Supreme Court Rules Against National Securities Regulator

Why does it matter? Link-filled goodness explains everything.

If you're like us, you know, in a general sense, what securities markets are and that the federal government wants a single national regulator to oversee them, but not nearly enough to properly explain them to a wider audience, or why the Supreme Court's decided today to put a hold on the government's plans. Thankfully, keener minds, such as The Globe and Mail's Tim Kiladze, do. The ruling hinged on three key criteria that the court believed the government's pitch did not meet:

1) Is the law concerned with trade as a whole rather than with a particular industry?

2) Is the scheme of such a nature that provinces, acting alone or in concert, would be constitutionally incapable of enacting it?

3) Would failure to include one or more provinces or localities in the scheme jeopardize its successful operation in other parts of the country?

These three get to what the Court deemed to be the “heart of the case:” whether Canada has shown that the proposed act for a national regulator addresses a matter of national importance and scope, distinct from provincial concerns.

The ruling essentially determined that the provincial right to oversee property and civil rights outweighs the government's claim that the feds' jurisdiction over commerce and trade meant it could overrule provincial regulators. Alberta and Quebec had vociferously argued against the federal government's plan, while Ontario, home to the country's largest securities market, was in favour of the plan. CBC also has a similar explainer for those still left scratching their heads. Our only two cents on this matter is that this marks the court's second major ruling against the feds in recent months, with them similarly putting an end to the Tories' quest to close Vancouver's Insite safe-injection clinic.