With the 2004 proxy voting season already here, Meritas Financial Inc., a provider of socially responsible investments, announced today that it recently posted its proxy voting guidelines on its Web site and will continue to post its proxy voting results online.

“The addition of our proxy voting guidelines to our website takes our transparency one step further than ever before. We agree with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States which considers the proxy vote to be a valuable asset,” said Gary Hawton, CEO of Meritas. “We have publicly posted our proxy votes since our inception because we feel we need to show our investors how we intend to vote the shares that we hold on their behalf,” added Hawton.

“We had hoped that the Canadian regulators would agree that investors deserve to know how their mutual fund company is using their proxy votes to help shape the future of the companies which it owns and, in turn, shape the world around them.,” said Hawton.

However, Canadian regulators have not yet proposed a ruling that would require the same level of disclosure for mutual fund market in Canada despite the fact that many people consider the proxy vote to be a valuable measure of a fund manager’s fiduciary duty.

Meritas’s proxy voting guidelines can be found on the main page of its web site. The voting record for each of its funds is available on the individual fund pages.