The Ontario Securities Commission’s (OSC) renewed investor advisory panel (IAP) is off to a good start. Now, it’s time that regulators actually heed its advice.

When the IAP’s initial two-year term wrapped up this past autumn, there was a risk that the IAP could be allowed to wither. Instead, the OSC, to its credit, re-upped the panel for another tour of duty and brought in several new members. In late January, the new panel first made its voice heard in both a submission to the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) and in a letter to the OSC’s Office of the Investor, calling for regulators to enhance their oversight of the dispute-resolution service, the Ombudsman for Banking Investments and Services (OBSI) and, as part of that effort, to start enforcing OBSI’s recommendations for compensation.

These are both pieces of good advice, and both are long overdue. The regulators should be listening, particularly when the counsel comes from an experienced, independent group such as the IAP. Unlike most of the input the regulators receive, advice from the IAP isn’t self-serving. It has no book to talk, no turf to defend and its opinions do not blindly hew to any particular dogma. The IAP’s mandate is to represent investor interests.

Note that the IAP is now chaired by a former brokerage-sector executive, Paul Bates, and that it includes a couple of other financial services industry veterans, along with investor advocates and policy wonks – the IAP is hardly a group of zealots out to trash the industry. Rather, the IAP is acutely aware of some of the basic ways in which investors are at a disadvantage in the system; and the IAP understands how investors often are failed by regulators, too. Thus, the panel’s advice deserves special weight.

This is particularly important now that the CSA is, once again, broaching some of the most fundamental investor issues – including whether financial advisors should owe a fiduciary duty to their clients. And the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada is also taking on the issue of professional titles once again.

None of these issues are new. But, hopefully, regulators will now listen – and, more important, take action.

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