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The Ontario government is stopping finance regulators from banning a popular type of mutual fund that the regulators say takes unfair advantage of people trying to invest for their futures.

This happened late last week, with a dry statement from Finance Minister Vic Fedeli about “proposed amendments to National Instrument 81-105 Mutual Fund Sales Practices (Embedded Commissions).”

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It all got drowned out by the Progressive Conservatives’ emergency monkeying with Toronto’s civic election, but it could affect a whole lot more people.

These investments are about a fifth of the mutual funds held in Canada (versus almost zero in the U.S. and Europe), and they’re “the purchase option that has tended to be the most difficult for investors to understand and to have the most negative impact on subsequent investor behaviour,” the regulators said, explaining their proposal to ban them on Thursday.