To Support and Protect
As the first female head of the OSC,
Maureen Jensen’s focus is on streamlining Canadian securities laws and increasing
women’s representation on boards and in C-suites by Susan Smith photo by Paul Orenstein
M
AUREEN JENSEN’S professional mission is based on a strong belief that capital markets must be well-regulated to protect the public. Should she ever doubt that even for a moment, she
need only refer to a tangible reminder of what can go wrong when they are not. For most people, Bre-X Minerals Ltd. is nothing
more than a bad memory, if they remember it at all, but the CEO and chair of the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) still has an ore sample salted with gold dust in her office — a reminder of a history-mak- ing securities scandal that shook corporate Canada. It was the 1990s. As Calgary-based Bre-X was amass-
ing a market capitalization of more than $6 billion based on fraudulent samples from an Indonesian
mine, Jensen had parlayed field experience and a degree in geology into the top job at Noble Peak Resources Ltd., a mining exploration company. She was appalled by — and vocal about — what the
Bre-X scandal cost Canadian investors in terms of dollars and the mining industry in terms of reputa- tion. So much so that a career move plunged her into the regulatory world when she joined the Toronto Stock Exchange as a director to work with a mining standards task force in 1998. There, she found that she liked the regulatory side of the business, and has stayed. From the TSX she went on to become senior vice-president of surveillance and compliance at Market Regulation Services Inc., now the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, or IIROC. She moved to the OSC in 2011, and was named
30 | CPA MAGAZINE | MARCH 2017
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