2026 Sohn Montreal: Pembroke’s Jeffrey Tory Makes the Case for Canadian Small Caps and the Beds a Resource Boom Will Fill

Jeffrey Tory has spent about 40 years investing in Canadian small caps, and at the 2026 Sohn Montreal Investment Conference he came to defend his favorite and least fashionable idea. Tory is chair, partner and a portfolio manager at Pembroke Management, one of the country’s longest-running small-cap firms, and his pitch began not with a stock but with a country. Capital has fled Canada and valuations have compressed, and he thinks that has gone too far.

His evidence was the takeover wave. By his own count there have been more than 61 privatizations in the Canadian small-cap space since November 2023, and buyers have paid up to get them. Strategic acquirers paid an average premium around 38%, he said, and private-equity buyers, the ones writing checks with their own money, paid about 44%. When that many companies leave the public market at prices like that, the people closest to the assets are telling you the assets are cheap.

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He likes the structure of the market as much as the discount. It is a generalist market where domain knowledge still earns an edge, the largest investors are too big to bother with small names, and founder-led companies tend to produce patient capital allocators. Then he turned to the stock that ties it together, a founder-run business that was once a pure oil-sands play and has quietly remade itself into something else.

Pembroke is one of Canada’s longest-running small and mid-cap equity managers and reportedly oversees around C$2 billion. Tory is a chair, partner and portfolio manager at the firm, with roughly four decades in the business and a long record of championing Canadian small caps. A graduate of Queen’s University and a CFA charterholder, he teaches at McGill and sits on the boards of two charities.