As part of our coverage of the federal election, Investment Executive profiles candidates who are working or who have worked in the financial services industry.
Here we look at Peter Conroy, Conservative candidate in the Ontario riding of Beaches-East York.
Peter Conroy, the Conservative candidate for the Beaches-East York riding in Toronto, wants to see the federal government help provinces and municipalities issue tax-exempt bonds.
“It would be good for seniors and other investors,” says the 36-year-old Conroy, who is on a leave of absence from his job as senior manager of client and business development at the Toronto Stock Exchange during the election campaign.
Currently, all bond returns are taxed at the federal level. Conroy’s tax-exempt bonds would help pay for transportation infrastructure projects in cities and in provinces. And because the federal government is backing the debt, it would be highly rated by bond ratings agencies, meaning the bonds would be attractive to investors here and abroad.
Although the idea isn’t part of official Conservative policy, Conroy says he has posted the idea on his Web site and he intends to bring it to the party leadership if voters elect him into Parliament.
Conroy, who is married with three young children, says he has been interested in running for political office since he was a youth. He participated in student councils from junior high school all the way through his political science and history degree at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.
The Toronto-born Conroy stands behind his party’s belief that most Canadians are too highly taxed. To alleviate the burden, the Tories promised to drop the GST to 5% from 7% in five years as well as reduce taxes for medium and small business.
He also believes the government can lessen the tax burden in creative ways. As an example, he points to the Conservatives’ promise to give Canadians tax credits for participation in amateur and competitive sport.
“People aren’t thinking anymore in government. There’s no vision,” says Conroy, who co-founded a business, called CollectiveBid Systems Inc., for trading securities before selling it to work for the TSX.
Finally, Conroy says small business owners, like advisors, would be fired by their clients if they handled their finances and business like the Liberal government has handled the nation’s finances for the last 12 years. In particular, he takes aim at its handling of the income trust portfolio.
“Perhaps we had the right outcome, but not without some serious pain for Canadian investors,” says Conroy, referring to his father, whose investment portfolio in income trusts lost considerable value throughout last fall.
As a TSX employee, Conroy was especially aware of how the government’s lack of clarity about the way income trusts would be taxed, relative to corporations, affected the capital markets.
In the span of a few weeks more than $10 billion of market cap was lost because of the “to-ing” and “fro-ing” on the issue. “People probably blamed their brokers, but they should have been blaming the government,” he says.
Conservative candidate pushes for tax-exempt bonds
- January 19, 2006 January 19, 2006
- 11:25