Whose priorities are these?

Every year the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) asks the public to comment on its proposed statement of priorities. The invitation sounds meaningful: Here is the agenda the OSC proposes to pursue. Tell us what you think before it is finalized. Your comments will be posted. Your feedback will be considered.

That is how consultation is meant to work. It lets investors and market participants test a regulator’s direction before it hardens into an operating plan. But the OSC’s recent practice no longer matches that promise.

For years the sequence was coherent. The final priorities for the year ending March 2024 were published on April 18, 2023. Those for the year ending March 2025 were available on April 29, 2024. Comment in the winter, read the final document at the start of the fiscal year (April 1) and know what the OSC intends to do.

The timing mattered. Priorities are not an academic exercise. They drive staffing, supervisory emphasis, policy work, technology spending and enforcement attention. When the final priorities land at the start of the year, stakeholders can judge the OSC’s choices before they are already up and running.

That orderly sequence broke last year. The proposed statement of priorities for 2025–26 told commenters their feedback would be incorporated into a final document in spring 2025. The business plan carrying those priorities did not appear until September 10, 2025 — more than five months into the year the priorities were meant to govern.

By the time the public learned which priorities survived, nearly half that year had passed. The proposed statement for 2026–27, released in November, carried the same spring commitment. Two weeks remain to meet it — by which point almost a quarter of the fiscal year will have elapsed with the priorities not yet finalized.

Advisor.ca asked the OSC when the new statement would be released. “As with previous years, the 2026–2027 Statement of Priorities will be part of our OSC business plan,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “At the moment, we do not have a set date for publication … .”

The lateness is a symptom, the deeper problem is authorship.

The OSC described the proposed statement for 2026–27 as flowing from its strategic plan, with competitiveness elevated to a top priority. The document does acknowledge that the OSC’s business plan must also satisfy the Ontario Minister of Finance expectations that are set out in the annual Letter of Direction.

The September 2025 Letter of Direction pointed the OSC in a precise direction: competitive capital markets, broader access to capital, attracting firms to register in Ontario and supporting the government’s capital markets modernization agenda.

Ministerial direction is not improper. The OSC is a public agency, the minister answers to the legislature, and government is entitled to set an agency’s broad expectations.

That is exactly why the document’s silence about the Letter of Direction matters. If the central direction is already fixed by the government, commenters deserve to know which priorities remain open to influence and which have been settled even before the consultation begins. The document does not make this distinction. It invites comment without admitting how little is up for grabs.

The transparency runs one way. The comments and Letter of Direction are public, but the route by which government priorities are set and enshrined as regulatory priorities is not. The visible inputs are not the decisive ones, and the decisive ones have done their work before the comment period opens.

Investor protection suffers

This falls hardest on investor protection, because the government’s direction doesn’t reinforce it. The Letter of Direction prioritizes competitiveness and capital formation. Investor protection has no comparable champion outside the OSC itself. When government direction and consumer protection compete for OSC resources and attention, protection loses.

The OSC has a dual mandate, and efficient markets serve investors too — a slow, costly, unpredictable regulator helps no one. But competitiveness and protection are not the same discipline: a regulator that leads with competitiveness tilts toward the industry it regulates, and protection becomes a function to acknowledge rather than the test that shapes the agenda.

That warning is not coming only from outside critics. The OSC’s own Investor Advisory Panel — the body it created to speak for investors — has warned that the drive for competitiveness, however legitimate, must not crowd out protection. It pressed the OSC to put real resources and firm deadlines behind its investor-protection commitments. When a regulator’s own investor panel has to issue that reminder, the tilt away from consumer protection is real.

The problem is institutional, not a matter of bad faith — and none of it is beyond fixing.

First, the OSC should say plainly where government direction has shaped its priorities, so commenters know which parts of the agenda are open and which are settled.

Second, it should show, in its response to comments, what it heard and what changed — which submissions moved which priorities, which did not and why. Not formulaic acknowledgments and thanks, but a record of its judgment, so stakeholders can see how argument and statutory purpose were weighed. That is what separates consultation from ritual.

Third, it should finalize its priorities before the fiscal year is half spent — and if the planning process no longer allows that, say so, and say what the annual consultation now does. Priorities that land halfway through the year describe it; they no longer direct it.

The OSC works in a political climate that prizes capital formation and growth, and those are legitimate aims. The danger is that, in that climate, investor protection comes to look like a courtesy the OSC extends rather than the reason it was built.

None of these fixes is hard. Until the OSC makes them, it will keep extending an invitation that promises more than it delivers. Until then, investors who answer the call are not shaping the OSC’s priorities. They are reviewing decisions already made.