By TAVIA GRANT

TORONTO, ONTARIO – It’s an unlikely image: staffers at the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions – surely one of Ottawa’s driest regimes – are busy brushing up on the fine points of sharia law these days to cope with the anticipated expansion of Islamic financial services in Canada.

“Lately we have had more expressions of interest,” said Normand Bergevin, managing director at OSFI’s approvals and precedents division.

Several people on his staff are learning about business plans, legal structures, accounting methods, types of governance and other issues related to Islamic finance.

“It’s fairly new to us,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of experience here in terms of supervising or even understanding the different types of products. They all have little twists on them that make them very unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.”

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