Outgoing TSX Group Inc. CEO, Barbara Stymiest, defended her opposition to U.S.-style corporate governance reforms in Canada in a speech to the Security Traders Association’s annual meeting in Boca Raton, Fla. on Friday.

She also lamented the state of Canada’s fragmented regulatory system. Stymiest said that Canada is the only industrial country with such an anachronistic regulatory system.

“This presents Canadian capital markets with significant competitive problems, and I am resigned to leaving the securities industry without this problem being solved — yet,” she said.

She stressed that things have been improved in the last few years, notwithstanding the fragmentation issue, thanks to the fact that a single set of trading rules covers the whole country.

Stymiest said that although she has received plenty of industry support for her stance against regulatory fragmentation, “the position we took on the Canadian response to Sarbanes-Oxley has been more controversial. In short, we did not think that SOX would have been appropriate for the Canadian markets.”

She stressed that it’s not a question of wanting weaker rules in Canada, just ones that are appropriate for Canada’s market which has a much higher concentration of smaller firms, than does the U.S. “In Canada, market participants are developing effective ways both to create a framework for internal controls for public companies and to assure investors that this framework is in place. This will not happen overnight. In the absence of standards, finding a balance between developing a structure to bolster investor confidence without overburdening companies with added costs will take time.”

“I think it fair to say that I lost the battle with the Canadian media that we are advocates of appropriate and effective regulation,” Stymiest said. “But in the end I think we won the war. The approach adopted by Canada’s regulators in their response to corporate governance and disclosure has addressed the same problems as SOX, and work continues. More important, what our regulators have undertaken, we believe, better reflects the differences between our market and the U.S. market.”

“I hope that in the coming years, we can find a way in North America to accommodate the natural and healthy differences between the way we regulate markets in Canada and the United States. That is the route to the kind of growth and expanding opportunity that our North American industry needs,” she concluded. “Indeed, it is the route to the kind of growth and opportunity that lie in more open trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific markets as well.”