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OTTAWA — It might have seemed like a straightforward proposition at the time: tying the strands of securities regulators across this country into one federal body with a unified set of rules.
But Canada — now a respected member of the Group of 20 industrialized nations — has for decades fallen short of that goal, leaving it out of step with global peers who long ago established national oversight of their respective capital markets.
Despite piling on study after study — some dating back nearly 60 years — along with numerous false starts, Ottawa is still less than halfway to its goal of creating some form of federal watchdog here.
It could be said that the most recent attempt, with the Conservative government pushing in 2013 to create the yet-to-be-launched Cooperative Capital Markets Regulatory System, the concept has finally reached the critical mass of signatories necessary to legitimize its existence and move forward.
Even now, of the country’s 13 provinces and territories, only five — Ontario and British Columbia in 2013, and Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edwards Island in 2014 — are officially on board, while eight remain outside the framework. And of those, at least three — Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba — have vowed not to join.
The Cooperative System, nevertheless, is scheduled to be launched in mid-2015, although that may be an unrealistic deadline — regardless of how many jurisdictions sign up for it.
“These things take a ridiculous amount of time in Canada,” says Brian Lee Crowley, managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think-tank focusing on federal policy issues.
The Constitution Act of 1867, he says, “was supposed to tear down the barriers between the provinces, and here we are today with the provinces [only] saying, ‘we think we might make some progress on this’.”
“[But] I’m just delighted that we’ve made more progress in the last year than we probably made in the previous 60.”
For now, Canada’s landscape remains a patchwork of regulators — not the single securities blanket envisioned by Jim Flaherty, who was named finance minister when the Conservatives came to power in 2006 with unifying the capital markets system as one of their goals.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://business.financialpost.com/2015/01/03/will-2015-finally-be-the-year-of-the-national-securities-regulator/