I am an urbanist, obsessed with the possibility of Canadian cities; I am a sustainability and innovation enthusiast, resulting from the ongoing climate crisis; and through decades of public service, I’m now fortunate to be recognized for my public sector leadership, and expertise and creativity in policy and program design.

At essence, I believe the combined challenges of human organization and consumption is a complex, existential problem we must work to solve.

And cities or “communities” are the most practical unit of human organization to apply our solutions.

Their form, their governance, our understanding of how human behavioral patterns scale and change within them, all reside at the core of humanity’s solutions and limits to growth.

Starting at a relatively young age, my life mission became clear: design and apply city-building solutions through positive projects that keep complexity contained and allow participation to anyone who is interested in creating a better future for people and our planet.

From designing national and provincial policies within and across the governments of Canada and Ontario, including advancing large-scale digital and traditional infrastructure investments, to running for municipal office in Ottawa and organizing solutions at the local level, to building unique, national smart cities programming and advisory services at Evergreen Canada, I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to move this mission forward.

My latest chapter is focused on building Community Innovation Canada (or “CIC”) and preparing for its public launch in early 2027, alongside a group of national partners and funders.

CIC is an applied innovation infrastructure organization: an entrepreneurial nonprofit and social enterprise working to bridge the gap between promising innovation and real-world implementation. It will connect governments, industry, innovators, and communities through operational testbeds, partnerships, networks, and applied projects grounded in community priorities. Its purpose is to accelerate the adoption and commercialization of built-sector innovations that can improve housing and infrastructure, strengthen productivity, reduce emissions and waste, and build climate resilience in Canadian communities. Click here for our website but it will be under construction until early 2027.

For me, CIC is a natural extension of the work and achievements over my career. I have observed Canada’s innovation and infrastructure networks from unusual vantage points: ministerial offices, executive policy and program desks across government, and leadership positions in national and international nonprofits. From these perspectives, I have seen persistent market failures, significant knowledge asymmetries, and strategic coordination gaps across the built sector. Innovators and policy makers need access to real operating environments and credible evidence; prospective adopters need confidence that a solution can meet their needs, often bespoke and complex; and communities need a meaningful role in shaping the problem definitions and realizing the benefits, therefore enabling trust – which is fundamental. These gaps cannot be closed by any one sector alone. They call for public policy and nonprofit capacity working alongside innovators, industry, and communities.

I also see a significant opportunity for communities to help shape and adopt practical responses to the local and global challenges intensified by a changing climate. Some of the most powerful environmental solutions come from people who may not describe themselves as “environmentalists,” but as problem-solvers and innovators. CIC has been built to connect that inventive energy with the places, partners, and pathways needed to put solutions into practice. It is the next chapter in a career devoted to helping Canadian cities and communities create a better future for people and our planet.

I’ll be sharing more in 2027, but for now, I’m going to describe a little career history, because it serves as the intellectual pillar supporting my confidence to make the leap to a Founder-CEO.

Evergreen Canada has been home to an important chapter of my career and is also helping me incubate CIC. Evergreen is one of only a few organizations at the centre of a multi-sectoral city-building dialogue in Canada. There are others, many excellent ones, but there is not a long list, focusing specifically on infrastructure innovation—and Evergreen is unique because they actually build things. They pour concrete, operationalize innovation through active construction projects, and have planning and development capacity similar to a small municipality. Evergreen Brick Works also shows anything is possible when public space, buildings, community activity, and innovation come together in one place. My Evergreen experiences continue to inform how I think about applied innovation and the practical conditions needed to move ideas into useful or operational contexts. I can go on, but I’ll leave it here on this introduction to one of Canada’s most treasured nonprofits and social enterprises – if you’re interested learning more about Evergreen click here for information about what they do, and what they build.

Going into 2019 at Evergreen, I transitioned from a Chief Program Officer role to Executive Director, Smart Cities, and led the design and overall management of a new national program focused on urban innovation and technology solutions. The team and I worked directly with hundreds of municipalities, in every province and territory, and tens of thousands of municipal staff, for over half a decade. We also worked with top experts across the country, spanning all major sectors, constructing a network and platform that represented the world’s premier centre of excellence in “Open Smart Cities.” This included the launch of one of the only nonprofit-led, municipal and Indigenous focused, smart cities advisory services. We referred to this large cluster of activities, and the people and relationships that bound them together, as the “Community Solutions Network.” Open North, another unique nonprofit and social enterprise, was the lead technical partner delivering the one-to-one advisory services with Evergreen.

