Preface

• Author: M.H. Ogilvie
• Profession: Professor of Law, Carleton University
• Pages: 15-16

PR EFACE

When Jeffrey Miller of Irw in Law suggested that it was possible to write

a book of not more than 400 pages on banking law for the Essentia ls

of Canadian Law series, I was skeptical. After all, big institutions and

big bodies of law require big book s, and typical banking law text s are

closer to 1,000 pages, if not considerably more. However, here is that

little book about banking l aw of about 400 pages.

To achieve this target, I kept continuously in mind t he introductory

student and the consumer for whom this book was written. The needs

of this audience explai n the topics chosen for inclusion and those omit-

ted, as well as the deg ree of detai l in which t he topics include d are dis -

cussed. Certain parts of the Bank Act, includi ng the 2007 amendments,

for example, are included in some detail, in par ticular, those setting out

the corporate governance st ructure for banks and the typ es of activities

in which banks are permitted to engage in Canad a. Considerably less

is included about foreign banks, bank subsidiar ies, and bank holding

companies, partly b ecause much of the Act relating to these mirrors t he

parts relati ng to banks, but also because they are of considerably les s

relevance to a consumer’s everyday bank ing concerns. Again, a number

of the more esoteric regulations and guidelines are al so omitted since

their content is largely of interest to bank regulators. On the common

law side, the focus is on bank account operation, including paper and

electronic payment orders, but virtual ly nothing is said about letters

of credit, international b anking and tr ade law, or complex lending and

securitization issues.

A special chal lenge posed for any writer on banking law today i s the

fast-changing n ature of electronic banking and the challenges pose d by

non-bank third party payment providers to t raditional bank ing and

banks. Essentially, there is no law and no regulation to di scuss, so that

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