Ken Thorpe is a financial advisor and an accountant by training who is frustrated by a missing number. No, it has nothing to do with investments or a client’s tax return. Rather, Thorpe, an avid naturalist, reveals that being stuck on bird No. 599 is the source of his frustration.

“I have this list of birds that I’ve seen in North America,” says Thorpe, who is with Promutuel Capital Financial Services Firm in Montreal but files his insurance business through a Sherbrooke, Que.-based managing general agency, Groupe CMA. “It’s a funny number to be stuck at. It’s hard to find a new [bird] in North America.”

But the source of his passion isn’t just birds. Like many people with a naturalist bent, Thorpe is deeply concerned about the degradation of the environment by human activity.

As part of Thorpe’s efforts to slow or halt that erosion, he dedicates most of his free time to preserving natural bird habitats — and the environment in general — as treasurer of Nature Canada, an umbrella group for naturalist societies across the country.

The association, which numbers about 40,000 members from 350 societies, aims to preserve and protect habitats for wildlife — birds, in particular. It’s a mission that aligns Nature Canada closely with many environmental organizations — such as the Sierra Club, the Suzuki Foundation and the World Wildlife Federation — that look to protect marshlands and endangered species. Nature Canada says global extinction threatens one in eight bird species globally. In Canada, 60 of the 428 bird species that regularly breed here are endangered.

Furthermore, one in eight of the world’s plant species are threatened with extinction. Logging, mining, agricultural practices and pollution are to blame. These human activities destroy or shrink ecosystems and disrupt precarious food chains.

“One of the things birding does is get you out to different remote locations and habitats,” Thorpe says, “and you become sensitive to environmental degradation.”

One look at Thorpe’s $50-million book of business and you know he practises what he preaches. That’s because about half of the assets under administration in his book are placed in socially responsible investments for clients that share his interest in the environment. However, Thorpe is adamant that, as far as his business goes, he doesn’t use his association with Nature Canada to bring in prospective clients.

Sure, Thorpe’s commitment gives him credibility with clients that share the same philosophy. But, given his role with the non-governmental organization and his understanding of governance issues, he basically has to turn away business that comes his way because of his role as treasurer of Nature Canada.

“I think about it a lot as I become more aware of governance issues for NGOs,” he says. “I make darn sure I’m restricted from having direct involvement with my own business.”

In the past, he has had to turn away from Nature Canada’s group RRSP business; currently, the association is finalizing plans to invest an endowment fund accumulated from member donations and bequests over the years. As treasurer, Thorpe has been involved with sending the business to a boutique Toronto firm with which the board has been discussing its investment policy statement.

“It will encompass mission-based investing,” he says. “[The firm] wants to work with us to refine the policy so that the investments are well aligned with our objectives without compromising financial returns.”

Although Thorpe says he has a strong sense of social justice, he stresses he’s not an activist in the usual sense. He doesn’t wave signs or throw eggs at rallies, nor does he claim to be a green policy wonk; however, Thorpe says, he is duty-bound to some extent: “For NGOs, it’s hard to find people with a good background. You have a lot of treasurers for charities who have to fly by the seat of their pants, effectively.”

It’s not in the number crunching that Thorpe’s expertise comes into play, as Nature Canada has an accountant and bookkeeper for those functions. Instead, Thorpe focuses on what he considers to be “conceptual work,” such as consulting with the NGO’s board on compliance regarding governance and tax regulation for charities. “That’s where the finance comes in,” he says. “It’s what I find interesting.”

Work with both Nature Canada and the Social Investment Organi-zation, the Toronto-based association for SRI financial advi-sors and distributors in Canada, has led to Thorpe’s work with yet another group: the Green Budget Coalition, for which he has also been treasurer. For several years, the Green Budget Coalition has been meeting with the federal government, pitching environmental ideas to implement in each fiscal year’s budget. The coalition was developed by several green groups looking to push a common agenda in Ottawa.

@page_break@“It was actually an idea of [former prime minister] Paul Martin’s,” Thorpe says. “He told us to get together on the big issues.”

Just as intriguing is Thorpe’s career in the financial services industry. An accountant by education, he was working in systems operations with Swiss Bank Corp. (Canada) Ltd. (the bank that merged with UBS AG) in the 1980s, when the firm was about to move to Toronto; but Thorpe didn’t want to make the move — nor did his wife at the time.

Thorpe had been filing tax returns for a few clients in Montreal when he saw a recruitment ad for Investors Group Inc. He decided to become a financial planner in 1986, at the beginning of the mutual fund boom. Although he started his career as an advisor with the Winnipeg-based firm, he preferred to work with a broader range of products than IG offered, so he moved on.

Thorpe also has been with Montreal-based Norbourg Asset Management Inc. Some of that now defunct firm’s former employees are being tried for fraud.

After Norbourg, Thorpe moved to Triglobal Capital Management Inc. before it was put into administration by l’Autorité des marchés financiers, when the provincial regulator found the firm to be investing funds in offshore funds without clients’ permission. Groupe Promutuel, Quebec’s No. 2 property and casualty insurer, bought Triglobal’s assets just two years ago, but has found the investment business not to its liking. Now, Montreal-based Peak Financial Group has agreed to buy the advisory business from Groupe Promutuel.

Thorpe, who attained his certified financial planner designation in 1996, adopted SRI as a marketing and sales niche recently; before that, he focused his practice on professionals, not businesspeople. His clients tend to be university-educated and affluent but not often in the so-called “high net-worth” category.

The attention to detail that’s needed of accountants is also an asset to Thorpe when it comes to his passion. When prompted, Thorpe will detail a bird’s habitat with scientific precision: its geographical presence, its plumage markings, its food and its breeding grounds.

He accounts for his interest in wildlife by hearkening back to days spent trout fishing with his family in “pristine” lakes in northern Quebec as a child.

Similarly, he became interested in birds on a family trip to Florida in 1976: “There were all these interesting birds down there, and I thought I really want to do more of this. I subsequently got involved with a lot of different [birding] stuff.”

Referring to his bird list, Thorpe will almost certainly break the 600 mark during a summer trip this year out to Vancouver Island with his wife and daughter, during which he also plans to do some whale watching.

“There should be some sea birds that I haven’t seen,” he says, with the keen anticipation of the truly committed. IE