We were delighted to welcome Peter Leacock back to the Zurich Project in June 2026. We are grateful to Peter for once again sharing his hard-won wisdom, his decades of practical experience, and a concrete idea with the group, all delivered in his characteristically humble and generous manner.
Zurich Project proceedings are confidential by default. With Peter’s approval, we are pleased to make the audio replay, the edited transcript, and the slide deck available to our members.
Peter is a Senior Portfolio Manager with CIBC Wood Gundy in Vancouver, where he leads The Leacock Group. He has advised clients for more than two decades and, for the past 18 years, has run a discretionary equity-income strategy he calls Income and Value, which has compounded well ahead of its benchmark since 2008. His engineering training and his early years on institutional bond desks in Toronto and London show in how he reasons: from cash flows, not narratives.
Peter’s talk recovered the forgotten work of Thomas Connolly, a retired Kingston, Ontario teacher who published The Connolly Report for 38 years. Connolly’s recipe is deceptively simple: own companies that have raised their dividend for at least 10 years, insist on a moderate payout ratio, check the CAPE ratio to avoid overpaying, then sit tight while dividends and prices compound. Return, in his formulation, tracks yield plus growth. Most investors, he argues, never realize their return is dividend-driven rather than market-driven. Growing income is the investor’s shield, and the behavioral ballast it provides is worth as much as the arithmetic.
Peter then added his own qualitative filters, namely moderate debt, a reputable CEO, sensible buybacks, and an acceptable business. He showed how the framework plays out across Great-West Life, Pembina Pipeline, and the Canadian banks, alongside the cautionary case of TELUS, where dividend growth outran earnings.
His featured idea is Boardwalk REIT (BEI.UN on the TSX). Peter recounted the remarkable Kolias family story and made the investment case: founder-led culture, roughly 25% family ownership, a conservative AFFO payout ratio near 43%, a discount of roughly 30% to net asset value, an active unit buyback, and a long runway for an asset that artificial intelligence is unlikely to disrupt. People, after all, will always need a place to live.
We think you will find this session genuinely instructive, whether or not Boardwalk suits your own portfolio. To hear Peter build the argument in his own words, examine the numbers behind it, and follow his reasoning in full, listen to the replay, download his slide deck, and read the complete transcript below.
