FAIR Canada recently published research showing that Canadian investors prize fair treatment above almost everything else the regulatory system does. The finding is already being carried into the policy debate as a statement of what investors want. It deserves to be — but only together with a second finding in the same survey that limits how much weight the first can bear.
Ask investors to rank what matters, and fairness wins. More than half (56%) put it in their top three, ahead of regulatory compliance and advisor qualifications. Innovation and new product development were at the bottom of the list, at 21% and 13%. FAIR Canada draws a reasonable conclusion: as policymakers weigh expanded retail access to private and exempt markets, investors are “not prioritizing more products.” That much is true. There’s little appetite for more complex products on the shelf.
Set that ranking beside a second finding though, and it looks less solid. Most respondents had, at best, a shaky grasp of the system they were ranking. Only 8% called themselves very familiar with how investment regulation works; 31% were unsure a securities regulator even exists; and just 16% could name one.
Read the findings together — clear priorities, shaky knowledge — and the headline changes character. Those priorities come largely from people who, in the same survey, could not name the regulator responsible for delivering them. It measures their wishes, not how they’ve been treated. Knowing you prize fairness is not the same as knowing if you’ve received it.
This gap — between what investors value and what they can judge — matters most on the question of fairness itself. Among advised and hybrid investors, 72% agreed their advisor puts the client’s interests first. FAIR Canada reads the shortfall, the nearly three in 10 who are not convinced, as the gap for advisors and regulators to close.
The deeper problem runs the other way: what does that majority’s trust actually measure? On this, the focus-group testimony FAIR Canada published is telling. Some said they would not know what being treated unfairly looked like. One said she did not know enough to recognize when things were going wrong. Others treated disclosure documents as a rubber stamp — signed and filed unread — valuing them not for anything they contained but as a comforting sign that rules must exist somewhere behind them.
These are not the accounts of people equipped to judge whether their advisor acts in their interest. What, then, supports it? Not advisor conduct — only confidence in it. Benefit of the doubt, granted by people who admit they have no way to know if it is warranted.
Satisfaction from people who would not know when to be dissatisfied is not evidence that the system works. It is evidence of how easily it can pass for a system that works.
What the client doesn’t know
Mistaking that appearance for proof is where it goes wrong — and the error is not FAIR Canada’s alone. It is entitled to ask investors what outcomes they value. And to its credit, it foregrounded low awareness in its report rather than burying it in a footnote.
The danger is to let the first finding — that investors prize fairness — travel without the second, and to treat investor sentiment as evidence of regulatory performance.
Reported fairness tracks what a client feels: the rapport, the regular calls, the absence of any obvious disaster. It does not track suitability, conflicts or embedded costs — the things beyond a client’s view that, by their own admission, they would neither understand nor know to look for.
A satisfied client and a well-served one are not always the same person. When they differ, the survey cannot tell the difference — because the client usually can’t either.
The implication for regulators is uncomfortable. Many investors do not really understand the system and are in no position to judge its performance. Absent that awareness, surveys of how they feel cannot stand in for evidence that it does.
That evidence must be gathered directly — through compliance testing that judges real outcomes for clients instead of counting completed forms, and redress that is proactive rather than complaint-driven.
The client-focused reforms were meant to move regulation in exactly this direction, away from formal compliance and toward better client outcomes. Their uneven implementation shows how hard the shift is. But the difficulty is the point, and reading reassurance off a satisfaction score is a way of avoiding it.
The most valuable thing in FAIR Canada’s research is not the ranking. Investors failed the knowledge test — an objective result, not a matter of perception. This tells us that the protective architecture investors say they want is one they cannot monitor, cannot navigate and cannot hold to account when it fails.
The answer is not to treat their trust as proof. It is to build protections that catch what the investor never will.
FAIR Canada asked investors what they want, and they answered clearly. Whether they are getting it is the harder question — one the survey cannot settle and one regulators cannot avoid. Treat satisfaction as the measure, and goodwill will outscore good performance. Trust should follow from protection that works, not stand in for it.
