20 Influential COOs Shaping Business in Alberta
- Jonno White
- 6 days ago
- 17 min read
Last updated: July 2026
Alberta's Chief Operating Officers rarely get the public attention their chief executives do, even though they are usually the ones actually running the organisation day to day. This list names twenty of them, working across energy, construction, technology, healthcare, tourism, government and finance, chosen for the real operational leadership they are providing right now. As of July 2026, Alberta's economy is forecast to grow 2.7 per cent this year, comfortably outperforming the roughly 0.8 per cent forecast for Canada as a whole, which is exactly the kind of environment where a capable COO earns their keep.
I put this list together myself, as someone who works with executive teams rather than inside any of the sectors below. Alberta's growth has not come from nowhere. Nearly all of the province's exploration and production companies are reporting plans to increase output and capital investment this year, even as spending patterns shift toward squeezing more from existing assets rather than chasing brand new projects.
Behind figures like that sit real operating decisions, made by real people, and this list is my attempt to put names to some of the ones doing that work well in Alberta specifically. "The company has the vision, momentum, and positioning to scale," is how Toast's Nicole Shokoples put it on stepping into the COO role this year, and that tension between vision and execution is the whole job in miniature.
Expect twenty short profiles organised into four categories, each naming a real person, their current organisation, and the specific thing that makes their operational leadership worth knowing about.
A note on this list: I compiled it, and I am not on it. I work in leadership and Working Genius facilitation rather than business operations, and I put this together because I keep meeting executive teams who can articulate their strategy clearly but cannot say who actually owns turning it into daily execution. The people below are listed for their own operational work, not their connection to me.
Why Alberta's COOs Matter Right Now
Alberta is currently leading the country in economic growth while much of the rest of Canada stalls, which puts unusual pressure on the operating side of every organisation trying to keep pace. A strategy that assumes steady growth needs an operations function that can actually absorb it, and that is squarely the Chief Operating Officer's job. Calgary's downtown energy corridor alone is home to more than 170 energy companies inside a three-square-kilometre radius, based on a Calgary Economic Development count, which is one of the densest concentrations of upstream headquarters anywhere in North America and a large part of why so many of the COOs on this list sit in the energy sector.
Edmonton is not far behind on the broader business count, with 40,278 registered businesses in 2025, up just over three per cent on the year before. None of that growth executes itself. Every one of the people on this list is the person an executive team turns to when a strategic decision has to become a working plan, a delivery schedule, or a functioning system, and that is a harder and less visible job than most chief executive roles. Growth at that pace also tends to expose weak operating structures quickly, since a plan that only just worked at last year's scale rarely survives unchanged at this year's.
How I Compiled This List
I chose these twenty people for a genuine, active contribution to how Alberta's organisations actually operate today, not for job title alone. Each one had to hold a current, verifiable Chief Operating Officer role, or its clear equivalent, at a real Alberta organisation, confirmed against that organisation's own leadership page, a news report, or another primary source I could actually check. I looked across sectors deliberately, because operations leadership in Alberta is not just an energy story, and I looked across the province rather than just Calgary, though Calgary's sheer concentration of head offices means it still dominates the list. Where I could not confirm someone still held the role, or found they had recently moved on, I left them out rather than guess, which is also why this list sits at twenty rather than a rounder or larger number I could have padded toward.
Energy and Resources
Martin Foy
Martin Foy is Chief Operations Officer of the Alberta Energy Regulator, the body responsible for overseeing safe and responsible energy development across the province. Foy took on the role in June 2020 after roughly three decades of experience leading people and managing natural resource operations, a background that brings a rare vantage point across the whole province's energy footprint rather than a single company's. The work sits at the intersection of regulation and operations, which means the decisions made in this role shape how every energy company in Alberta actually runs its projects.
Known for: overseeing operational regulation across Alberta's entire energy sector, not just a single company's output.
Robin Zabek
Robin Zabek is Chief Operating Officer, Exploration and Production at Canadian Natural Resources, one of Canada's largest independent energy producers, having stepped into the role in the final quarter of 2023. The position covers the operational side of the company's exploration and production business, one of two distinct COO mandates the company runs in parallel. Running a function of that scale requires exactly the kind of operating discipline this list is built to recognise.
Known for: leading exploration and production operations at one of Canada's largest independent energy producers.
