PrefBlog

There is a superb opinion piece in the Globe by Joseph Groia, titled Hey OSC: Can you spare $100-million?:

Do most Ontarians know that there is more than $100-million of public money sitting in a bank account at the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) just waiting to be spent on health care, education or legal aid? Unfortunately, they may not as the OSC is badly behind on its statutory corporate-governance obligations (ironically for our capital markets regulator). It is also not clear what Queen’s Park plans to do about it.

Where did the $100-million come from? Under the Securities Act, the OSC is required to pay money it receives under certain orders or settlements into Ontario’s consolidated revenue fund for general governmental purposes unless they designate it to be used for third parties or investor education (the 2(b) Fund). The 2(b) Fund now exceeds $100-million, yet the OSC has not said when or how it plans to spend this enormous amount of public money; nor is there clear transparency or accountability about the process they will follow. What is clear is that the Securities Act allows the Ontario government to take surplus money away from the OSC at any time.

This pool of money has been used in the past to fund outfits like “FAIR Canada”, which by some odd coincidence happens to have created jobs for ex-OSC staff. The existence of this pool is a blot on Ontario’s governance. If investor education is important, an allowance for this should be made in the budget. If it’s not important, don’t fund it. But all fines and penalties levied by the OSC should go straight into Ontario general revenues, with no discretion allowed to the OSC to fund their friends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.