Alberta calls for incremental regulatory change

(March 30, 2004) Advocates of a single national market regulator must abandon the “my way of the highway” approach if they want to accomplish any form of regulatory harmonization, according to Alberta’s Minister of Revenue.

“The easiest way to start is to work together, find some ways that we can make decisions without unanimous consent — and passport would be an easy first step,” Greg Melchin said at a breakfast meeting of the Economic Club of Toronto. “Even back in last July when we had unanimous consent to proceed ahead to the passport, it was always viewed as a first step, never the end objective.”

Melchin is in Toronto to meet his counterpart in the new Liberal government, management board chair Gerry Phillips, who oversees the Ontario Securities Commission.

“We could have gone ahead with a passport model with all the provinces except Ontario,” he says. “But as provincial ministers, we’re not happy with proceeding without a province. We certainly want to work with Ontario on what makes sense for Ontario. That’s why we haven’t cast anything aside yet.”

Melchin says support for the national regulator is not as widely spread as its proponents seem to believe. Recently Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty called the choice a “no-brainer.”

“In Ontario, you had far more people saying ‘let’s have a single regulator,’ but that’s not true for the rest of Canada,” he says. “Some of the microcap companies in B.C. are regionally based and not national at all.”

The key to regulatory harmonization, he says, is to agree on the end goals, rather than the best form to reach those goals. If the best form eventually proves to be a national regulator, he is prepared to accept it.

“I’ve never been worried about what the methodology of regulation is, whether it’s passport or some hybrid of a single regulator with provincial commissions, or even a single regulator,” he says. “My concern is how do we get this thing moving forward, what is the right first step.”

While he admits single national voice would serve the country well, Melchin points out there are concerns aside from economics and market reaction.

He points out that decades after the fact, Albertans still harbour resentment toward Ottawa over the National Energy Program and are loath to cede provincial powers to the federal government.

“You add in all the political issues — the West might feel it’s not being heard by the federal government because they don’t have the population — how do you allow this to be transferred over to the federal government?”

Filed by Steven Lamb, Advisor.ca, steven.lamb@advisor.rogers.com