Insecurity Regulator

I don't have a strong position on "a national securities regulator" other than I am always a fan of strong federal institutions. I don't like relying on a document that assigns Natural Resource rights to the provinces despite the fact that "oil" didn't exist.

That said, I am really puzzled by this. I have a few friends who follow the issue, and frankly, they like the idea of a strong federal regulator too.

As I said above, if a government is going to be involved, I would prefer it be the federal government. Historically, in terms of 'loopy' one-offs, the feds have a better record of "not crazy" than the provinces do.

What I don't get is "why?" Both from a practical measure and from a political one.

Practically, I have been told by everyone who claims to know shit about this that Canada's regulations for financial institutions that they are the best in the world. This includes securities.

I have also been told that (looking both ways) there isn't a lot of substantive difference in how the provinces regulate securities trading. In many cases, the statutes and regulations suffer from "photocopy-rudence."

Politically - it is my understanding that the Conservative government hate the federal government doing anything that is not 100% their purview. Get the federal government out of provincial jurisdiction, they say.

Also, this is an issue in exactly two places - Quebec and Alberta. Both known for their opposition to the feds doing anything they are not allowed to do.

Now, I am not so naive as to think that the "expert" report wasn't written before they started, and that the "master strategistician" (*I made this word up) had his eyes on this prize for a long time.

I guess their position on renewed federalism is no longer principle based, it is exception based. "Provincial jurisdiction will be protected until we say it shouldn't be."

POGG indeed.

So, do we need a national security regulator? When in doubt, I always fall back to the needs/plan analysis. As Vanilla Ice sais "If you gotta problem, yo I'll solve it." The experts say Canada does the best job in the world, do we need to fix a machine that isn't broken? This seems to create more problems than it purports to fix.

My gut tells me that "modernizing" institutions that are undergoing world-wide renewal is probably a good idea. My head tells me that this is a fight that the federal government don't need to engage in. My solution - treat securities like health care - establish a national standard, allow provinces to meet that standard by either a) following the terms and conditions of the federal standard in their own way or b) not doing it, and not getting any financial help to do so.

If we can have federal and provincial corporations, surely to god we can have the shares of those companies traded in different markets whose rules for trading are different. I don't think that having a different lead regulator is going to make that much of a difference - why?

We (canada) haven't seen the problems in securities seen elsewhere.

I have always believed in evidence based decision making as opposed to decision based evidence making.