PE in Toronto

dondraper85Anyone have any insight into PE firms in Toronto? The obvious large player is Onex, but are the MM PE funds active? Thanks

All the major pension funds in Canada have internal private equity groups (e.g. Teachers', OMERS, CPPIB). These funds have large amounts of capital to deploy so they do invest in the large multi-billion dollar buy-outs. However they usually don't have the ability to run a deal on their own so you'll see them frequently pair up with another PE fund when making acquisitions (e.g. BC & OMERS acquiring Husky, TPG & CPP acquiring IMS). Also expect to take a large pay cut when moving over from investment banking.

Of the independent middle market funds, the more prominent ones are Birchhill (which just raised a new ~C$1bn fund), Clairvest (recently raised ~C$500mm), Torquest, Edgestone, Kilmer to name a few. Onex also has a middle-market fund - ONCAP. Then there's also Tricor out in Vancouver and Triwest in Calgary. I would be careful with some of the funds that are having difficulty raising new capital due to poorly performing investments.

The merchant banking arms for the most part other than CIBC's are all winding down or in TD's case, its private equity group became Birchhill and its FoF became Northleaf Capital. CIBC mostly focuses on small-cap opportunities too and has a bit more flexibility to invest across the whole capital structure.