As a small organization, FAIR Canada does not have the resources to do everything we would like. One thing we strive for, though, is more investor-centric research. Rather than assuming what investors think or need, we invest in research to understand their experiences and priorities, enabling us to better represent their interests. This month, we released the results of an independent survey and focus group study — conducted by Innovative Research Group on our behalf — asking 1,500 Canadian retail investors how they experience and rank the outcomes that securities regulation is designed to deliver. The survey featured in this issue covers what they said, and I encourage you to read it.
What I want to raise here is something the data touches on but does not fully capture. We are in a period — and Canada is not alone in this — where much of the energy in parts of the industry and among some regulators is focused on product innovation and expanding retail investor access to complex and illiquid investments. The words “innovation” and “democratization” are used constantly. The pitch, stripped to its core, is that ordinary investors are calling for greater access to opportunities in new, innovative products or in private assets available to wealthy investors, and that industry is responding to that demand. I understand why that argument has political traction. Better Markets, a U.S.-based financial reform organization, offered a blunter reading in March 2026: the push has nothing to do with democratizing investing and is instead about an industry that needs new revenue streams to sustain its own growth. Whether or not one accepts that characterization entirely, the underlying tension deserves honest examination.
What is sometimes overlooked is that wealthy investors have access to high-quality advice and a greater capacity to absorb market downturns. Retail investors, particularly do-it-yourself investors, are exposed to greater risks when complex products are readily available without the benefit of a suitability assessment or a clear understanding of the product. They are also more susceptible to shocks. The Bank for International Settlements raised related concerns about what happens when illiquid private credit assets are made accessible through vehicles promising retail investors ready liquidity. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority completed a multi-firm review of private asset valuations in 2025 and found that conflict-of-interest management and valuation independence both needed improvement, explicitly stating that those gaps mattered more given the growing retail exposure to private assets. Amit Seru at Stanford has warned that this kind of retail expansion could turn private equity into what he has called a systemic risk machine. Professors Clayton and de Fontenay at Brigham Young and Duke make a related but distinct argument: broad retail access is likely to erode the very performance advantages that made private equity attractive in the first place, rather than protect investors who have been shut out of it. Both arguments, made by finance academics rather than investor advocates, are at least as important as the political pitch for innovation and democratization.
Financial history has something to say here as well. The global financial crisis, including the asset-backed commercial paper crisis in Canada and the broader collapse of structured credit markets in 2007 and 2008, did not result from a shortage of innovation. It resulted, in part, from complex instruments being sold to investors who did not fully understand what they held, in conditions where distribution moved faster than the discipline to ask whether the products served investor needs. The products today are different. The regulatory environment is different too. I have no interest in overstating the risk. But the pattern is worth naming: innovation framed as inclusion and access, moving ahead of the evidence for it, before it hardens into policy. Our research gives Canadian regulators and policymakers something concrete: direct evidence of what investors themselves say they want, and it is not new, complex products. What they want is to be treated fairly.
Jean-Paul Bureaud
Executive Director, President and CEO, FAIR Canada