I'll take that one, thank you, if I may, Mr. Chairman.
A common securities regulator would be very helpful for the securities-issuing business and for its clients, because you have better clarity of regulation, better clarity of enforcement mechanisms, and better international cooperation, which is important to free trade in securities, which is I think is an appropriate goal for policy.
However, the notion that a single regulator or a national regulator would necessarily ward off types of trouble such as we saw in the ABCP market, I think, is probably attaching a few hopes too many to the program. Similar failures happened in other markets where there were single regulators. The U.K. has a financial services authority that is an über-regulator, and I would not hold out the U.K. marketplace as an example of success for regulation of financial services in the past two years.
I point out also that with respect to ABC in particular, you had failures on the part of the issuers to understand what they were issuing; you had failures on the part of distributors to understand what they were distributing; you had failures on the part of the overseers to understand what they were regulating; and you had failures on the part of buyers to understand what it was they were buying. So there were plenty of things going on there, in that market, that didn't function very well.
One of the key issues, I think, is that those managerial incentives, those risk management incentives, do need addressing, but I wouldn't like to see them being addressed using a top-down mode from a Canadian regulator or a federal regulator.