Madam Speaker, I never said why one securities commission would be in Toronto. It has not been decided. Obviously, the legislation has not even been introduced. However, it is not certain that the national commission would be in Toronto. There are other options. I would encourage the member to have Quebec participate and fight for Montreal to be the centre. I would fight for somewhere in Alberta, or perhaps in Ottawa, wherever.
We have said with our proposal that we would keep the expertise in the local offices. One of the concerns from Alberta is the issue of junior capital pools. They want to keep that local expertise in Alberta because they feel that people in other regions do not understand that expertise, so the proposal that we are putting forward, if the members are actually interested in it, is that we keep that local expertise there and we would rely on that.
The concern here is that we are the only nation of the G7 that has a security system with 13 different regulators. The intent is to have a uniform system across the country for better enforcement, for better protection of market participants, and for better protection of investors so that we can have one uniform system.
In terms of whether we should have one between Canada and U.S., I would still fight for a Canadian securities regulator and it would be up to Parliament, if it adopted the Canadian securities regulator, to protect and ensure it remained in place.
This is the one area of our financial regulatory system, in my view, that is not up to the level it should be. Every other area of our financial regulatory system, in my view, is tops in the world, but this is the one area that does need to be improved. The member just has to read the reports from the IMF and the OECD, including the most recent reports, to recognize that Canada should follow this path.