The Investment Counsel Association of Canada is urging provincial finance ministers to take action, and Canadian corporate executives to voice their support, for a single national securities regulator for Canada.

“Canadian investors remain disadvantaged with our current cumbersome and costly regulatory framework. We are asking Canada’s provincial and territorial finance ministers to take prompt action on the matter of a single securities regulator. We are committed to assisting, in every possible way, in the creation of a single regulator regardless of the authority which initiates and drives the process,” says Richard Knowles, ICAC president.

In the letter to the executives of TSX-listed companies, ICAC notes that during discussions with a variety of stakeholders it discovered that “the provinces do not have the sense that there is strong support for a single regulator in corporate Canada.”

“I think this is a premature conclusion. Virtually all our discussions with corporate leaders have focused on the need for a modern, national securities regulatory regime,” says Knowles.

“We believe there is strong business community support for an efficient, low cost national regulatory system, and we are asking Canada’s corporations to make their views clearly known to provincial and federal finance ministers.”

Knowles said that investors pay the price for inefficiencies in the Canadian regulatory regime.

“Canada remains the only Western industrialized country without a centralized securities regulatory agency, to the detriment of Canadian investors and the investment counsellors who serve them,” he says.

ICAC’s submission to the Wise Persons’ Committee, whose report last December recommended the establishment of a national securities commission based in the National Capital Region.

The submission included ICAC’s October, 2002 position paper, The Path to Achieving a National Securities regulatory System for Canada, which outlines the cost of the present system and proposes options that would lead to a centralized securities regulatory system.

ICAC represents investment counsel and portfolio management firms in Canada. The association’s 74 member firms manage in aggregate more than $500 billion in assets for institutional and high net worth investors.