Parkland Corporation

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Parkland Corporation's Q4 and year-end results analyst call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Friday, March 5, 2021. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brad Monaco, Director of Capital Markets for Parkland. Please go ahead.

Thank you. With me today on the call are Bob Espy, President and CEO, Marcel Tunison, Senior Vice President and CFO, and Doug Hawk, President of Parkland USA. This call is webcast, and I encourage listeners to follow along with the supporting slides. We will go through our prepared remarks, then open it up for questions from the investment community. Please limit yourself to one question and a follow-up as necessary, and if you have other questions, re-enter the queue. We would ask analysts to follow up directly with the capital markets team afterwards for any detailed modeling-type questions. During our call today, we may make forward-looking statements related to expected future performance. These statements are based on current views and assumptions and are subject to uncertainties which are difficult to predict. These uncertainties include, but are not limited to, expected operating results and industry conditions, among other factors. Risk factors applicable to our business are set out in our annual information form and management's discussion and analysis. We will also be discussing non-GAAP measures which do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by GAAP. These measures are identified and defined in Parkland's continuous disclosure documents which are available on our website or CDAR. Please refer to these documents as they identify factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements. Dollar amounts discussed in today's call are expressed in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. I will now turn it over to Bob.

Great. Thank you, Brad, and good morning. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy, and we appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Given it is his first quarterly conference call with Parkland, I would like to officially welcome Marcel. We are excited to have him as part of our senior leadership team. We also have Doug Hawk joining us today, who leads our U.S. business, to talk about our recent U.S. acquisition and provide insights into our U.S. growth strategy. On slide three, we have highlighted some of the many successes we have had as a business over the last year. We believe the true test of a company's resilience is how it performs over a prolonged period. And while we experienced some COVID-19 volatility through Q4 and the impacts of one off items, our underlying operations were right on track and we delivered excellent performance through a challenging year. When I look back at 2020 and particularly to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I'm exceptionally proud of our team. Our full year results exceeded our initial expectations and highlights our ability to manage any ongoing uncertainty through our diverse geographic platform, product lines, and customer segments. I'll start with safety. We ended 2020 with a record low TRIF of 1.12. This is a more than 20% improvement from 2019 and a testament to our relentless focus on continuous improvement and the commitment of our teams who safely and reliably provided the essential fuels and services customers need through COVID-19. Safe businesses are well-performing businesses, and I'd like to thank the Parkland team for their accomplishments. As always, we remain highly disciplined in advancing our strategy through 2020. We drove organic growth, acquired prudently, integrated effectively, and leveraged our supply advantage. We fully funded all these initiatives across all geographies and are positioned to deliver significant growth through 2021. After a brief pause in the first half of 2020, we resumed our acquisition growth in the second half of the year. Doug will touch on the recent U.S. acquisition activity later in the call. I also want to highlight that it's not just been the U.S. segment doing acquisitions. Our international and supply teams continued to find accretive opportunities and in the first quarter of 2021 completed an LPG marketing acquisition in St. Martin and two LPG rail terminals in the U.S. Midwest, respectively. Turning to slide four, 2020 marked the launch of our inaugural sustainability report. Sustainability practices are deeply embedded at Parkland, and we intend to share key milestones and exciting developments as we move through the year. We are highlighting a few great examples on this page. First activity I want to highlight is our biofeedstock coprocessing efforts at the Burnaby Refinery. We have spoken about this in the past, but I want to emphasize how proud we are that our Burnaby Refinery was the first facility in Canada to use existing infrastructure and equipment to co-process Canadian biofeedstocks such as canola oil and tallow alongside crude oil to produce low carbon fuels. This includes gasoline and diesel with a renewable component and progressing towards commercialization of a low carbon aviation fuel or biojet. This is a highly capital efficient way of producing lower carbon fuels. that give our customers the mobility they depend on, but with far less carbon intensity. For example, since 2017, we have invested approximately $30 million in total on these efforts. In addition to stacking up extremely well relative to other projects out there, our low carbon fuels have less than one-eighth of the carbon intensity of conventional fuels, making them a critical element of Canada's transition toward a lower carbon future. We coprocessed 44 million liters of biofeedstocks in 2020, up 140% from the prior year. We have high confidence in our capability and expect to increase this by 125% in 2021. This equates to 100 million liters of biofeedstocks, or the equivalent of removing the impact of 80,000 passenger vehicles' emissions. As you can tell, we are excited about this and look forward to talking more about it as the year progresses. The second example I want to highlight relates to our Journey Rewards program. As part of our commitment to offer our customers greater choice, we have made an exciting addition to the way our Journey members can deploy their rewards points. Beginning on March 1st, in addition to the option to collect items from within our convenience stores, Customers may now use their loyalty points to collect a carbon credit offset. This is a great example of our commitment to help customers lower their carbon emissions. I will now pass over to Marcel to go through the corporate financial results.