A charter and a name

On the first day of April 1901, a group of prominent Canadian business leaders gathered in Toronto to sign a charter that would change the country’s financial landscape forever. The document they put their names to that morning incorporated The Dominion Securities Corporation Limited, a name that reflected its national scope. The founders, led by Senator George Cox and his protégé Edward Rogers Wood, were principals in the Central Canada Loan & Savings Company, and they had a vision that went well beyond the walls of 26 King Street East, where the new firm opened its doors alongside its parent company that same spring.

E.R. Wood served as the firm’s first President, leading Dominion Securities from its earliest days.

A soldier at the helm

In the weeks before the Letters Patent were formally granted, Lieutenant Colonel Henry M. Pellatt, commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, was appointed “provisional” President. Pellatt had contributed a substantial sum to the establishment of the firm. Within a few years he would become Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, C.V.O., D.C.L., V.D. and the Colonel of the Regiment.

Crossing the Atlantic

Dominion Securities wasted no time in knitting the country together. Before April was out, a Montreal office had opened on the third floor of the Canada Life Building at 275 St. James Street West. Within six years, the firm had crossed the Atlantic, planting its flag at 4 Bishopsgate in the City of London, the first Canadian investment house to establish a true London presence. The man tasked with opening that English outpost was Edmund Peacock, later Sir Edward Peacock, and his career trajectory would eventually intersect with the finances of the British royal family itself. As Receiver General of the Duchy of Cornwall, overseeing the private finances of the monarchy, Sir Edward Peacock carried a thread of Dominion Securities’ DNA into the court of King George V. He was knighted in 1934 primarily for those royal services.

The London office was not merely a bold display of ambition, it produced an immediate and historic result. In 1908, Dominion Securities completed the first public issue by a Canadian company in the London market, bringing Western Canada Flower Mills to British investors. It was a moment that signaled an enduring truth about the firm: it would not simply serve Canada’s existing capital needs, it would help create new markets where none had existed before.

Bonds that built a country

The First World War tested the firm and revealed its character. When the Dominion government began financing the war effort in 1916, starting with the first war loan, Dominion Securities was at the centre of the effort. The firm’s War Loan and Victory Loan bonds did more than raise money for the front; they laid the very groundwork for a functioning bond market in Canada, introducing millions of ordinary citizens to the concept of owning a piece of their country’s debt. The patriotic fervor of those campaigns masked what was, in retrospect, a profound act of financial institution-building. Canada’s capital markets trace a direct line back to those crowded bond sales of 1916.

The dean of an industry

By June 1916, E.R. Wood’s stature in the industry had become formal as well as informal. He was named the first Honorary President of the newly established Bond Dealers Association of Canada, a body formed with 31 charter members and destined to become the Investment Dealers Association, a position he held continuously until 1926. The man who had opened the firm at 26 King Street East was now, a quarter century later, the Honorary President of the Bond Dealers Association of Canada, a position he had held since 1916.

One other milestone from this era deserves mention, not just as trivia but as a symbol of how quickly the firm had grown. In 1907, the entirety of the Toronto operation was served by a single switchboard and twenty-two telephones. Every bond issued, every trade executed, every client call returned, all of it flowed through those twenty-two lines. The firm would one day handle billions of dollars of business across global markets.