Click here for information about Evergreen’s Community Solutions Network and click here for information about Open North and here for more about Open Smart Cities.

We designed this national program to focus on place-based, people-focused approaches, and it followed on the heels of Evergreen’s ambitious launch of a broad suite of additional innovation programs that were captured by the title or identity we called “Future Cities Canada.” This is essentially a collective impact program operated by Evergreen but represented the work and passion of hundreds of partners, and tens of thousands of individual and organizational participants.

Click here for an overview and some of the history of Future Cities Canada. The founding partners included The McConnell Foundation (who provided the initial seed investment of approximately $4M), Community Foundations of Canada, Maison de l’innovation sociale, TD Bank Group, and later Suncor’s Energy Foundation joined as a core partner too. This all paralleled programming investments from Infrastructure Canada and Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and such a long list of other significant partners and investors.

Over 2017-2020, Future Cities Canada programming and capital investments provided the fastest revenue growth in Evergreen’s 34-year history: growing the organization’s revenue base by $25M+, over an approximate four-year period.

For the broader national policy setting that funded tens of millions of dollars underneath the programming I designed, launched and managed you can click here (for information about INFC’s Smart Cities Community Support Program), here and here (for information about INFC’s Smart Cities Challenge and CMHC’s Housing Supply Challenge), here (for the programming audit conducted on the smart cities programming at INFC, now known as the “HICC” portfolio), and here for the Privy Council Office’s “Impact Canada” logic model driving the Government of Canada approach, which also drove the Infrastructure and Communities Canada (or “INFC”) and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (or “CMHC”) innovation programs.

Over several years, I was regularly consulted by senior Government of Canada officials on the design and development of the smart cities and housing innovation programs, both as a Senior Policy Advisor to Ontario’s Minister of Infrastructure, and as Evergreen Canada’s Chief Program Officer.

These substantive investments eventually proved two major strategic assumptions: 1) Canadians increasingly prioritize urban innovation to help solve problems in our communities; and 2) there is a demand for national-scale and regional programs that prioritize “shared-value” approaches to advancing innovation at the local level (increasingly referred to as “community innovation” and also relate to “public sector markets,” not only the commercial sort).

These were assumptions we made but they were also major risks, because at the time (2016-2018) this direction was uncertain. We took the risks and we pushed ourselves - pretty hard, actually - restructured a big portion of the organization, and positioned Evergreen successfully as a national leader within Canada’s urban innovation agenda.

Then COVID hit the world.

Over the pandemic period, 2020-21, Evergreen rebuilt and restructured our program-service teams yet again (50+ FTEs), and my responsibilities were broadened through the concept of “government innovation,” and then later, into 2025, further changing my work to focus on “community innovation” - moving from municipal governments and Indigenous communities, to eventually include numerous other actors, within public sector markets, like SMEs and schoolboards, as well as universities and community stakeholders in general.

As Evergreen’s first Executive Director, Community Innovation, I was responsible for advancing, supporting, and reframing innovation through community-level, shared-value approaches across Canada. In the final three years of my decade-long tenure at Evergreen, I was also able to focus more directly on developing applied innovation activities at Brick Works, including the launch of one of Canada’s first construction technology development sites. That work brought together the national innovation programming experience I had gained with the opportunity to test and operationalize solutions in situ. I am now carrying those lessons into the development of Community Innovation Canada, with a focus on building the partnerships, capacity, and project-level activity that can help communities put promising innovations to work. For more about the funding program that supported and focused the property and construction testbed activities at Brick Works, click here for information about the Ontario Centre of Innovation’s Critical Industrial Technology Initiatives.

So, overall, I think I’ve had a few really great gigs. And coincidentally, I don’t think too many people in Canada have had these vantage points to help them understand the complexity of the innovation function across property, construction, and infrastructure domains.

All of this has been exciting and highly rewarding work. And equally fulfilling has been gleaning substantive insights from our data and information collection. The resulting knowledge creation has allowed me to learn an incredible amount about Canadian communities and how we approach and realize innovation locally.

