OSC head Grant Vingoe plans to ‘act fast and act harder’ on enforcement matters

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Canada’s chief market watchdog says he will use his newly extended mandate to “act faster and act harder” against financial crimes.

The Ontario Securities Commission is set to announce Tuesday that chief executive officer Grant Vingoe will have his term extended for five years to December, 2029. Mr. Vingoe, 66, has been with the OSC in various capacities since 2015 and became its first dedicated CEO in April, 2022, when the chair and CEO roles were separated.

In an interview, Mr. Vingoe said he will use the time to implement an “ambitious” six-year strategic plan. While the exact details of the plan remain months away from public release, he said the primary goal is to make the regulator more efficient.

“There is a famous saying from a hedge fund manager that regulators are archeologists that look at the aftermath of events,” Mr. Vingoe said. “That was very striking to me and I wanted to be more in the flow of events and respond more in real time.”

Key to achieving a real-time response, he said, was recommitting to “a more impactful, harder approach to enforcement.”

“We are seeing a period with greater multinational fraud and greater use of technology, whether it is deep fakes or other techniques of manipulation, that are very complex cases requiring the analysis of large amounts of data,” Mr. Vingoe said.

“We have a very capable group of enforcement personnel today, but we can even increase those capabilities in terms of litigation, enforcement and data analytics.”

The OSC’s enforcement division has grown from 160 staff in 2016 to 175 as of last month. However, long-time OSC director of enforcement Jeff Kehoe will be leaving the regulator at the end of February while the search a permanent replacement continues.

Whoever eventually fills the job will need to work quickly.

Mr. Vingoe said one of his goals is “to increase the speed at which we can disrupt events while they are occurring, which would be preferable, or actually having swifter consequences after the fact.”

That could include using the OSC’s power to freeze assets to a greater degree, he said, or to seek receiverships as it did most recently in the case of failed hedge fund Traynor Ridge Capital Inc. The OSC already has many of the enforcement tools that it needs, Mr. Vingoe said, though he added “the additional tools that we would get could be helpful.”

For example, Mr. Vingoe said the OSC is “watching with great interest” initiatives recently introduced in British Columbia, such as the ability for its provincial securities regulator to prevent people with unpaid fines from renewing their driver’s licences in certain circumstances.

“If you’re a fraudster who is no longer able to drive your Lamborghini and that Lamborghini might be seized until you pay a penalty, that could have a strong impact,” he said.

Mr. Vingoe also said the OSC may look at strengthening enforcement of insider-trading cases.

“It is very difficult in the Canadian system to prove an insider-trading case and that could be an area of future improvement in legislation,” he said.

He is also hoping to expand on the progress the OSC has made in recent years on regulating new technologies such as crypto. While progress has been made, Mr. Vingoe said “the amount of absolute fraud is still very large” and advancements in artificial intelligence have made scams even more difficult to detect.

“The obvious one is artificial intelligence and all that it can bring, but also the way that data science is being used by market participants to influence investor behaviour,” he said.

Beyond investor protection, the OSC under Mr. Vingoe is also planning to embrace the capital formation mandate it received when the Ontario Securities Commission Act took effect in 2022.

“We are going to be experimenting to a larger degree on new corporate finance techniques, especially to assist earlier-stage companies,” Mr. Vingoe said.

The OSC has already introduced multiple initiatives designed to make it easier for smaller companies to receive funding. For example, some investors can now receive accredited status to put money into businesses within their area of expertise – such as someone with a doctorate in computer science investing in a technology startup – and some public companies can sell shares without filing a new prospectus under certain circumstances.

“We are going to continue along that trend and look at additional measures to promote economic growth,” Mr. Vingoe said.