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Introduction
On December 10-11, 2008, the Canadian Police College (CPC) and the Bank of Canada conjointly hosted a symposium entitled "White Collar Crime in Canada: An Integrated Law-Enforcement Approach." More than 60 senior officials from law-enforcement organizations, regulatory agencies, investigative bodies, federal government policy and regulatory departments, the major banking institutions, academia and the private sector were brought together to "explore the opportunities and challenges for improving a coherent approach to address white-collar crime in Canada."
This paper serves as a both a participant observer report on the symposium proceedings[1] and a conceptual pathfinder piece outlining the principal challenges and some of the elements of a strategy forward for regulating markets and controlling white-collar crime in Canada. We begin by presenting a working definition of white-collar crime and proceed to outline its tremendous economic, social and psychological costs to society and individuals. We proceed to underline that, in the context of recent financial crisis and ongoing fundamental questioning of the best directions for the future of healthy financial markets, immediate and enhanced action against white-collar crime has been deemed essential: demand for reform is emerging from all sectors, and most especially from civil victims.
An examination of the current approaches in Canada confirms that the current multi-agency system for market regulation and the enforcement of securities law in Canada is woefully inadequate for meeting our present objectives of serving victim needs and ensuring market integrity. With nearly 50 agencies organized into six jurisdictional "pillars" which, in practice, function too often as isolated silos, the Canadian system is widely regarded to be overly complex, poorly coordinated, badly resourced, and thereby ineffective. This is a story that repeats itself across the Western liberal democracies.
Synthesizing symposium and published academic material, I argue that the principal obstacles to creating a coordinated regulatory and enforcement strategy are, at bedrock, conceptual: the dominant conception of a fundamental divide between the public and private spheres that holds in Western political economy contributes the practical structural, legal, and cultural obstacles to coordinating the policing of the public sphere with the regulation of the private sphere that preoccupied symposium participants. Practically speaking, the accepted ways around such difficulties are commonly regarded as being: enhanced information sharing between enforcement and regulatory players (e.g. the...