Last week, Tom Konrad brought you a piece on the Algonquin Power Income Fund (AGQNF.PK), in which he opined that a shift in investor attention away from capital gains toward yield might eventually provide a catalyst for the prices of yield-focused securities such as income trusts to rise.

So-called utility trusts, or income trusts where the underlying corporation is engaged in utility activities such as power generation, are a common feature of the Canadian income trust sector (the mother of all income trust sectors). A sub-set of utility trusts is the clean power utility trust, where the power generation assets consist of technologies such as wind, small hydro, biomass and waste-to-energy [WtE]. Though new tax rules have effectively made it impossible for new income trusts to be brought to market (barring certain exceptions such as REITs), existing clean power utility trusts (existing as of Oct. 31, 2006) get to operate under the old tax regime until 2011.