On Monday, October 4, ACE Aviation Holdings, the company that emerged from the Air Canada reorganization, and Quebecor World Inc. will launch trading with new stock symbols on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

ACE Aviation will be ACE.RV. The new code suffix “RV” represents a “restricted voting issue” and Quebecor will be IQW.SV to indicate a “subordinate voting issue.”

These are the first in a series of rollouts between October 4 and December 13, with the stock symbols for those shares with non-conventional voting structures being re-named, bringing additional clarity to the differences between various types of securities that trade on TSX and TSX Venture Exchange.

Robert Fabes, senior VP, TSX, said these changes will help investors understand what they own. “When purchasing a new Air Canada share, an investor clearly knows they own a restricted voting share.” He added, “We believe the benefits to investors will come from the greater transparency to the market resulting from having clear and consistently applied stock symbol formats reflecting the voting attributes of the securities while eliminating the inconsistencies between the labelling of share classes.”

Moving ahead, investors in TSX and TSXV issues will see specific suffixes for ‘Multiple Voting Shares-MV’, ‘Subordinate Voting Shares-SV’, ‘Restricted Voting Shares-RV’, ‘Limited Voting Shares-LV’ or ‘Non-Voting Shares-NV’.

New suffixes for non-convertible notes-NT issues were launched this summer. According to Fabes, “with a renewed focus on investments and the governance of our listed issuers, this is an idea whose time has come.”

Work on this project began earlier this year after discussions between TSX and the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance. The Coalition recommended TSX look at changes it could make to clarify the nature of shares that shareholders owned.

New codes for other issues are scheduled to be completed by December 13.