The latest push for a national securities commission has sparked a surprising level of optimism. There’s a good deal of hope that it will actually happen this time around. But for the exercise to be worth the effort, it needs to be more than a simple rebranding.

After decades of debate and false starts, you might think that dealers would be among the most skeptical when it comes to prospects for a national regulator. Yet, in our inaugural Regulators’ Report Card, dealers expressed their desire to see a national regulator come to fruition.

The craving cuts across region, firm size and industry segment. Mutual fund dealers, investment dealers, firms large and small from Nova Scotia to British Columbia and points in between indicated they’d like to see a national securities commission.

For the most part, they say, a national regulator is needed to eliminate the wasteful duplication and overlap that persists in the existing system. They also complained about needless interprovincial barriers to trade — namely the inability to serve clients in other provinces. And they criticized the starkly different approaches and service levels that prevail in different jurisdictions.

With the passage of the federal budget in March, the federal government now has the funding and the mandate to get the job done. It can draft a federal securities act and establish an office that will negotiate and manage the transition. Most important, it has the money to compensate the provinces that will be losing a source of revenue if they cede jurisdiction to a new national authority.

Simply creating a national regulator, however, probably won’t solve the problems dealers say exist within the current system. Realistically, a new national commission will probably be largely staffed with personnel from the existing commissions, who must overcome their institutional memory and petty jurisdictional prejudices. To deliver genuine progress, the move to a national regulator must represent a change in more than just the name on the door.