Strange bedfellows
Alberta and Quebec join forces to fight Ottawa’s proposed single securities regulator
by Max Fawcett
It’s not often that Alberta finance minister Ted Morton praises Jean Chretien and criticizes Stephen Harper in the same year, much less the same speech, but that’s what happened Tuesday at the Royal Glenora Club in Edmonton. Morton, who was joined by his Quebec counterpart, Raymond Bachand, at a breakfast organized by the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, reiterated his unconditional rejection of the federal government’s plan to replace the patchwork of provincial securities regulators with a single overarching organization.
In the course of so doing, he reluctantly praised the former Liberal Prime Minister for choosing to respect the autonomy of the provinces and asking for their when the issue of a single securities regulator came up during his time in office. Meanwhile, although he noted that “nobody is a bigger fan of Stephen Harper than me,” Morton criticized his former student for abandoning the promise of renewed federalism that he believes earned the Conservative Prime Minister all 28 seats in Alberta and 10 in Quebec during the 2006 election. Morton pulled his punches, placing the blame for Harper’s decision to stray off course on rogue officials in the federal Department of Finance in Ottawa, but his sense of disappointment was palpable.
Morton also thinks that his former pupil has misread the facts in this latest case of constitutional conflict between the federal government and the province of Alberta. “Our position is very clear: until the various court challenges are heard, it simply doesn’t make sense to be spending time and resources on developing a system that may turn out to be unconstitutional. Rather, we’d like to see that time and resources spent on improving the passport system.” To that effect, Morton and Bachand, who spoke yesterday at a similar event in Calgary, signed and sent letters to their counterparts in other provinces and territories encouraging them not to comply with what they describe as “the very arbitrary” September 30th deadline that the federal government has set for signing so-called “development agreements.”
If it seems like an usual alliance – Canada’s most politically conservative province joining forces with its most liberal one – it’s not necessarily a new one. A generation ago, Quebec Premier Rene Levesque and Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed teamed up in an effort to resist Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s attempt to patriate the constitution. Bachand paid tribute to that relationship in Tuesday’s speech, calling it a “renewed alliance” between two old constitutional allies.
The two provinces are fighting the national regulator for two principal reasons, Morton and Bachand said. First, it would disrupt a system that already works well, one that has been ranked by the OECD, the World Bank and the Millken Institute in the top 5 worldwide and ahead of the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries that they describe as the “model” for single regulator systems. “If it ain’t broke,” Morton asked rhetorically, “why should we fix it?”
Equally problematic, they both argue, is the centralizing effect that it will have on the securities business in Canada. A brain drain would funnel both good jobs and talented people east to Toronto or Ottawa, where they argue the head office, once it’s created, will inevitably be located. That out-migration of lawyers, accountants and other assorted professionals would undermine the financial clusters in Edmonton and Calgary, ones that Morton said are “growing rapidly, and will continue to grow.”
While Alberta and Quebec are the only provinces to come out publicly against the federal government’s plan, Morton hinted that other provincial governments would be joining them as interveners opposed to the federal position in the Supreme Court case that’s expected to be heard some time in 2011. Meanwhile, if the country’s highest court does end up siding with the federal government, both Quebec and Alberta intend to opt out. For his part, Morton seems steadfast in his opposition to any form of federal interference in what has traditionally been a provincial area of jurisdiction. As he told reporters after Tuesday’s event, “Alberta is not going to agree to anything that would mean not having an Alberta Securities Commission located and working in Alberta.
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