The B.C. Securities Commission reports that various amendments to the province’s Securities Act have received Royal Assent.

The amendments are designed to: harmonize with other provinces; strengthen compliance and enforcement powers; and improve investor protection, by giving secondary market investors a new right to sue public companies for damages caused by misleading disclosure.

Some of the amendments came into force on Royal Assent, including the amendments to facilitate harmonization of requirements and processes with those in other Canadian jurisdictions, and some of the strengthened compliance and enforcement powers.

The enforcement amendments:

  • consolidate the commission’s power to do compliance reviews, and extend this power to cover reporting issuers, investment funds, custodians of assets of investment funds and registered individuals;
  • permit the commission to issue a freeze order;
  • broaden the commission and executive director’s power to prohibit a person from participating in the securities market;
  • along with powers allowing it to order disgorgement; and
  • broaden the power to make a reciprocal order based on an order or settlement agreement from another jurisdiction.



The government will bring the other amendments into force by regulation when the related rules or administrative processes are ready. These amendments require investment fund managers to register; provide new statutory remedies for investors in the secondary market who suffer damages from misleading disclosure; and, clarify that the maximum fine for manipulation and fraud, insider trading and front running is triple the profit made by all persons because of the contravention, not just the profit earned by one of them.

The new registration requirement will come into force with proposed registration reform rule, which will be published for comment for a second time in the next few months.

The new secondary market liability will come into force when the BCSC has developed a local rule to prescribe specified transactions covered by the liability and define terms used in the new provisions. The rule will be harmonized with the provisions in Ontario’s Securities Regulation on secondary market liability. The BCSC will publish the local rule for comment in the next few months.

“We will ask the government to proclaim into force the amendments clarifying the maximum fine for manipulation and fraud, insider trading and front running at same time as we implement the new insider trading and front running prohibitions,” it says. “We anticipate that will occur in the next few months.”