It can happen here. Bankers and policy-makers in Canada are studiously ignoring efforts elsewhere to seal off depositors from the risks that are taken by traders — doing so at everyone’s peril.

By weathering the global financial crisis better than most, the Canadian banks had earned some bragging rights. Regulators and politicians have grabbed their fair share of the credit, too, claiming that better policies had prevented Canadian bankers from getting into trouble.

But now they are making the mistake of being far too complacent. Although the push for reform is understandably strongest in countries that were hit hardest by the crisis, our own policy-makers do all Canadians a disservice when they ignore the lessons to be learned.

One of the most crucial lessons is the danger posed by housing risky capital-markets businesses and basic retail banking businesses under the same roof. During the financial crisis, various governments found themselves forced to bail out financial services firms whose risk-takers got them into trouble when they couldn’t afford the damage to depositors.

Policy-makers in those countries have been looking to ensure that situation can’t happen again by insulating retail banking from the more speculative wholesale side. For example, a new report from Britain’s Independent Commission on Banking recommends that banks be required to “ring-fence” their retail banking operations into separately capitalized firms, which must hold bigger chunks of capital.

These recommendations have their critics. And there are other mechanisms available for dealing with the possibility of a large bank failure. But the silence from the Canadian banks and policy-makers on these issues is troubling. Canadian banks had skirted the last crisis, but we can’t assume they’ll avoid the next one.

Even if Canadian bankers and regulators are somehow smarter than those in the rest of the world, rogue traders still exist — and they still can run up massive losses. There are sensible reasons for ensuring that depositors will never have to pay off the bets laid by traders. And Canadian policy-makers should be making certain that’s the case here as well.