Garbage magnate Patrick Dovigi vows to press on in wake of violence

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Garbage magnate Patrick Dovigi vowed publicly Thursday that violence directed towards Green For Life Environmental Inc.’s property and at least one of its executives will not “derail or distract us from continuing to drive the business forward.”

A gunman fired multiple shots at Dovigi’s Toronto home in late September. He wasn’t in the country and nobody was injured.

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Arsonists have also hit several Green For Life Environmental Inc. (GFL) facilities in Ontario this year, including setting six commercial vehicles on fire in Windsor, Ont. this past summer, causing $1 million in damage.

The comments came during an earnings call regarding the company’s third-quarter results.

“I want to take a few minutes to talk about the security incidents that you may have read about in recent media reports in the context of where GFL is today,” Dovigi told analysts.

“I started this business in 2007 with one solid-waste transfer station and four old roll-off trucks and $250,000 in start-up capital. This December will be GFL’s 17th anniversary as a company and today we are the fourth-largest diversified environmental-services company in North America.”

GFL has operations in 10 Canadian provinces and 25 U.S. states, he said.

“This year we are approaching $8 billion in annual revenue,” Dovigi said.

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“We have millions of customers who trust us to provide them with their essential environmental services, including the over five-million households that we service across Canada and the United States weekly.”

GFL has “achieved this level of success by providing high-quality service at a fair price and through the more than 250 acquisitions we have completed to date, with many of those owner-operators staying on with us post-acquisition to continue to contribute to the integration of their businesses into GFL,” Dovigi said.

“We have a reputation in the industry of doing what we say we are going to do, and we’re proud of that reputation.”

GFL investors include “the highest-quality institutions from private-equity funds to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and leading financial institutions around the world,” Dovigi said.

Dovigi wouldn’t get into the details of the shootings or arsons.

“Regarding the recent events we are not going to comment on any specifics because the police are investigating these incidents and the investigations are ongoing,” he said.

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“While the media likes to speculate, we would encourage everyone to allow the authorities to do their work. We are co-operating in the investigations and trust that the authorities will bring this to a successful resolution, hopefully in the near term.”

GFL is also working with a security consultant “to review our security measures and any additional precautions we should be taking,” Dovigi said.

“While the authorities continue to do their work, we also remain focused on the safety and wellbeing of our employees, who … are the core to everything we do. The results we’ve achieved this quarter and throughout our history are a reflection of all of the hard work and dedication of GFL’s more than 20,000 employees. We have hundreds of facilities across our platform and these incidents are not going to derail or distract us from continuing to drive the business forward.”

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. It opened on the TSX Thursday above $60 and climbed to more than $62 a share by 10 a.m. before dipping slightly.

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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.

Dovigi did not respond immediately Thursday to questions including whether he’s worried GFL employees could get hurt by violence aimed at the company, or whether it could hamper the looming sale of GFL’s environmental-services business, which it expects to bring in at least $6 billion in net proceeds.

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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