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Fedeli’s news release came at 10 a.m. Thursday after the CSA “published for comment” its proposals to improve “investor protection and market efficiency” by, among other things, prohibiting upfront fees and deferred sales commissions.

The government’s intervention apparently stunned the investment industry and its legal teams. The move, said lawyers at Osler, raises “interesting issues relating to the functioning of the OSC and Canada’s established process for national securities rulemaking.”

Osler did not explain what the “interesting issues” are, but let’s start with the possibility that Fedeli’s move may be the beginning of a much larger conflict between the Ford government and the OSC. And here’s another possibility: a little disruption within the investment industry’s regulatory hen houses is overdue.

Sales commissions and other aspects of the mutual fund business have been the source of much agitation and theoretical puzzlement for decades. Most of the research uses economic calculations and models to attempt to prove that mutual funds are dubious investment vehicles that depend on costly marketing schemes, reward sales people more than investors and fail to provide solid returns over time. The latest paper, published this month by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests somewhat unhelpfully that “eliminating (mutual fund) marketing substantially improves welfare” as capital shifts toward cheaper funds and competition decreases fees.