Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the four of you for being here.
On increasing our competitiveness, we're all in favour of reducing the communicative burden of regulatory issues to ensure that we are able to lower some of those other provincial barriers as well as barriers in international trade and then supplement some of that growth, regardless of the partisan rhetoric that happens at times in these discussions. We're all in favour of trying to make our businesses more competitive and ensure that we grow our economy and that we're productive. Those are critical issues. Without that, we can't sustain all the other things that are important to our services and government and the people of Canada.
There are two issues I want to get into with you. In my previous life, I tried to bring forward a capital market securities regulator for all of Canada. We had eight provinces signed on to the deal. It would make us more competitive, lower duplication of services, reduce regulatory matters and enable us to be more competitive on the international stage, but then there's politics. Suddenly it fell apart with every different election, and that's a real challenge in the federation. I think Mr. Bachrach even alluded to it as well. We have to be mindful that when you're talking to the federal government, we're also talking to all the other governments that are part of this equation.
How do you feel about independent regulators? I'm talking about the Ontario Securities Commission, for example. I'm talking about FSRA, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario, which we changed. It had been too close to government, so we put it at arm's length to provide independence and to minimize government interference.
Give me your thoughts.
The Bank of Canada is an example of that.