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October 2025 Advocacy Newsletter
Summary:
Off the top – wishing the Blue Jays good luck tonight – and it’s been a special thing to see us all come together around Canada’s (for now only) team.
Why mention this in a newsletter about policy advocacy? Because thematically, we’ve been pushing government and regulators to think about our industry’s ‘case for Canada’ in a deglobalizing and increasingly economically adversarial world. It animated my comments on a panel at last week’s annual Alberta Securities Commission Connect conference in Calgary, where I spoke about how we need to draw on the best aspects of Calgary’s (and by extension, Canada’s) engineering culture to think about the opportunities for us to be more innovative, solution-oriented and thoughtful in our approaches to regulating and growing Canadian capital markets – and asset management particularly. I think there’s an abundant opportunity as we think about regulating innovative areas of the capital markets to think about how we innovate in better aligning policies and processes towards their policy goals and our shared objectives. Policy frameworks that introduce a different (but not shorter) stack of forms for (at best) uploaded/emailed/manual filing by PDF, and that hint at relaxed regulatory expectations, without specifying minimal ‘must-haves’ don’t reduce friction and uncertainty, and don’t get us any closer to our oft-stated growth objectives. And they stand in the way of Canadian businesses being globally relevant and competitive. I think we can take the opportunities of this AI-driven era to explore more utility-like approaches to bringing firms and regulators together through data linkages to (perhaps even better) pursue public interest regulatory objectives, de-sludge the work of regulation and compliance, and better enable capital markets participants to serve investors and our economy to grow. But it demands a change in mindset from the status-quo, and a change in approach relating to resolving the uncertainty created by a principles-based regulatory approach as it regards the articulation and enablement of the meeting of minimum regulatory expectations. But to return to the engineering culture – this starts with the collective mindset that this is figureoutable.
We continue to bring this attitude to our work advocating for entrepreneurship, competition, and innovation with multiple governments and regulators across Canada in partnership with our peer organizations in the Canadian Asset Management Entrepreneurship Alliance. We continue to advocate that Canada needs to urgently chart its own course for the investment and financial services sector within the context of renewed concerns about economic sovereignty, and the government’s many identified needs for capital deployment and investment at-scale, where our profession and industry is a necessary partner. We remain concerned that our lack of regulatory harmonization will make it difficult to be as dynamic and responsive in Canada as some of these changes abroad should demand, and that our regulatory structures that focus on process perhaps over outcomes don’t serve this moment. We need to work harder to meet this moment by being dynamic, harmonized, and ambitious.
As we head into the end of the year, both our proactive outreach agenda and responsive commentary plates are full, as we (continue to!) await the Supreme Court’s decision in Lundin v. Markowich, and continue to engage on proficiency evolution in the Canadian industry, noting particularly Fitch Learning’s recent purchase of the legacy Canadian Securities Institute business from Moody’s.
We will again highlight that effective January 1, 2026, CIRO’s new proficiency model takes effect, with significant new recognition for CFA Program in the form of exam waivers. CFA charterholders or recent passers of the Level 1 exam will be able to avail themselves of a waiver for the introductory CSIE exam, and either of the qualifying ‘segment’ exams – Retail or Institutional. This process runs through the CIRO dealer member firm at the time of registration, so there’s no action to take on an individual level to qualify. See CIRO’s proficiency website for more details on the new model, and expect to see more awareness-building soon on what this means for CFA charterholders and current and potential CFA candidates from our channels.
Michael Thom, CFA
Managing Director
CFA Societies Canada