Provinces interested in joining a new national securities commission have been asked to step into the public spotlight and nominate representatives to help structure the new organization and get it up and running by 2012.
Doug Hyndman, the former chairman of the British Columbia Securities Commission who is leading a transition office to create a new national regulator, said yesterday that his team will have a model in place by next July, along with a new draft of a national securities act to replace individual provincial securities acts.
Mr. Hyndman said the design of the new regulator will be shaped over the next 10 months based on input from a new advisory committee, which will have one representative from each province and territory willing to participate in the project.
He said no region will be committed to joining a national regulator just because it participates in the advisory committee. The new agency is expected to be fully operational two years after a model is developed, he said.
"The objective is to give provinces sufficient certainty about what the regulator will look like so they can buy in," he said.
Mr. Hyndman would not reveal which provinces are planning to nominate a committee member, but said there are "quite a few."
So far, Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba have signalled some willingness to consider a new national regulator, although only Ontario has firmly endorsed the project. Quebec, on the other hand, has said it will fight the proposed national regulator in court, arguing that the federal government is trampling on the provinces' jurisdiction over securities regulation.
Once one of Canada's most public skeptics about the merits of building a national securities commission, Mr. Hyndman acknowledged yesterday that he is pleased that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty asked him this spring to help develop the model.
While the proposal was being debated last year, Mr. Hyndman gave several speeches warning that a national regulator could be worse than the current model of 13 provincial and territorial securities commissions if it was not structured properly.
"I'm very proud the Minister of Finance called my bluff, if you will, and asked me to take a leadership position to make sure we do it right," he told a conference organized by the Investment Industry Association of Canada.
Mr. Hyndman said no decision has been made yet on key questions such as where the new regulator would be based.
Janet McFarland