Laura Jones

Laura Jones is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and the Executive Vice-President and Chief Strategic Officer of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). CFIB is a non-profit association that advocates for 109,000 independent businesses in Canada on topics of importance to them, including taxes and regulation.

Jones has been providing advice to Canadian governments on effective regulatory reform for more than a decade, serving on a number of advisory committees including the Red Tape Advisory Committee for the government of Canada. She has also authored a number of studies estimating the cost and impact of regulation, including studies for the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Mercatus Center and CFIB.  She created Canada’s annual Red Tape Awareness Week, a successful initiative to focus government attention on the red tape problem.

Jones is currently on the board of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and CFIB.  Before her work with CFIB, Jones taught economics at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and worked at a well-known Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute.

 Jones received her B.A. in Economics from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and her M.A. in Economics from Simon Fraser University. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and three spirited children.