The minister of finance has identified some 300 taxes and fees that he says could be cut or changed as the provincial government prepares its very first budget.

Many of the fees and levies they’re looking at were introduced in 2016, some of which are more costly to administer than what they bring in according to Minister Craig Pardy.

He’s directed each department to look at fees to see if they still make sense and whether or not they could, or should, be eliminated.

“I just know that there are 300 of them out there and we just asked for every department to send us in and we gave them a deadline to do so, which will be post-budget. Because it’s not simple to know that every fine or fee that a department would have, you just list it down,” he told reporters.

“We need to know what the genesis of it was, what the rationale was, what the return was, what the administrative cost was. So if all those things are understood, then I think we can really zero down to look at what that does for the government of Newfoundland and Labrador.”