National Instrument 45-106 – Prospectus and Registration Exemptions ("NI 45-106") will come into force on September 14, 2005. NI 45-106 is an attempt to harmonize the prospectus and registration exempt offering regimes in all Canadian jurisdictions, which, although currently substantially similar in all provinces other than Québec, are not identical. While NI 45-106 does create uniformity across Canadian jurisdictions in respect of many commonly used prospectus and registration exemptions, it falls short of complete harmonization as some exemptions are not available in certain jurisdictions and other exemptions are applied differently as amongst different jurisdictions.
The goal of NI 45-106 is to provide market participants seeking to effect a distribution on a multi-jurisdictional basis with a more efficient distribution regime based on harmonized offering rules. In certain cases, the instrument clarifies the availability of exemptions that existed in most jurisdictions, either
