Now is not the time for new Capital Markets Act, says investor advocate
“We’ve got customer-focused improvements now, and we’re launching a new single self-regulatory organization,” Kivenko said. “In the last budget, he introduced a mandate to promote capital formation. They recently announced a new executive director for OSC, so there will be two of them… I would argue anyone who studies organizational change and dynamics [would recognize] It’s a tremendous change, and the employees must be going through hell.”
Even before its dual mandate, Kivenko said the OSC had not been fully effective in maintaining investor protection. Notably, the call for providing binding authority to the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) is yet to be answered. A recent report by the Auditor General of Ontario, which concluded that the OSC was vulnerable to political decision-making, does not inspire much confidence.
The securities regulator’s decision to prioritize burden reduction for the industry makes sense in the context of the global multi-year pandemic and widespread technological disruption. But the fact that industry burden mitigation has advanced from a program to embedding in the culture of CSOs, as reflected in its statement of priorities, is likely to upset many investor advocates.
“When you already have that, and you put in a capital formation mandate… I don’t know how much you can do to destabilize an organization, but there’s a lot more,” Kivenko said.
The CMA also proposes establishing a platform system of regulation, which could in theory provide enough regulatory flexibility for OSCs to respond more quickly to market developments, as well as to enable them to respond more quickly to various entities and activities. But its regulatory treatment can fix it. Current situation. It should also empower CSO employees to effectively legislate, provide exemptions and prioritize reforms.