Jay Froc
Jay Froc has served as Chief Operating Officer, Oil Sands at Canadian Natural Resources since September 2013, making this one of the longest-serving COO mandates on this list. The mandate covers the operational side of the company's oil sands business specifically, a distinct function from the exploration and production side of the same organisation. More than a decade in a single operating mandate is itself a signal of how demanding and specialised oil sands operations leadership has become.
Known for: over a decade of continuous operational leadership across Canadian Natural Resources' oil sands business.
Andrew Dahlin
Andrew Dahlin is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Cenovus Energy, overseeing the company's day to day upstream business and capital project delivery together. That combination, running current operations while also delivering major capital projects, is one of the harder pairings in energy operations leadership. The role spans both keeping today's production running and building tomorrow's capacity at the same time.
Known for: jointly overseeing Cenovus Energy's ongoing upstream operations and its capital project delivery.
Dave Gosse
Dave Gosse joined Gibson Energy in 2025 as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, bringing experience from a prior role as President of Energy Transfer Canada, leading operational growth and transformation across that company's Canadian midstream assets. Gosse holds a chemical engineering degree and an MBA, and is a licensed Professional Engineer, credentials that sit underneath a career built specifically around midstream energy operations. The move to Gibson brought that same transformation focus to a new organisation.
Known for: bringing a midstream operations transformation background from Energy Transfer Canada into Gibson Energy's leadership team.
Jason Sharpe
Jason Sharpe is Chief Operating Officer of ATCO Energy Systems, leading operations across ATCO's natural gas and electric utilities including construction, engineering, major projects, and health and safety. Sharpe joined ATCO in 2002 as a civil engineer and rose through vice president and president roles in the company's gas and pipelines division before stepping into the current position in 2025. That two decade path through the same organisation brings an unusually deep operational memory of how ATCO's utility network actually works.
Known for: rising through two decades of engineering and operations roles at ATCO before leading its energy systems division.
Building, Technology and Health Innovation
Nicole Shokoples
Nicole Shokoples became Chief Operating Officer of Toast, a Calgary based recruitment and workforce intelligence platform, after previously serving as chief of staff and vice president of stakeholder relations and planning at Alberta Innovates. The move from a public innovation agency into a fast growing private platform is a fairly unusual operational path, and it puts someone with real public sector operating experience inside a scaling technology company. "The company has the vision, momentum, and positioning to scale," Shokoples said of the decision to join.
Known for: bringing public sector operational experience from Alberta Innovates into a scaling Calgary technology platform.
Meaghan Nolan
Meaghan Nolan is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Mikata Health, a Calgary based company using artificial intelligence to help health care professionals deliver faster, better care. Being both a co-founder and the operating lead of the same company means building the operational function from nothing rather than stepping into an existing one. The University of Calgary named Nolan to its Top 40 Under 40 class in November 2025 in recognition of that work.
Known for: co-founding and operationally building an AI driven health care company from the ground up.
Jordan DeCoste
Jordan DeCoste is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Headversity, a Calgary based mental health and resilience technology company. As with Mikata Health, building the operating function of a company you co-founded is a different task from joining an established one, requiring the systems and processes to be created rather than inherited. Headversity's growth through 2025 put its operational leadership, DeCoste included, squarely in the local technology conversation.
Known for: co-founding and running day to day operations at a Calgary based mental health technology company.
Jeff Sandeman
Jeff Sandeman leads operations at Casman Construction, a Fort McMurray based construction company, drawing on hands on construction experience, formal management education, and a background as a Red Seal certified carpenter. That combination of tradesperson credentials and formal operational leadership is relatively rare, and it means the operating decisions in this role are grounded in genuine on site construction experience rather than management theory alone. Fort McMurray's construction sector depends heavily on exactly that kind of practically grounded leadership.
Known for: combining Red Seal carpentry experience with formal operational leadership at a Fort McMurray construction company.
Mike Wieninger
Mike Wieninger is Chief Operating Officer of Canadian Operations at PCL Construction, one of the largest construction companies in North America, headquartered in Edmonton. Wieninger began a PCL career as an estimator in Calgary in 1996, meaning the current oversight of the company's buildings and civil operations across every Canadian province is built on nearly three decades inside the same organisation. Few operations leaders in Alberta construction have that depth of institutional knowledge to draw on.
Known for: nearly three decades at PCL Construction culminating in leading its operations across every Canadian province.
