Financial Security Chamber | Investigators leave, files pile up

The watchdog charged with monitoring some 34,000 financial advisers is toothless. More than half of its investigators have jumped ship and the trustee has just resigned after a sick leave. In the turmoil, the files are piling up.

“I can’t deny that it’s a difficult situation,” acknowledges the CEO of the Chambre de la sécurité financière (CSF), Marie Elaine Farley, in an interview with The Press.

We conducted interviews with 12 employees and former employees of the Chamber’s trustee’s office, which is tasked with shedding light on its members’ breaches of industry rules. They are unanimous: the organization is experiencing serious labour relations problems, particularly due to high tensions between investigators and assistant trustees.

The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), which oversees the Chamber’s activities, says it is taking the situation “very seriously.” “The elements raised mainly concern human resources issues that would affect the CSF and that could ultimately affect public protection,” emphasizes communications director Sylvain Théberge.

Marie Elaine Farley assures on the contrary that “the protection of the public is not compromised and never has been.” The CSF has set up a system to prioritize certain more serious cases and those affecting vulnerable people.

Exploding workload

Since July 2023, 6 of the syndic’s 11 investigators have resigned, including chief investigator Moises Ramirez, who became an intelligence analyst with the Montreal police last summer. Another went on sick leave for five months and one of his colleagues has also just gone on sick leave.

Two out of five assistant trustees also left the office. The CSF replaced them, but it only recruited one investigator, a part-time consultant.

The workload has therefore almost doubled for the remaining investigators, acknowledges interim trustee Julie Dagenais. “Right now, we have an average of 48 cases per investigator,” she says. “At the beginning of the year, we were at 26.”

“Turbulence”

Last month, Syndic Claude Baril herself went on sick leave. In a farewell email to her team members, she bluntly listed serious problems affecting the CSF.

“We are living in turbulence, we all know that,” his message says, “that The Press obtained. Lack of staff, workload, salary dissatisfaction, demotivation for some. […] Changes need to be made, that’s very clear.”

She then explains that she has to “take a step back” to “get better”.

“She will take on new challenges”

In interview with The PressCEO Marie Elaine Farley announces that the trustee has finally decided to leave her position. “Claude Baril has decided to resign,” she said. “We welcomed her decision. She will take on new challenges.”

The CEO insists that the crisis the Chamber is experiencing is “temporary” and headhunters are redoubling their efforts to recruit new staff.

Reached by telephone before her resignation, Claude Baril refused to answer our questions, saying she was bound by a “confidentiality clause.”

“I hated being a manager.”

His predecessor as trustee, the former president of the Quebec Bar and former Liberal MP Gilles Ouimet, also left demotivated.

When he arrived at the CSF in 2018, he planned to improve and simplify work methods, he says. Once this task was completed, human resources management and performance evaluations did not excite him much. “I hated being a manager.”

However, she still had a major challenge: cleaning up the poisoned relationships between the investigators and the assistant trustees, all lawyers. “No one trusted anyone,” summarizes in an interview the former investigator Lucie Coursol, who resigned in October 2023.

Amid these tensions, Gilles Ouimet announced his intention to resign in January 2023, before taking a short sick leave. “I had realized that I was no longer the same manager, that I had a short fuse,” he admits.

The lawyer, however, remained in office for eight more months at the request of management, which only began looking for a replacement in June. “It’s unusual how long they took to replace me,” says Gilles Ouimet, now senior attorney at the syndic of the Order of Dentists.

Deputy trustee Julie Dagenais finally took over the reins on an interim basis, from August 2023 to January 2024. “We were left in the dark for months, with no official trustee… At some point, there was a lack of direction,” says Patrick (fictitious name), a resigning investigator who wishes to remain anonymous to protect his current job.

At the beginning of the year, on the recommendation of management, the board of directors recruited Claude Baril, who had just lost her position at the Montreal Stock Exchange. She stayed for eight months.

Most of the investigators and former investigators interviewed praise the work that Gilles Ouimet has accomplished, but strong tensions remain. Several speak of the “contempt” of the trustees towards them.

“I am very surprised and I don’t understand,” responds Marie Elaine Farley. She highlights a “high rate of mobilization, at 89%,” according to an internal survey conducted in 2022. “That is not at all the portrait we have.”

The AMF is worried… again

In response to questions from The Pressthe AMF emphasizes that the allegations relating to the “working climate” at the CSF have already pushed it to impose “an action plan”.

In 2022, these issues were already worrying the Authority. In an inspection report, it deplored a high turnover rate in the trustee’s office, creating “a risk” for investigations.

Cases remained unaddressed “for long periods” or were passed from one employee to another… “The processing times for certain more complex cases were particularly affected.”

The report mentions investigations that stretched on average over 255 days, while the target is 180 days. By 2023, these delays had increased to nine months, or 270 days, according to the CSF’s latest annual report.

Two years later, the AMF is currently conducting another inspection of the Chamber. Some elements that The Press raises “are already the subject of more specific approaches,” says Sylvain Théberge, without specifying which ones.

In an interview, interim trustee Julie Dagenais assured that AMF inspectors should see figures similar to those that raised their eyebrows in 2022, but nothing more. “It won’t explode.”

Patrick believes that the AMF inspectors “will see the files that are piling up incredibly.” “I don’t know if they will have much patience.”

Consult the latest inspection report of the Financial Markets Authority at the Financial Security Chamber