Finance committee  Good morning, Mr. Chairman and committee members. I am Michael Conway, chief executive and national president of Financial Executives International Canada. FEI Canada is a voluntary membership association comprised of over 2,000 Canadian chief financial officers and other senior

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Dechert. It's really important, as I said to Ms. Block. It's a big competitive world out there, and Canada is a relatively small capital market versus the entire world. So the ease of access for the capital markets is critical. Things are better than they used to

Finance committee  —and they don't want to see their fees go away, but a single securities act and a single set of regulations, improved enforcement, a lot of the things that are currently being looked at at the securities regulator just make sense. I might add, while we're at it, Mr. Menzies, if

Finance committee  Thank you, Mrs. Block. FEI Canada did participate in the Hockin panel and currently is participating in round tables, just last week with the Canadian securities transition office, to move this initiative forward. FEI Canada is all about efficiency and capital markets that wor

Finance committee  FEI Canada has long come forward to talk about transparency and accountability as one of the basics of our organization. We brought in a code of conduct about a decade ago. Actually, our sister organization in the U.S. had it incorporated into the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and we have

Finance committee  Our organization has a capital markets committee that has supported transparency and worked with the Ontario Securities Commission on the executive compensation disclosure requirements. The public has the right to know. The recommendations we put forward for the recovery spending

Finance committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and committee members. It's a pleasure to be appearing back before your committee. I'm Michael Conway, and I'm pleased to present Financial Executives International Canada's views on the forthcoming federal budget. FEI Canada is a voluntary profess

Finance committee  FEI Canada has various technical committees, one of which is the committee on corporate reporting, and so we spend a lot of time talking with the standard setters and accounting regulators. You're right that marked to market is certainly something that's garnered a lot of headlin

Finance committee  I guess, ultimately, it's a balance. We recognize the difficult decisions you have to make in balancing the logic of aligning the funding of the solvency deficits with what we think is a logical alignment over the lifetime in which they relate, against some of the concerns of the

Finance committee  I think it's a question of degree. Our survey differentiated between availability of financing, ranging from very available to available to somewhat available to not at all available, and you had it across the board. In the summary we basically boiled it down to what I refer to a

Finance committee  In the appendix, we've segmented our survey into public and private, large and small. We thought that would be helpful input for the committee. We saw across the board that the tightening of availability, the cost increase, and the process difficulty have increased for all sector

Finance committee  Exactly. To your question about availability of credit, certain avenues have shut down. Some of the foreign banks are lending less, certainly on the—

Finance committee  On the equipment leasing side—

Finance committee  The foreign groups have shut down; a lot of the U.S. banks are lending less.

Finance committee  I'll let my colleague, who deals with the syndicates, speak to this.