David Johnson
David Johnson is President and Chief Operating Officer of the Edmonton Construction Association, a body representing construction industry interests across the Edmonton region. Holding both the president and operating roles at once brings responsibility for the association's public representation of the industry as well as its day to day running. That dual mandate sits at the centre of how Edmonton's construction sector organises and advocates for itself.
Known for: leading both the public representation and daily operations of Edmonton's construction industry association.
Public Sector, Innovation and Trade
Jason Leslie
Jason Leslie is Chief Operating Officer of the Alberta Chambers of Commerce, integrating the organisation's strategy across operations, advocacy, and research from its Edmonton base. Chambers of commerce work sits at an unusual junction between membership organisation, policy advocate, and research body, and running the operational side of all three at once is a genuinely distinct kind of operations leadership from running a single company. The role sits in a position to see how business conditions are actually landing across the whole province.
Known for: integrating operations, advocacy, and research strategy across Alberta's provincial chamber of commerce network.
Terry Rock
Terry Rock is Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Alberta Innovates, the province's principal innovation and economic development agency. Running the operating side of a public innovation agency means balancing government accountability with the kind of speed and flexibility that innovation funding actually requires, a genuinely different operating challenge from a private company. This work sits behind a large share of the applied research and commercialisation activity happening across Alberta.
Known for: operationally leading Alberta's principal public innovation and economic development agency.
Kara Claypool
Kara Claypool is Senior Vice President, Chief Financial and Operations Officer at Travel Alberta, the province's tourism marketing organisation, a role that combines the financial and operational sides of the business under one mandate. Claypool joined Travel Alberta in December 2015 after operating and finance roles at companies including Big Rock Brewery and Jugo Juice, bringing a genuinely varied operating background into the role. Combining the CFO and COO mandates in a single seat is a structure more organisations are experimenting with, and Travel Alberta is a working example of it.
Known for: combining the chief financial officer and chief operating officer mandates in one role at Travel Alberta.
Tammy Hofer
Tammy Hofer is Chief Operating Officer of Alberta Precision Laboratories, the wholly owned Alberta Health Services subsidiary that runs medical laboratory testing across the province. Operating a province wide diagnostic laboratory network means the decisions made in this role touch nearly every patient who has bloodwork or pathology testing done anywhere in Alberta. That scale of operational reach, across hundreds of communities rather than a single site, is one of the largest in this entire list.
Known for: operationally leading Alberta's province wide medical laboratory testing network.
Tourism, Sport and Finance
Ian Allison
Ian Allison is President and Chief Operating Officer of Spruce Meadows Sports & Entertainment, the Calgary equestrian venue that hosts some of the sport's most prestigious international events, and also serves as managing partner of Cavalry FC. Allison started at Spruce Meadows as a summer student roughly four decades ago, which means the operating decisions in this role are shaped by a rare depth of institutional memory about the venue. "This promises to be an interesting year for our sport, and for Spruce Meadows," Allison said, reflecting the same forward looking operational mindset that runs through this whole list.
Known for: four decades of operational leadership at one of the world's leading equestrian sport venues.
Stuart Back
Stuart Back is Chief Operating Officer of PURSUIT Banff Jasper Collection, a major tourism operator across two of Alberta's best known mountain destinations. Running operations across multiple tourist attractions and destinations, rather than a single site, means coordinating logistics, staffing, and visitor experience at a genuinely regional scale. Banff and Jasper's tourism economy depends heavily on exactly that kind of coordinated operational leadership working well behind the scenes.
Known for: operationally coordinating a major multi site tourism operator across Banff and Jasper.
Diederik Pen
Diederik Pen is Group Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and President of WestJet Airlines, a role held since July 2021 at one of Canada's largest airlines, headquartered in Calgary. Running COO responsibilities alongside the presidency of the airline itself means the operating decisions and the public leadership of the airline are the same job, rather than two separate mandates. A retirement was announced in May 2026, planned for no later than the first quarter of 2027, with a successor search underway, though the role remains actively held in the meantime.
Known for: combining the chief operating officer and airline president roles at one of Canada's largest carriers.
Margaret Paproski
Margaret Paproski is Chief Operating Officer of Canada ICI Capital Corporation, an Edmonton based commercial real estate finance company, having joined in March 2025 after more than twenty years across investment banking, structured finance, legal advisory, and financial operations. "I'm excited to join Canada ICI at such a pivotal time in the industry," Paproski said on taking the role. This background spans Lehman Brothers' investment banking division and several Alberta based financial and professional services firms, bringing an operating perspective that bridges global finance and local commercial real estate.
