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February 2024 Advocacy Newsletter

Summary:

This spring, the Ontario Securities Commission will unveil a new strategic plan spanning into 2030. This plan should give us a better sense of the OSC’s thinking on some of the more significant recommendations it has received over the past few years—from the Ontario Capital Markets Modernization Taskforce, which recommended a bevy of reforms intended to promote capital formation and competition in capital markets; and from the Ontario Auditor General, which called attention to investor protection problems and raised concerns about delays and undue political influence over policymaking.

The strategic plan hopefully also will give us a better sense of the OSC’s approach to balancing its new, multi-pronged mandate, which requires it to balance the interests of investors against those of a variety of securities industry stakeholders. But many of us are concerned that, as the OSC works out this approach, investor interests will be lost in the shuffle.

To try and prevent this from happening, CAC and other consumer-oriented stakeholder groups have been doing more to coordinate our efforts to influence regulation. At the end of February, we and eight other stakeholder groups published a joint news release taking a united stance on a longtime CAC priority—giving the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments binding authority to resolve retail investor complaints about the firms they work with.

We hope this coordinated approach will further amplify our influence on the policymaking process and keep regulators’ attention focused on investors and other financial consumers.