Ed Waitzer, a former Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) chairman, has won an award for his research into fiduciary duty, and he’s been nominated to chair the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).

The Ontario government announced Thursday that it has named Waitzer as its nominee to head the LCBO’s board, and it tapped the current LCBO chair and partner in private investment firm, KJ Harrison & Partners Inc., Philip Olsson, as the next chair of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG). Both nominations are subject to review by the legislature’s Standing Committee on Government Agencies (SCOGA).

Waitzer, who is now a partner at Stikeman Elliott and director of the Hennick Centre for Business and Law at York University, also recently won one of two awards from the New York-based Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRC) for a paper examining the evolving fiduciary responsibilities of pension trustees, arguing that they need to take a long-term, systemic view of their obligations, rather than focusing solely on short-term returns.

In June, the IRRC bestowed its practitioner award on Waitzer, and law student, Douglas Sarro, for their paper which “argues that evolving trends in fiduciary responsibility will impose public and inter-generational obligations on trustees and require that they consult with beneficiaries (or their proxies), be strategic, and collaborate with other like-situated fiduciaries.”

“Pension trustees face the possibility of legal challenges related to their duty of impartiality – the requirement that they balance the interests of present and future beneficiaries. This requires them to take a systemic view of markets and to collaborate with other asset managers dedicated to meeting long-term obligations,” Waitzer explained. “Our research shows that social expectations, which tend to be a leading indicator of the law, are rapidly evolving to reflect these ‘public’ fiduciary obligations.”

The IIRC’s other award, for academic research, went to Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School, for a paper that looks at how financial markets have begun to factor certain governance provisions into market prices and earnings forecasts.

“Our study contributes to resolving long-standing questions concerning the relationship between governance provisions and the value of firms,” Bebchuk said. “The governance provisions incorporated in the standard indices used by financial economists have an association with operating performance that has remained significant and persistent over time. Because the markets have learned to appreciate the significance of these governance provisions, abnormal profits from trading based on them were possible during the period of learning but not afterwards. Still, investors can benefit from stock price appreciation by improving the governance provisions of firms.”