Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦

Independent 🇨🇦 Senator (CSG) representing Nova Scotia — focused on climate, inclusion, innovation, entrepreneurs, privacy & monopolies. Check LinkedIn

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@JeremyPatzerMP @SenatorHousakos Jeremy, your work to craft this important bill, and defend it so exceptionally, is why it has been successful. Congratulations. Now we just need Royal Assent.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@SenatorBoyer @globeandmail @kkirkup Yvonne, your unrelenting efforts, working to prevent these devastating harms in future and bring justice to countless harms of the past, must require incredible emotional strength on your part.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@cfibNational @JasminGuenette Thanks for stopping by. Entrepreneurship needs to be cherished if we’re to prosper.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@DavidColetto Confetti from the Heavens.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@CdnChamberofCom What a wonderful legacy award for Canadians to aspire to achieve… and for those who don’t aspire to achieve awards, but who just reliably do the hard work over the years, to end up receiving.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

“TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crime to flourish. By making its services convenient to criminals, it became one.”

“TD Bank chose profits over compliance in order to keep its costs down. That decision is now costing the Bank billions of dollars.”

Those are the words of United States Attorney General Merrick Garland as he announced the largest ever (US$3 BILLION) penalty of its kind.

What a humiliating day for Canada.

The world can now point to TD Bank and this case as powerful evidence that fraud and other financial crimes have been accommodated by Canadian banks and our financial regulators. That is the harsh reality of this moment.

Canada’s reputation as the home to the globe’s most trusted, safe and reputable banks has been dealt a humiliating and devastating blow. The facts in this case are deeply troubling.

For six years, I have been doing what I can to encourage the last two Ministers of @FinanceCanada to give Canadians control over their financial data, to integrate new financial technologies into our financial system, and to encourage made-in-Canada competition. I’ve not been successful. The strategic and steady spreading of fears, uncertainties and doubt (FUD) slowed progress to a crawl and reinforced the status quo while the rest of the world raced ahead.

Surely, this case proves that the status quo is no longer an alternative — that what we’ve been doing is NOT working. We MUST turn this moment into an inflection point, and do what it takes to turn this massive blow to Canada’s global reputation into a positive. But how?

Our #BigBanks can never again be granted the position of dominance that they have occupied, especially as it relates to policy decisions in Ottawa. Our financial sector policy decisions (federally and provincially) MUST start to meaningfully include Canadian innovators, not just our biggest incumbents.

Our regulators need to change how they are regulating. Competition and disruptive alternatives to the status quo can no longer be pushed aside because of resistance from the big banks.

We must finally choose to prioritize the eradication of fraud and money-laundering here at home. Some early progress has been made from a policy standpoint, but the TD Bank case highlights an utter lack of operational progress. Let’s decide today, to build the world’s best and most innovative crime-fighting tools, and a financial innovation ecosystem that solves our own problems — and then go and sell those services to a world that also needs them.

We must transform our financial system FROM one that fosters an organization is issued the biggest penalty of its kind, and TOWARDS one where we become the world’s best, most sophisticated financial crime fighting cops. (Don’t think we can? Just look at Newfoundland’s Verafin as an example of what our financial innovators can achieve… and then do a LOT more of that.)

Let’s turn humiliation into opportunity.

#CatalyzingCdnInnovation

https://t.co/VrNDn9NdZN

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@privacylawyer He is a genius. Spectacular insights.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@deAdder Such a loss. Your “voice” is so insightful and important.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@realjcdeacon @PGATOUR Congratulations Coach. You’re building quite a legacy.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

Businesses, large & small, need accurate and easy-to-use carbon accounting tools to to quantify their carbon emissions & track their progress towards #NetZero. I cited Calgary’s @Arbor_eco as a great example of an effective software tool that already exists in the market. Canadians can count on the talents of our innovators to help us on every step of our journey towards #NetZero and, ultimately, #NetNegative in our fight to overcome the #ClimateCrisis.

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

This is not making Canadians richer in future. It is not and will not.

[Ben Rabidoux @BenRabidoux]

One of these things is not like the other things...

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

I don’t think @dbreznitz’s no-holds-barred view of 🇨🇦’s governance & results over 2½ decades is unfairly dark — and it is followed by hope. I totally loved the humorous insight at the outset, almost involuntarily vaporizing my morning coffee! https://t.co/a9Gji3QN3t

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

I had the honour of being one of the countless teenagers (and many others) that fell in love with Maggie Smith in the 1970s. It never waned… but she did seem to hit a perfectly perfect stride on Downton!

[Stratford Festival @stratfest]

The Festival mourns the passing of Dame Maggie Smith🕊️

"Her arrival at the Stratford Festival was a moment of rebirth both for the theatre and also for her work. The desire to rediscover oneself made her an incredibly prolific and multifaceted artist.” - Antoni Cimolino

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

Maggie Smith… one of a kind, representing so much for so many.

[ana @shivlestat]

rest in peace maggie smith you’ll always be loved

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

Today, I had the great pleasure of engaging with Canada’s forestry leaders thanks to @FPAC_APFC (this is something that I want to post on separately because there was no shortage of discussion of the enormous opportunities, and the barriers that we can and must overcome).

But what I am posting about right now is one of the closing speaker’s comments. @davidfrum provided an overview of the geopolitical environment that was clear, compelling, humourous and incredibly insightful. That was absolutely no surprise.

During his engaging talk he also pointed to a historical moment in the peaceful transfer of power in the United States on January 6, 1961. The contrast with the events of January 6, 2021, 60 years later, is shocking.

The then Vice President, and President of the Senate, was Richard Nixon. It was his highly unusual role to hand over power to his electoral opponent. In this video, he reads out the final tally of the electoral college results of the campaign where he ran against John F Kennedy, and lost.

This moment in history is 15 years after the end of WW2 and during the height of the Cold War. Clearly, much of the world was no longer taking democracy for granted. We can only wish that we all will increasingly respect the perilous and precious nature of democracy as it was respected by Richard Nixon at that particular moment in time.

It’s well worth watching.

https://t.co/YZaZYojBCc

[Liz Hoffman @lizrhoffman]

NEWS: The Justice Dept is overhauling its review of bank mergers, Jonathan Kanter, the agency’s top antitrust cop, tells me.

Focus on branch overlap and deposits ignores the rise of fintech, private equity, etc. New rules could come as soon as tomorrow.

https://t.co/8jbQb94Saq

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

I had the honour of being an election observer in polls east of Kyiv during 🇺🇦’s 1st presidential election of 2019 (the 2nd was a runoff between incumbent Poroshenko & challenger Zelenskyy). We all know who won. The first ballot was 44 names long. I never thought 🇨🇦 would exceed that!

[Montreal Gazette @mtlgazette]

Elections Canada hopes 91-name ballots in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun will be counted by midnight https://t.co/Ax5oHzMKuf

[Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @colindeacon]

@quaid_jennifer @CompBureau @DrCiviluOttawa @monopolyproject @queensu @CADInnovators Jennifer, it is wonderful that I might have finally become a moderating force! Thanks again for your contributions. Fabulous job done to help launch such an important Competition Summit.