Here’s a link to a deep collection of OECD resources on the topic of government innovation; and here’s a link to a well curated collection of resources on the topic on community innovation from the Tamarack Institute.

Prior to Evergreen, my career path has included several government and nonprofit executive leadership roles, often focusing on policy and program design and execution.

Cities, sustainability, and innovation have been a near constant tying most of my career and personal passions together.

Before the last decade of leadership roles at Evergreen, I served the Premier of Ontario and advised the Minister of Infrastructure on capital planning and procurement policy and held responsibility for the long-term infrastructure planning file in the office. This work continues to be the most comprehensive infrastructure planning initiative in Ontario's history—capturing approximately $190 billion of investment over 13 years—enacted through the Infrastructure for Jobs and Prosperity Act, 2015 and published as the Building better lives: Ontario’s Long-Term Infrastructure Plan, 2017. At the time, this was one of the only legislated “LTIPs” in Canadian political history (Quebec legislated their in 2013 and Alberta in 2021). It was in this context that I worked alongside many of Canada’s best thinkers and got to co-design high-impact, innovative infrastructure programs across numerous strategic policy domains. Social purpose real estate and developing shared value frameworks, in the context of surplus property disposal (incl. the development of one of the country’s first “Surplus Property Transition Initiatives” - click here for more detail); bringing smart cities approaches into infrastructure planning, for another Ontario first; leveraging infrastructure projects to advance community benefits; driving life cycle assessment and asset management across government, through embodied carbon and ghg reduction lenses; and, operationalizing “community hubs” and integrated service delivery, are all examples of policy and program areas that used to keep me up late at night, and destroyed my weekends for a number of years. But all in a good way – wouldn’t have traded it for anything!

In addition to all this day job stuff, I have somehow also found time to establish what has now become a relatively long history of community service, civic leadership, grass-roots political and community organization, and extensive non-profit governance experience. I’ve been very fortunate to have been invited to participate in and provide strategic advice to numerous boards and organizations. As I get older, I’m realizing that the breadth of my civic experience is quite unique in Canada; and in many ways, has become a professional hallmark of mine, underpinning my values and approach to leadership. Click here for my full civic resume.

I have served many years as a proud board member and director on the Centretown Community Association (click here for website). I can talk a lot about my old neighbourhood but I’ll just say that Centretown and Ottawa will always hold essentially “family status” in my life. That said, I now live in the Glebe community, just south of Centretown, and hold a membership on the Glebe Community Association (check out our website here).

I’ve definitely been involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, at numerous levels. Too many to provide a full list here, however, I’ll mention a select few that I feel remain relevant in my life today. Working with an amazing group of local leaders, I was a founding board member of the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict: an innovative, multi-sectoral partnership in the central business district of Canada's capital; during an internationally controversial, smart cities redevelopment project with Google, I contributed to the critical area of urban data governance as a former member of Sidewalk Toronto’s Privacy and Data Governance Working Group (and learned a ton from Ann Cavoukian); and, because of my work in government, as well as my links to the ongoing redevelopment of Evergreen Brick Works and its Future Cities Centre, I was invited to sit as a member of the Treasury Board of Canada’s Secretariat Low-Carbon Assets & Life Cycle Assessment Steering Committee. This one sounds a little technical but the work is foundational to establishing a true circular economy in Canada’s built sector.

When you add it all up, this collection of policy and program design, public sector leadership and community experiences help form unique perspectives, and I’m often afforded opportunities to share and reflect in professional settings across Canada, and around the world. From Barcelona to New York, to Sydney to St. John’s, I fully enjoy speaking at conferences, universities and all kinds of events on matters of city building, community development, social infrastructure, placemaking, and urban innovation. What sometimes feels like constant travel and networking, although it wears me down from time to time, has become crucial to ensuring my ideas, thinking and learning processes remain as advanced and informed as humanly possible.

Finally, I consider Ottawa my home and I’m a graduate of Memorial University. My university experience is intimately connected to building the person and professional described throughout this career narrative and biography.

Click here for a downloadable professional biography in Word format (currently being updated); and click here for business portrait (high resolution), and click here for portrait (low resolution).