Tausi Insider

Samuel Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, testifies during a Senate Committee on Feb. 9. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images Blair Wiley is chief legal officer of Wealthsimple, which offers cryptocurrency trading. Critics are quick to suggest that events like the recent collapse of FTX Ltd. make crypto a Wild West, without the regulatory oversight we take for granted in other industries. But in fact, in Canada, we do have a regulatory framework for crypto and it’s been working, and working well. Canadians are affected by the insolvencies of the Bahamas-based FTX, and New Jersey’s Celsius before it, largely because those companies have been operating in the country without conforming to its regulatory framework. It’s estimated that total losses from FTX could exceed US$10-billion, spread across a million creditors, including in Canada. More needs to be done to bring these foreign platforms under our regulatory framework and fast, otherwise Canadians will continue being victim to poor actor...

Police officers patrol outside the Palais de Congres, during the opening of COP15 on Dec. 6, the two-week U.N. biodiversity summit in Montreal. CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/Reuters Delegates have reached the starting line for COP15 in Montreal, the 15th United Nations conference on biodiversity, where work on a new international agreement to protect nature is set to commence on Wednesday. But participants say the road ahead is already looking like a steep, uphill climb. For representatives from 196 countries who are party to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, the central purpose of the meeting is to hammer out a new framework under the convention, with agreed targets to be met by 2030. The previous framework expired in 2020 with none of its targets met. COP15 was initially intended to take place that year in China, but its completion has been delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic and the venue shifted to Montreal. The conference, taking place at Montreal’s Palais des congrès, is surrounded...

Delegates walk past a giant Jenga-style tower at the COP15 United Nations conference on biodiversity in Montreal, on Dec. 8. Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press A reporting system for business risks tied to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss and efforts to reverse them should start gaining traction globally in 2024 and achieve wide adoption relatively quickly, the co-chair of the task force developing it says. David Craig, co-chair of the new Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), said the urgency of protecting the world’s natural assets puts pressure on businesses to act to avoid financial and legal trouble. Companies face a host of risks as the natural systems degrade – shoreline loss, floods, deforestation, wildfires – all of which affect assets and markets. The TNFD aims to have its framework ready by next September, giving companies a new set of tools to assess and disclose their impact on nature and the risks they face in dealing with physical and pol...

Submitted to Finance Canada by the government-appointed Sustainable Finance Action Council, the document could significantly shape global markets by serving as the most credible available protection against greenwashing Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press A federal advisory body is proposing to disqualify any new oil and gas projects from being classified as green, and award that designation only in a limited and qualified way to projects to reduce pollution from existing fossil-fuel production. The recommendations are included in a framework for a rulebook to define sustainable investments in this country, known as a green taxonomy, a copy of which was obtained by Tausi Insider. Submitted to Finance Canada this fall by the government-appointed Sustainable Finance Action Council (SFAC), the 77-page document received sign-off from all of that group’s members – including representatives of most major Canadian financial institutions, insurers and pension funds. But it has not yet been publ...