GFL share price pops in wake of September shooting outside CEO’s Toronto home

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Business watchers say the billionaire CEO of Green For Life Environmental Inc. may address recent violence against GFL property and at least one of its executives on an investor call next month, as Ontario police forces continue to seek suspects.

A gunman fired multiple shots at garbage magnate Patrick Dovigi’s Toronto home late last month, and an arsonist set fires at a GFL facility in Windsor this past summer.

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David Soberman, a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, suspects Dovigi will address the shootings next month when GFL hosts an investor conference call Nov. 7 after releasing its third-quarter financial results.

“I think he’ll be able to make light of it,” Soberman said.

“But it’s something which I would say, if anything, will enhance his reputation as the CEO of a company … When someone’s made an attempt on you or an attack on you and you sort of come out unscathed, and you’re able to, in some ways, almost chuckle about it, I think that’s something that people feel very positive (about). I don’t want to draw the parallel, but I am going to anyways, to the attempts on Donald Trump’s life. Who knows what would have happened in the absence of those attempts, but I suggest that those things actually increased his appeal to a large swathe of the American electorate.”

Dovigi could not be reached for comment this week. But, when asked in the week after the shootings if he thought one of his competitors was trying to scare him, he told National Post: “I’ve been in business for 20 years. Who’s going to scare me? This is not the Sopranos.”

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GFL’s share price was hovering around $53 on the Toronto Stock Exchange in the days after a gunman fired multiple shots at Dovigi’s Rosedale home eight minutes before midnight on Sept. 29. But it’s crept upward pretty steadily ever since, topping $58 by noon Wednesday, before dipping down towards $57 Thursday.

“Everyone said it was a house of cards; it’s never going to last,” Peter Hargreave, a former director of policy and strategy for the Ontario Waste Management Association, said of GFL.

“That was probably 12 years ago, and their stock price keeps climbing.”

GFL bills itself as “the only major diversified environmental services company in North America offering services in solid waste management, liquid waste management, and soil remediation.”

This past June, the industry publication Waste Dive reported that “GFL’s environmental services business, dominated by liquid waste, has long been a boon to the company. Its cross-selling opportunities with traditional solid waste contracts helped GFL early in its Canadian expansion, and netted the company $1.46B (Canadian) in revenue by the end of last year.”

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Soberman said he believes the GFL share price has gone up because “these guys seem to be doing the right thing in a business that’s pretty competitive.”

Police say the shooting at Dovigi’s home near the intersection of Mount Pleasant Road and St. Clair Avenue was targeted, and that investigators have linked it to a second shooting about an hour later in the vicinity of Bayview Avenue and York Mills Road.

Nobody was injured in either shooting. Dovigi has disputed a newspaper report that the second shooting targeted the home of Ted Manziaris, a consultant with GFL.

The Toronto Police Service would not link the arson at a GFL facility in Windsor, Ont. this past summer to their investigation of the two shootings late last month.

“That’s not a connection I’m able to confirm,” Const. Stephanie Sayer, who speaks for the force, said in an email.

She noted “no arrests have been made so far” in the shooting probe.

The Windsor Police Service appealed to the public for help identifying arson suspects after six commercial vehicles at a GFL facility on Tecumseh Road West were deliberately set on fire just before 5 a.m. on June 27. Nobody was hurt, but the fires caused an estimated $1 million in damage.

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