KOO – I notice that you are using a Yahoo Finance site for your information. You are safer to go to the Government of Canada sites for your information as many of these other sites summarize so end up only giving the most common situations.

At the government’s site for Qualified Investments, is point 1.24 that I have copied below.

1.24 The post-amble of the public corporation definition in subsection 89(1) allows a new corporation to elect to be deemed to have been a public corporation since its date of incorporation. To qualify, the corporation must become a public corporation on or before the time it must file the T2 return for its first tax year and it must file the election with that return. The retroactive effect of this election also applies for the purposes of the qualified investment rules. By filing a valid election, any otherwise non-qualifying shares or debt obligations of the new corporation acquired by a registered plan between the date of incorporation and the time at which the corporation becomes a public corporation will be a qualified investment from the time they are so acquired. Accordingly, any non-qualified investment taxes that would otherwise apply would be rendered inapplicable.

Zenith shares meet these conditions and the required election filings were made. This covers the shares that were received through the spin off. I can’t say for sure as to any shares bought OTC after they started trading there but it is possible that the brokers won’t let them be bought in a registered account from the OTC. There are OTC tiers that don’t even have to file with the SEC (and probably not SEDAR) so shares that just trade OTC don’t qualify for registered accounts due to low standards. It is possible though that the elections that Zenith filed would make them okay as those probably have them meeting the standards. We know that Zenith does file on SEDAR.

I am not qualified to make the determination that shares bought on OTC would be okay. Your broker could probably answer that as to whether they would allow it or not if they are already allowing Zenith shares in your non-registered accounts.