Finance Minister Ralph Goodale denies anyone in his office leaked word of changes to income trust policy, even as one man told CTV News he was tipped off in a phone call from one of the minister's senior advisors.

In the hours before Goodale announced that the federal government was increasing the tax credit on corporate dividends two weeks ago, there was heavier-than-usual trading in income trusts and dividend-paying stocks. That has fuelled speculation that some investors profited from an early warning.

Goodale has insisted all along that no advance word came from his office. "The Finance Department is very meticulous about these matters," he said Tuesday. "There was no specific advance notice whatsoever."

But a representative of Canada's most influential seniors' lobby group says he got a phone call on the morning of Nov. 23, several hours before the markets closed, and before Goodale made his announcement.

Protocol is that a finance minister never gives word of a policy change while the markets are still open.

"The day they made the announcement they phoned us and said something is going to be said," the associate executive director of Canada's Association for the Fifty Plus, William Gleberzon, told CTV News.

Gleberzon said the call came from a senior policy advisor in the finance minister's office.

When asked what exactly he was told, Gleberzon indicated the specifics were vague, but the underlying message was clear.

"They said something was going to be announced later in the day. And we assumed that if they told us that ... it would probably be something we'd be happy with."

As approximately 400,000 senior citizens have a vested interested in the issue, Gleberzon said his group, known by the acronym CARP, had been in "constant contact" with the policy advisor to the minister.

They might have benefited from advance warning of the policy change, but Gleberzon says CARP never passed along the heads-up.

"We didn't tell anybody anything because we didn't know what to tell them," he told CTV.

When confronted with the latest development, Goodale still denied that anyone from his office gave advance notice of the announcement.

"I'll have to determine whether there was any breach of rules, any breach of impropriety," Goodale told CTV News. "On the basis of the information I've been given, it does not appear to me that there was any untoward conversations that either revealed the nature of what might be forthcoming in terms of a policy change or the timing of that."

The Ontario Securities Commission is the body responsible for investigating unusual activity on Toronto Stock Exchange, such as the sudden jump in trading that day. CTV asked several times for an interview regarding this story. They refused, and would not confirm whether they are investigating.

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