Thieves of Bay Street

Bruce Livesey, a Canadian investigative journalist, argues that Canada's securities enforcement is among the weakest in the developed world and that white-collar financial crime is effectively unpunished there.

His structural argument concerns the regulatory architecture. Canada has no national securities regulator; each province maintains its own, which produces fragmentation, jurisdictional gaps and inconsistent enforcement. Criminal prosecution of securities offences requires police and prosecutors who rarely have the expertise, and the resulting cases take years and usually fail. Livesey compares conviction rates and penalties with the United States.

The cases he covers include Bre-X, the mining fraud in which salted gold samples produced one of the largest market losses in Canadian history with no successful prosecution; Nortel, whose accounting executives were acquitted; Sino-Forest, the Chinese forestry company listed in Toronto whose collapse followed a short seller's research; and various smaller frauds. He also covers the mutual fund industry's fees and disclosure practices, and the relationships between the financial industry and the regulators and politicians who oversee it. Livesey is a critic and the book is written for a general audience. The reference has not verified its detail. The general finding about Canadian enforcement weakness is consistent with academic comparisons.