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“There were very few, if any DIP providers in Canada” said Selfe. “This is one of the areas that we think is a ripe opportunity.”

While companies in the mining and oil & gas sectors have been in a downturn for several years, the restructurings could be expanded into some of the suppliers of those industries as well as services firms, said Selfe. Also, some ‘veteran’ services industries, or manufactured or sport or niche manufacturing industries, may also being forced to reorganize their balance sheet.

Photo by National Post files

“There’s often very, very little left if they hit the wall. It’s not like a mining company or an oil and gas company where at the end of the day you’re left with a mine or an oil and gas facility,” said Selfe. “The banks will do whatever they can to prop up those companies because in a blowup their recovery is very little.”

While Infor restructurings activity takes off, investment banks in Canada may continue to see a steady flow of mergers among the mid-size and small players in the Canadian cannabis industry, he said. For that to happen there should be a closing of the current gap between the values that “small players think they’re worth and what the larger players are now willing to pick them up,” he said.

“We do think there’s a few mid tier players that will still pick-up Canadian assets and we’ll try to push into that top ten,” said Selfe. So it’s really the mid tier producers buying small tier producers. Above the one billion dollar threshold “we think that most of that activity is going to be focused globally and outside of Canada.”

–With assistance from Doug Alexander and Erik Hertzberg.

Bloomberg.com