At a breakfast speech to Toronto’s Albany Club today, Doug Hyndman, chair of the British Columbia Securities Commission and the Canadian Securities Administrators, will warn against rushing to adopt U.S.-style securities regulatory reforms.

“Canadian regulators would do a serious disservice to Canadian markets and investors if we adopt more rules just to keep pace with our neighbours,” says Hyndman. “Our duty is to regulate the markets under our jurisdiction as efficiently and effectively as we can. We should pay attention to what is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere but we shouldn’t adopt new rules just for the sake of harmonization.”

Hyndman says that rather than adopting more prescriptive and detailed rules, Canadian investors would be better protected from the accounting fraud, governance lapses and other market abuses by having regulators do a better job of enforcing the current rules already in place. In today’s speech, Hyndman will detail how the BCSC aims to strengthen investor protection and focus securities regulation on issues that pose the most risks to investors.

“This is probably the worst time for us to adopt prescriptive requirements for governance,” he says. “As a result of the train wrecks of the past year, investors are now taking governance more seriously and asking companies hard questions about what their directors are doing. We should let the market work, as only it can, rather than stepping in as if we had all the answers.”