Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, for appearing today on this very important topic.
Mr. Garetson and for everyone else, in the Dark Ages in the nineties, I spent some time on Bay Street in a highly regulated financial services industry, both in the regulated banking business and also in the asset-based finance industry. We've had, and some of the witnesses here today have mentioned this, people with ethical challenges since the beginning of time looking to make a buck and take advantage of the people whom Barnum singled out in his famous saying. We had Enron, a publicly traded company. People chose to commit fraud quarter after quarter in that company. Obviously, everybody is familiar with Bre-X and the Ponzi schemes of Mr. Madoff and many others, so this is nothing new. What we have is a new platform that people are coping with, and we're in the early stages of regulation.
Maybe I'll start with Mr. Garetson.
Can you tell me exactly the state of the current regulation? You're referring to the fact, as some of the other witnesses have, that some are publicly traded, and obviously there are securities laws for the publicly traded companies, but some, I believe, like Wealthsimple, are privately held by primarily an institutional or a majority shareholder, which I think is Power Financial. Can you tell me how the Canadian system is set up currently to regulate crypto bitcoin tokens and that new industry?