Known for: bringing two decades of structured finance and investment banking experience into commercial real estate operations.
Notable Voices We Almost Included
A few real, currently active Alberta operations leaders did not make the final twenty, not because their work is less genuine, but because their situations did not quite fit this list's requirement for a stable, current Chief Operating Officer role. Stuart Dalgleish spent years as Chief Operating Officer for the City of Calgary before announcing retirement, effective in June 2026, which put that departure just outside the window for a list built around who holds the role right now. Jen Lussier served as Chief Operating Officer of Platform Calgary for two and a half years before being promoted into an interim chief executive role in October 2025, a genuine step up that simply moved this appointment out of the COO seat this list is tracking.
Michael Thompson was appointed acting Chief Operating Officer of the City of Calgary's water utility in June 2026, a genuinely significant operational mandate, though its acting and interim status meant it sat better as someone worth following than as a full profile here. All three are worth watching regardless of where they land next, and it is entirely possible one or more will anchor a future update of this list once their roles settle.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Thinking About Operations Leadership
The most common mistake is treating the Chief Operating Officer as a junior partner to the chief executive rather than as the person who determines whether strategy actually happens. Several people on this list, including Diederik Pen at WestJet and Andrew Dahlin at Cenovus Energy, hold operating mandates that sit alongside or inside the most senior decisions their organisations make, not underneath them. Treating the role as purely administrative misses how much strategic judgement genuinely sits inside good operations leadership.
A second mistake is assuming operations leadership looks the same everywhere. Running exploration and production operations at Canadian Natural Resources is a different discipline entirely from running a province wide diagnostic laboratory network like Tammy Hofer's, or coordinating tourism logistics across two mountain destinations the way Stuart Back does. Organisations that hire or promote into operating roles using a single generic template often end up with a mismatch between the operating discipline the role actually needs and the background the person brings.
A third mistake is underestimating how much operational continuity matters. Jay Froc's more than decade long tenure in a single oil sands operating mandate, and Mike Wieninger's nearly three decades inside PCL Construction, both point to how much operational knowledge compounds over time in a single organisation. Organisations that churn through operating leaders quickly often lose exactly the kind of institutional memory that makes an operations function genuinely effective.
A fourth mistake is assuming the operating leader must come from inside the industry. Nicole Shokoples moved from a public innovation agency into a scaling technology platform, and Margaret Paproski moved from global investment banking into Alberta commercial real estate, and both moves brought a genuinely different operating lens into their new organisations rather than a weakness. Insisting on narrow industry pedigree for an operating hire can rule out exactly the kind of cross sector operational thinking that strengthens a business.
A fifth mistake is confusing a combined title with a diluted mandate. Kara Claypool holds the chief financial and operations mandate at Travel Alberta in a single seat, and Diederik Pen combines the chief operating officer and airline president roles at WestJet, and neither combination has made either role smaller. Organisations sometimes assume that folding operations into another executive's title automatically weakens it, when in practice a well structured combined role can give operations a stronger seat at the table than a standalone one would.
Implementation Guide: Building an Effective Operations Function
Building operations leadership that actually works follows a fairly consistent sequence, whether the organisation is a Calgary energy major or an Edmonton non-profit. First, clarify the mandate in writing before hiring or restructuring into the role, distinguishing clearly between what the Chief Operating Officer owns outright and what remains shared with the chief executive or other senior leaders, since role ambiguity at the top is one of the fastest ways to stall execution.
Second, pair the strategic plan with an explicit operating cadence, meaning a regular, recurring rhythm of reviews, checkpoints, and decision points that turns a yearly strategy into weekly and monthly work. Andrew Dahlin's combined oversight of Cenovus Energy's ongoing operations and its capital project delivery only works because that cadence exists underneath it.
Third, invest deliberately in the layer of leadership beneath the Chief Operating Officer, since a single person cannot personally execute a province wide or company wide operating plan. Tammy Hofer's oversight of laboratory testing across Alberta, and Jason Sharpe's oversight of ATCO's entire natural gas and electric utility network, both depend on strong regional and functional leaders reporting into that seat.
Fourth, review the operating model itself on a genuine schedule rather than leaving it static for years, since Alberta's growth conditions in 2026 are meaningfully different from even two or three years ago. An operating structure built for a slower growth environment can quietly become the constraint on a faster growing one if nobody revisits it, and a fixed annual or semi-annual review date, treated as non-negotiable, is usually enough to catch that drift before it becomes a genuine bottleneck.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a Chief Operating Officer actually do differently from a Chief Executive Officer?
