North of the border, the Livent prosecution (aka "Canada's WorldCom) moves closer to its final phase, as Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb will be sentenced tomorrow. Last month, Crown Attorneys told the court that the Livent co-founders, convicted in late March of fraud and forgery related to the company’s accounting scandal, should receive sentences of 8 to 10 years. Drabinsky and Gottlieb, on the other hand, have asked for no jail time, but rather for conditional sentences or house arrest, with community service that would include lectures at business and theater schools across the country.

U.S. lawyers watching the case say that the defendants' request for no jail time at all would be a non-starter here: "If this were the U.S., that suggestion would result in the entire courtroom bursting out with laughter," said Jacob Frenkel, a former SEC lawyer.

Observers such as Richard Powers, a lawyer and director of MBA programs at the University of Toronto’s Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, who studies white-collar crime in Canada, believe that the Livent case will set an important precedent for white collar sentencing in Canada. He stated that if the court was to accept the defendants' suggestion of no prison time it "would make a joke out of the entire case" and "acknowledge once again that Canada is the place to go if you want to commit white-collar crime." Powers predicts that the judge in the Livent case will probably sentence them to two or three years, and adds that expecting more than four would be unrealistic.