As part of our coverage of the federal election, Investment Executive profiles candidates who are working or who have worked in the financial services industry.

Here we look at Ken Cooper, Conservative candidate in the Manitoba riding of St. Boniface.

If the Winnipeg Stock Exchange’s former chief executive becomes the Conservative MP for the Manitoba riding of St. Boniface, he will fight against the formation of a national securities commission.

“I’m against the centralizing of most government services that are locally provided,” says Ken Cooper. “The most creative things that have come out of the Canadian investment industry have been the result of competing commissions.”

For example, Cooper points the junior capital pool companies, which originated in the old Winnipeg and Alberta stock exchanges but have now become a viable vehicle for going public in Ontario.

“They never would have come out of Toronto and a centralized securities industry. They’re too small,” he says.

He says the level of commission involvement in the local economy varies from province to province and he doesn’t see any reason to change that.

“What Ontario thinks is worth worrying about [often] isn’t something Manitoba thinks is worth worrying about,” he says.

Cooper also says he doesn’t think the federal government should be able to wield the power it currently does with municipalities and gas taxes.

“They hold this hammer over cities saying, ‘we’re going to give you five cents on the dollar of gas tax credits back and this is how you’re going to spend it.’ I find this repulsive that a federal bureaucracy should be dictating to local municipalities how [they] should spend [their] tax dollars,” he says.

Cooper, currently the managing director of the Winnipeg Angel Organization — a non-profit network dedicated to connecting private sector investment with new ideas developed by local entrepreneurs and small business owners — is surely hoping his views resonate with the constituents in his riding. After finishing as the runner up to Liberal incumbent Raymond Simard in the June 2004 election, the second-time Conservative candidate is back on the hustings for the Jan. 23 vote.

“Running the first time was the major decision. Now it’s, ‘I’ve gone this far, why not again?’” says Cooper. “I’m taking the ‘put up or shut up’ approach. If you’re dissatisfied with your country’s leadership, you can complain or you can do something about it.”

For instance, Cooper says the recent handling of the income trust issue by federal Finance Minister Ralph Goodale was “abominable.” He says it was clear there was a leak prior to Goodale’s late-November announcement that new taxes would not be imposed on Canadian investors’ favourite sector.

“Nobody could tell me that was people making shrewd guesses,” he says of the trading spike that preceded Goodale’s news conference. “Markets don’t work like that. There definitely had to be a leak, but who made the leak has to be determined. It had to be a fundamental breakdown in their whole administration.”

As for winning in St. Boniface, a multi-cultural riding with a large francophone population, he’s not worried about how his English participation in two French-only debates will be perceived.

“I’m expecting to do quite well. There’s virtually nobody in St. Boniface that doesn’t speak English,” he says, noting that his French is still a work in progress.