A Chief Operating Officer is generally responsible for turning strategy into daily execution, while the Chief Executive Officer sets that strategy and represents the organisation externally. In practice the split varies a great deal by organisation, as Diederik Pen's combined COO and airline president role at WestJet shows.
Why does this list focus specifically on Alberta rather than all of Canada?
Alberta's growth rate is currently outpacing the rest of the country, and its economy is genuinely distinctive, from Calgary's dense energy sector headquarters to Edmonton's public agencies and Banff's tourism operators. That distinct economic mix is exactly what makes operations leadership here worth examining on its own terms rather than folded into a national list.
Are all Chief Operating Officers in Alberta concentrated in the energy sector?
No, though energy is heavily represented given Calgary's concentration of upstream headquarters. This list includes operations leaders in construction, technology, health innovation, tourism, public agencies, and finance, reflecting how broadly the role is genuinely used across Alberta's whole economy today.
Why isn't every Chief Operating Officer mentioned in this list included, given how many operate in Alberta?
This list only includes people whose current, active Chief Operating Officer role could be confirmed against a primary source such as an organisation's own leadership page or credible news coverage. Anyone whose status looked uncertain, recently changed, or unconfirmed was left out rather than guessed at.
How should a growing organisation decide when it needs its first Chief Operating Officer?
The clearest signal is when the chief executive can no longer personally hold both the external, strategic side of the role and the internal, operational detail without one of them suffering. At that point a dedicated operating leader, rather than an ever growing list of the chief executive's direct reports, usually becomes the more sustainable structure.
Can a Chief Operating Officer role be combined with another senior title rather than standing alone?
Yes, and several people on this list show it working well rather than diluting the role. Kara Claypool's combined chief financial and operations mandate at Travel Alberta and Diederik Pen's combined COO and airline president role at WestJet both function as one coherent seat rather than two half jobs.
Final Thoughts
The twenty people on this list are not the only capable operations leaders working in Alberta, and a handful of others who are doing genuinely strong work were left out simply because their situation did not fit a list built around current, stable, verifiable Chief Operating Officer roles. What they share is a willingness to own the unglamorous middle distance between a strategic decision and a working result, across sectors as different as oil sands production and equestrian sport, energy regulation and equestrian entertainment, public laboratories and commercial real estate finance.
As Alberta's economy continues to outpace much of the rest of Canada, the organisations that keep growing well will very likely be the ones whose operations leadership, visible or not, is doing its job properly. Watch this list of twenty over the next year, because the operating challenges Alberta's growth is creating right now are exactly the kind that either make an operations leader's reputation or expose the gaps in one. Either way, the work these twenty people are doing deserves more attention than it usually gets.
About the Author
I am Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold). I work with executive teams around the world on how they function together, including the kind of strategy-to-execution handoff that sits at the heart of every Chief Operating Officer's job. If your team is wrestling with that handoff, I would be glad to help. You can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.
Sources
Alberta Energy Regulator, Executives page. The Hub, "2.7% growth in 2026: 5 charts explaining Alberta's up and down (and up again) economy," May 2026. CBC News / ATB Financial economic report coverage, 2026. BOE Report, "Alberta's economy remains resilient amid geopolitical turmoil," March 2026.
Alberta Regional Dashboard, Edmonton number of businesses. Calgary Economic Development, Fact Sheet: Calgary Head Offices, 2021. BetaKit, "Former Alberta Innovates exec joins Toast as COO," May 2026. Horse Sport Magazine, Canada's 50 Top Influencers in Equestrian Sport, Ian Allison profile.
Newswire, "Canada ICI Appoints Margaret Paproski as Chief Operating Officer," 2025. University of Calgary Alumni, Top 40 Under 40 Class of 2025. Canadian Natural Resources, Management page. Cenovus Energy, Leadership team page.
WestJet, 2021 executive announcement news release. Gibson Energy, Leadership page. Cantech Letter, ATCO and AltaLink transmission project coverage. Calgary.Tech, Headversity leadership coverage, September 2025.
Casman Construction, company site. PCL Construction, Leadership page. Alberta Chambers of Commerce, Staff page. Alberta Innovates, Organisational structure page. Travel Alberta, Executive team page. Government of Alberta, Public Agency Biographies.
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