Business Leaders Support Call For Single Canadian Securities Regulator

December 17, 2003

The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) strongly supports today’s call for a single Canadian securities regulator by the Wise Persons’ Committee to Review the Structure of Securities Regulation in Canada (WPC).

A single regulator would be more effective in protecting investors and encouraging the growth of Canadian companies from coast to coast, said the CCCE, which is composed of the chief executives of 150 major Canadian enterprises.

“The current regulatory system is too fragmented, too costly and too slow to manage change,” said CCCE Executive Vice President David Stewart-Patterson. “In one way or another, Canada needs to move quickly toward a single securities regulator. If provincial governments do not like the model recommended by the Wise Persons’ Committee, the onus is on them to come up with a better one.”

The CCCE agreed that a collaborative federal-provincial approach to creating and running a single regulator is by far preferable to unilateral federal action, but noted the legal advice provided to the WPC that the federal government does in fact have the constitutional authority to act if necessary to strengthen capital markets through securities regulation.

As the CCCE said in its submission to the WPC: “Efficient and dynamic capital markets are vital to innovation, productivity, competitiveness and economic growth. They are too important to let jurisdictional jealousies get in the way of what is right for Canada.”

Interprovincial efforts to date have been limited to development of uniform securities regulation and a “passport” model that would allow issuing companies to deal with one regulator while paying the costs of all thirteen.

These efforts would represent incremental improvements, but even if successfully implemented, neither would be sufficient to foster the dynamic capital markets that Canada’s economy needs, the CCCE said.

Replacing 13 regulatory bodies with one would offer many advantages to investors, to dealers and brokers and to both large and small issuing companies: one set of rules for all market participants; lower administrative and compliance costs; consistent interpretation and enforcement of rules; more timely response to changing circumstances; and a more effective Canadian presence internationally.

Canada is now the only major industrialized country in the world without a national securities regulator, said Mr. Stewart-Patterson. “The state of Texas would not dream of regulating securities at the county level, and Canada’s maintenance of 13 regulators within an economy of equivalent size simply makes no sense within today’s fast-moving and global markets.”

The CCCE is Canada’s senior business organization and is devoted to strengthening the country’s economy and society through the development of sound public policy in Canada, North America and the world. Its member chief executives head companies that administer in excess of $2.3 trillion in assets, have annual revenues of more than $550 billion and account for a significant majority of Canada’s private sector investment, exports, training and research and development.

The members of the CCCE’s Executive Committee are: Chairman Richard L. George, President and Chief Executive Officer of Suncor Energy Inc.; CCCE President and Chief Executive Thomas d’Aquino; Honorary Chairman A. Charles Baillie; and Vice-Chairmen Derek H. Burney, Dominic D’Alessandro, Paul Desmarais, Jr., David L. Emerson, Gwyn Morgan, Gordon Nixon and Paul M. Tellier, the chief executives respectively of CAE, Manulife Financial, Power Corporation of Canada, Canfor Corporation, EnCana Corporation, Royal Bank of Canada and Bombardier Inc.