Combating white‐collar crime in Canada: serving victim needs and market integrity

Purpose - This paper has two integrated purposes: it provides a report on a symposium hosted by the Bank of Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in December 2008 dealing with key challenges and directions forward for addressing white‐collar crime; and it ties this material into a conceptual review of the academic literature addressing the key conceptual, structural, legal, and cultural issues that impede the effective policing – broadly conceived – of white‐collar crime. Design/methodology/approach - Participant‐observer in a symposium and literature review. Findings - The original argument is put forward that the bedrock difficulties for dealing with white‐collar crime are conceptual: fundamental liberal capitalist beliefs about what markets are and how best they serve the well‐being of the population have resulted in a deep public‐private divide in law, institutional design, institutional culture, and institutional practice that often frustrates the types of collaboration and information sharing that are universally deemed essential for the effective policing of market space. Practical implications - Coordinated experimentation across the enforcement spectrum must be undertaken, documented, and communicated with the purpose of identifying approaches that circumvent the known practical (i.e. legal, structural, and cultural) difficulties associated with the current political economy. Originality/value - The value of this paper thereby lies in situating the practical obstacles to policing market space that face regulatory and enforcement actors, along with victims, in political economic context, so that alternatives that work beyond the limits of the current concepts become literally conceivable.