumulated while the space was waiting. Rent and basic occupancy costs were C$6,400 over the two months. The revised drawings cost C$1,180. A contractor’s rescheduling and cancellation charges came to C$950. Storage for equipment that could not yet go into the unit was C$430. Insurance and utilities added C$610. That is C$9,570 before the business had opened. These are my costs, not a claim about what every applicant pays. The amount that hurt most was not one dramatic bill; it was several ordinary bills arriving on schedule while the permit did not.

I tried to limit the damage. I delayed the contractor rather than risk work starting without approval. I kept the lease rather than abandon the unit after paying to prepare the application. I followed up and supplied the requested drawings. Each choice was sensible on its own, but none gave me a way to know whether I was facing a short pause or another month of fixed costs. The gap between a rule and a usable process is where a small operator can get trapped: the obligation is clear, while the timeline and next step are not.

That is why I support the Council’s four-part ask: assess the effect of new rules on small businesses, provide a one-stop digital process, publish service times, and set a deadline for permit decisions under a silence-is-consent approach. A single place to see requirements, submit documents, receive questions, and track status would have saved me from piecing the process together. Published service times would let an applicant plan, and would help distinguish a normal review from a stalled file. If something is missing, the system should say what is missing and what happens next.

I also want the consent deadline designed carefully. It should not force approval where a genuine safety, accessibility, or code issue remains unresolved. The authority should be able to pause the clock for a clearly stated reason, tell the applicant what is needed, and show the new target date. But a file should not simply disappear into an indefinite queue. Where the authority has all required information and does not decide by the published deadline, there should be a meaningful consequence for the

delay, including a presumption of consent where the law and the nature of the permit allow it.

My experience cannot establish a pattern by itself. That is why I support collecting reports across places and permit types, checking volume, frequency, consistency, spread, and corroboration, and then testing a draft in public. The Days to Open survey and Permit Timer can make the delay visible without asking an applicant to accuse an individual employee or name a business. Measure the time from a complete application to a decision, and record when an agency asks for more information. Those details matter if the goal is a fair comparison rather than a slogan.