We need to fuck off with the fines. If the penalty for something is a fine, it just becomes the price of doing said illegal thing, and doesn't de-incentivise it at all. People need to start going to jail, or else the crimes of these companies are just going to get worse and worse because there's no reason for them not to. Like, oh no we were fined 1.3M but we made 5M from doing the illegal thing so it's ultimately worth it.
If a fine is going to be effective it has to be multiple times the crime. So the $5m crime is punishable by a $20m fine or something like that. Or even better for massive corporations, if it was based on their total revenue/market value. Fine them a huge percentage of the company.
If someone charged them $20 billion (4x the $5B someone else quoted below), they might just go bankrupt and regular customers could get hung out to dry. The responsible individuals must get criminal charges like with any non-corporate case of criminal negligence/corruption, and there can be a hefty assessed fee or confiscation of profits.
Our regulatory bodies have people that rotate in and out of the banking industry on the regular.
Until this stops, we will never, EVER, see positive change.
Our government will continue to divide people with incompetent initiatives and then keep taking money from these companies on the down low, pretending all the while like the regulators are going to do something.
There's not a single regulatory body in Canada that isn't absolutely riddled with the cancer of large corporate money paying off the 'regulators' that work in those offices, or, straight up offering the regulators jobs if they just look the other way for the more heinous crimes and do small fines for the more obvious crimes.
So, keep in mind, that if this is what CIBC is being fined for and this is considered 'small', what are they doing that the regulators know about and are actively ignoring to keep the public in the dark?