Professor Niamh Hardiman:

Corporate governance of Canadian banks is even less an area of expertise for me than corporate governance of Irish banks. However, it should be noted that what were then the two large Canadian banks had a major collapse in 1984. On foot of that, the banks themselves got a terrible fright and adopted a conservative business model thereafter. As a result, they were a little bit more resistant to the temptations of ready credit and financialisation than were many of the American banks and others in the English-speaking world.