There is a lot of material to go over and I certainly haven’t done that yet but I have read some very interesting parts. One of the recommendations introduces MERIT (”Model for Effective Regulatory Information Transfer” - catchy eh). MERIT is a system for extending and viewing XBRL documents that include all disclosure activities. I’ve heard people speak about XBRL as an extensible implementation (I know how XML works) many times but I have yet to see evidence that it has been extended to include non-financial reporting data in any real way. What are these people talking about? The goal of extensively tagging up corporate relations/ investor relations/ governance etc… is very interesting and is something that we’ve been working on for a good while. Although I have doubts that what we are doing is creating a natural extension to XBRL. Personally I would like to see something like XDML (extensible disclosure modeling language) but the domain is taken already

I read the MERIT chapter from the task force - something like 16 or 19 pages of “stuff”. It solves everything including world peace. The only barrier now is that no one has even started to design the taxonomy of what that would look like - not even the task force. After a quick call to the task force office I found out it was nothing more than vaporware with a cute flash demo that demonstrated very little. Oh, and that the task force has disbanded now that the report is done - so that settles that.

• Task Force to Modernize Securities Legislation in Canada
• Executive Summary of Recommendations
• MERIT – A New Paradigm for Electronic Disclosure

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