CSA Decide Not To Reduce Early Warning Threshold To 5%

The Canadian Securities Administrators today (10th October 2014) announced that they will not be moving forward with plans to reduce the early warning reporting threshold from 10% to 5% as previously proposed.

As we discussed in March 2013, the CSA last year proposed amendments to the reporting threshold, triggers and related disclosure requirements under Canada's early warning reporting regime intended to "provide greater transparency about significant holdings of issuers' securities". While the most significant change under the 2013 proposal would have been to decrease the reporting threshold from 10% to 5%, the CSA also proposed a number of other significant reforms, including greater transparency through reporting of "equity equivalent derivatives" in order to address issues such as "hidden ownership" and "empty voting".