Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP is pleased to announce that William N. Gula will rejoin the firm on November 3, 2004 as a partner in its mergers and acquisitions and securities practice groups.

Mr. Gula is one of Canada's leading M&A professionals, with over 25 years of experience in advising clients from both legal and financial perspectives.  For most of the past seven years, Mr. Gula has been Managing Director and Head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Scotia Capital Inc., the investment banking arm of Scotiabank.  In that role, he has been a senior advisor to public and private company clients, including some of Canada's leading multinational companies, with respect to domestic and foreign mergers, acquisitions and divestitures with aggregate value well in excess of $100 billion.  Some notable transactions in which Mr. Gula was involved include Manulife's acquisition of John Hancock, the Allstream/Manitoba Telephone merger, the Cap Reit/Res Reit merger, the acquisition of Weldwood Canada by West Fraser Timber, Sobeys' acquisition of the Oshawa Group, Manulife's bid for Canada Life and Rogers Communications' bid for Videotron.

Prior to joining Scotia Capital in 1997, Mr. Gula was a partner with Davies for more than sixteen years and was widely regarded, domestically and internationally, as one of Canada's foremost M&A lawyers, particularly in the area of public company take-over bids and defences.  As a Davies partner, Mr. Gula led many of the most complex, high profile M&A transactions in Canada including, among many others, Onex Corporation's acquisition of Celestica from IBM, the bid by a consortium led by Onex for John Labatt, Maclean Hunter's defence of the hostile bid by Rogers Communications and Loewen Group's defence of the hostile bid by SCI International.

"We are delighted that Bill is returning to the firm", said William O'Reilly, Managing Partner of Davies.  "Our mergers and acquisitions practice is what we are best known for.  Bill will add terrific expertise and experience to this core practice capability,  including the unique perspective that comes from having led highly complex M&A transactions in complementary but very different roles – as legal counsel and as financial advisor."

"This is a great opportunity to build on my 25 years of legal and financial advisory experience", said Mr. Gula.  "Davies is a great platform with an entrepreneurial, yet collegial culture of excellence.  Its creative, results oriented and business minded approach to helping clients achieve their objectives is consistent with my own.  I look forward to rejoining the outstanding Davies team."

Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, with over 220 lawyers, practises nationally and internationally from offices in Toronto, Montréal, New York and Paris, and is consistently at the heart of the largest and most complex commercial and financial matters on behalf of its North American and overseas clients.  For the last four years, Davies' mergers and acquisition practice has been ranked number one in Canada by Chambers Global.

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CONTACTS:
William O'Reilly
Managing Partner
416.863.5573
woreilly@dwpv.com

Kevin Thomson
Partner
416.863.5590
kthomson@dwpv.com

Paul C. Carder
Director,
Marketing & Business Development
416.367.6975
pcarder@dwpv.com