Minister may have to sell energy stocks

OTTAWA — New Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford holds investments in an elite hedge fund that trades securities in the energy sector he will now oversee.

According to his conflict of interest disclosure, Rickford owns an unspecified number of units in the Waratah One Fund, an investment vehicle administered by Toronto firm Waratah Advisors.

The minimum buy-in for the fund is $500,000, but Rickford did not personally invest that amount. His share was pooled with others by his investment adviser.

The investment firm does not make public the list of individual stocks held in each fund, but according to its January 2014 performance summary, the Waratah One Fund had a combined exposure to the energy sector of 22.5 per cent, equally split between long and short positions. (Shorts are equity positions that will appreciate if the value of the equity goes down.)

That means Rickford, who took over the cabinet post from Joe Oliver last week, could stand to lose or gain substantial sums from companies in the industry he is responsible for regulating as natural resources minister.

Ethics commissioner Mary Dawson did not require Rickford to sell his units in the Waratah fund or put them into a blind trust when he joined cabinet last July as minister of state for science and technology.

But Dawson could change the divestiture requirements now that Rickford has taken on a more senior cabinet post with responsibility for energy policy affecting some of Canada’s largest publicly traded companies.