Canada’s public markets are shrinking. The Fraser Institute documents a 32.7% drop in listings since 2010 and a collapse in IPO activity from 67 new listings in 2010 to just four in 2024 — evidence that too many promising companies are choosing private money or foreign exchanges.
The standard response has been “burden reduction“ — looser oversight and a promise of renewed growth. It sounds pro-market, but in practice it undermines growth, stifles innovation and weakens capital formation.
A market that is slow to police, hard to navigate and stuck on outdated processes pushes away both issuers and investors. The fix is not looser rules; it is modern digital infrastructure that makes compliance fast and inexpensive for good actors while catching problems early.
Start with disclosure and investor information. Company filings should be digital from day one — searchable, structured and validated automatically before publication. Canada launched SEDAR+ to modernize disclosure, but the system has struggled with outages, slow searches and inconsistent data access since its July 2023 rollout.
Most filings still arrive as static PDFs that are difficult to search and compare. Contrast that to international standards: the U.K.’s Companies House offers free company profiles with core facts and an open application programming interface (API); the SEC publishes standardized, machine-readable “company facts” through its EDGAR system; the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) provides issuer pages that surface key details quickly.
SEDAR+ needs to evolve from a PDF warehouse into a structured, real-time platform that matches these standards. Canada should add a free, reliable company facts page for every issuer showing share count, major insiders, filing compliance record and key risk flags in a searchable, API-ready format.
When trustworthy information is easy to find and compare, more investors examine smaller Canadian companies, trading deepens and those companies raise money at lower cost.
Supervision needs the same upgrade. Technology lets regulators combine trading data, company updates and complaints to spot trouble quickly. This is not “more burden,” it is smarter oversight that identifies misconduct sooner while reducing blanket requirements that affect everyone. Faster detection protects investors and lowers the cost of capital for honest issuers by reducing the scandal discount that weighs on valuations when trust is low.
The clock is ticking
Time matters for founders. Going public and raising follow-on capital should take weeks, not months. Clear published timelines, standardized forms, automatic cross-checks with registries and transfer agents and unified onboarding across securities commissions would make the public route competitive on speed without weakening standards.
When timelines are predictable, companies do not burn cash on bridge financing or settle for quick sales — they list and build here.
Australia shows this works. Facing competition from Cboe Australia — which received listing approval in October 2025 — the ASX accelerated timelines, streamlined digital filing and improved investor information access. Listings and secondary offerings now move faster because the infrastructure supports speed.
Canada needs the same approach: publish firm service standards, automate routine checks and make cross-listing administratively simple. That is how you compete — on speed, predictability and data quality, not on diluted standards.
This is precisely where the burden-reduction mantra fails. The promise is that looser oversight will restore activity. The reality is just the opposite. When enforcement is slower and information is unclear, trustworthy issuers pay a reputational penalty and retail investors retreat.
The result: fewer Canadian options in RRSPs and TFSAs, higher search costs for advisors who must buy data that should be free and more money in cash or foreign indices because confidence in smaller domestic names keeps eroding.
These are actual costs felt by households today. The opportunity costs are larger: fewer IPOs mean fewer mid-cap firms scaling into global competitors, weaker technology adoption and a thinner pipeline of Canadian companies worth owning long-term.
Next steps
We do not need to abandon standards to compete. We need to change how standards are met. Make filings machine-readable and instantly validated. Make supervision real-time and targeted. Make listing and follow-on timelines short, clear and published. Provide a free, comparable company facts feed for every investor. This is not more red tape, it is a practical way to reduce effective burden for good actors while raising accountability for those who cut corners.
The choice is not protection versus competitiveness. It is outdated systems versus modern markets.
Keep promoting burden reduction and the drift continues — more private deals, more foreign listings, fewer Canadian names to own. Build better infrastructure, and Canada can reverse the shrinkage, attract new listings and give savers a broader, healthier set of homegrown companies to invest in.
That is how capital formation, innovation and investor protection reinforce each other. Design infrastructure that works or keep losing to markets that already have.