The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada has proposed its latest set of amendments designed to re-write its rulebook in plain language.
This latest set of proposed amendments, published today for a 90-day comment period, encompasses what IIROC calls “clean up” amendments, which aims to capture rule provisions that were not otherwise accounted for in one of the previously published tranches of amendments. So far, seven tranches of the proposed plain language rulebook have been published, with amendments dealing with the market integrity rules and the enforcement rules to be drafted separately and published at a later date.
In its notice, IIROC indicates that its staff conducted an overall review of the current rulebook to ensure that all existing rules are either included as part of the plain language rules; or repealed. And, in the course of that review, they identified several issues that needed to be cleaned up, including: definitions that they’ve decided to move to another section of the rulebook; provisions to be inserted; and, some provisions that had been missed inadvertently.
Most of these so-called clean up amendments are not significant, however, IIROC has marked three of the proposed amendments as substantive. Among them, a proposed plain language rule will state that a dealer must not pay any commission fees, or other fees in connection with payments received from a client or issuer, to any person other than a registered rep or investment rep.
IIROC says that many of the non-substantive amendments consist of simply adding definitions within the current rulebook.