Picture the client Canada’s senior-investor rules were written for. Carol is 79 and lives in Halifax. The advisor who has handled her account for 20 years notices something wrong — a sudden request to move a large sum to an account he does not recognize, pressed with an urgency that is not like her. A new acquaintance, met online, is involved.
This is the scenario Canada’s securities regulators spent years anticipating. The advisor can do two things. He can telephone a person she named in advance and ask whether she is alright. He can pause the transfer while someone looks harder. The regulators built both tools for exactly this. The problem is that firms are asked to do this without reporting client decisions.
On June 15, World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) marked the occasion with a press release showcasing advice for seniors. Name a trusted contact. Beware the unsolicited offer. Distrust the endorsement an AI may have faked. Sound advice, all of it. The CSA has told firms to ask for a trusted contact since the end of 2021.
Give the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) its due. It took the vulnerabilities of older investors seriously, and early. A Seniors Strategy in 2018. A panel of experts in law, medicine and elder care. Real money spent on how to design a form people would actually fill in. The fraud warnings are useful. The AI caution is sharp. The effort is not in doubt, but intent is not protection.
Consider what the rules require. A firm must ask for a trusted contact. The client can refuse. The contact, once named, can do nothing — no trades, no access, no say. A firm may freeze a suspect transfer, or may not. Every verb that matters is a soft one. The protection is optional for the client, discretionary for the advisor and the firm — and, at the top of the chain, unmeasured by the regulator. Soft all the way up.
Discretion is not free, and it is the vulnerable senior who pays for it. The advisor who senses a scam must weigh a frozen account against a client who might sue and a regulator who might second-guess. Some act. Some look away. And when they look away, it is the client who is left with the loss — how often, no one records.
Does any of it work? No one can say, because no one has published a count. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) can tell you that the average senior over 60 who reported a fraud loss in 2024 was taken for some $21,000.
The CAFC keeps that number. The CSA reports nothing. Four years on, it has not published how many clients named a contact, how many holds were placed, or a single dollar of loss prevented.
The silence is the point. Instead of doing the work of confirming the protection is effective, the regulator is content to perform the motions of protection. Draft the rule. Print the form. Mark the day. The work that would test whether any of it mattered — the counting, the audit, the follow-up — never comes. The press release is the product.
It does not have to be this way, and south of the border it isn’t. The Americans got there first, and they checked their work. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) put trusted-contact and temporary-hold rules in force in February 2018; Congress followed with the Senior Safe Act.
Canada’s near-identical version arrived almost four years later, and has not moved since. FINRA’s has barely stopped moving. It reviewed the rules, amended them in 2022, and this January proposed another round — a friendlier name to lift uptake, longer holds and a new five-day “speed bump” for any transaction if a firm suspects a customer is being defrauded. And it can tell you what Canada cannot: survey data it cites put trusted-contact adoption at about 42%. Of the investors without one, 81% could not recall being asked. The Americans measure the gap. Canada averts its eyes from its own.
The rest — the part Canada skipped — is the part that matters. Require a recorded answer — a named contact, or a refusal in writing — so the question can’t quietly go unasked. Standardize the trusted-contact form the OSC paid to design and test. Give advisors a clear safe harbour, so freezing a suspect transfer does not pose a career risk.
Then count. Each year, publish how many clients named a contact, how many holds were placed, how much was saved. The regulators built the rule. They will not take the last step — finding out whether it works.
The CSA promised older Canadians protection, and on paper they have it. What it cannot produce is proof. Even now, it cannot point to a single client these rules have saved — not because none were, but because no one counted. A safeguard no one can vouch for is only a promise. So, we will never know what happened to Carol, or the transfer she was pressed to make. And neither will the CSA.
