Toronto Partner and Co‑Leader of Fasken’s Private Equity Group, Grant McGlaughlin, and Vancouver Partner, Kareen Zimmer, examine the Ontario government’s initiative to allow retail investors to participate in private equity opportunities, in an op-ed published in The Globe and Mail.
In their piece, they highlight the decline of Canada’s public markets, the resulting negative impact on retail investors, and the importance of enabling those investors to share in the value created by a growing private equity sector.
“It is critical that regulators keep working to make Canada’s public markets as attractive as possible, including by unwinding overburdensome regulations that contribute to startups choosing to stay private or existing public companies choosing to go private,” McGlaughlin and Zimmer write. “But doing so will not erode private equity’s inherent structural advantages. For this reason alone, we are unlikely to return to the frothy initial public offering volumes of past decades. It’s therefore essential that smaller investors are better able to benefit from private equity’s growth going forward.”
