24 Influential HR Leaders in Canada Worth Knowing
- Jonno White
- Aug 6
- 16 min read
Last updated: August 2026
Canada's most senior human resources leaders are running people strategy for railways, banks, airlines, mining operations, universities and software scale-ups, often across several countries at once. This directory brings together 24 influential HR managers in Canada, each one currently in post, with the organisation they lead people work for and one detail worth knowing about how they do it.
As of August 2026, the people function in large Canadian organisations looks different from how it looked even five years ago. Several of the leaders here hold portfolios that reach well beyond traditional human resources, taking in communications, brand, sustainability, public affairs or information technology. That is not title inflation. It reflects a practical judgment that decisions about people are inseparable from how an organisation explains itself, invests in systems and sets its standards.
The names are presented alphabetically by surname for easy navigation. Every person listed holds a current, publicly stated senior people role at the organisation named beside them, and the scope is deliberately national: leaders based and working in Canada, across the private sector, the public sector, professional services and higher education.
If you work in human resources in Canada, this is a directory of peers whose work is worth following. If you lead an organisation, it is a snapshot of how the people function is being structured at the top of Canadian business right now. Either way, the value is in the pattern as much as in any single name.
Why HR leadership in Canada matters
Human resources leadership matters in Canada because the country's largest employers operate under conditions that make workforce decisions unusually consequential: heavy unionisation in transport and resources, a bilingual regulatory environment, safety-critical operations, and competition for skilled people against a much larger labour market immediately to the south.
Those pressures show up directly in the roles described in this directory. A railway people leader spends a large share of the year in labour negotiation. An airline people leader learns that a scheduling decision becomes a customer-facing failure within days. A mining people leader has to think about where a workforce sleeps, not only how it is paid.
Canadian organisations have also been quicker than many to hand their most senior people executives responsibility for adjacent functions. Brand, communications, citizenship, sustainability and even information technology now sit inside people portfolios in several of the organisations listed here. That structural choice gives the people agenda more leverage, and it raises the standard for what a senior HR leader is expected to understand.
For anyone building a career in the field, the practical lesson is that credibility increasingly comes from being able to argue the people case in commercial, operational and regulatory terms, not only in the language of human resources itself.
1. Adam Albeldawi
Chief Human Resources Officer and Senior Vice President, External Affairs, Suncor Energy
Adam Albeldawi leads the people function at Suncor Energy, one of Canada's largest integrated energy companies, from its Calgary base. Energy is a sector where workforce planning has to hold steady across long project cycles and volatile commodity markets, which makes it a demanding place to run human resources.
His mandate is unusually wide. Alongside all human resources functions, he is responsible for investor relations, government affairs and public affairs. That combination puts workforce strategy in the same conversation as how the company explains itself to investors and governments, and it is a useful model for anyone arguing that people decisions belong in the room where reputation is managed.
2. Maeghan Albiston
Senior Vice-President and Chief Human Resources Officer, CPKC
Maeghan Albiston is the senior human resources leader at CPKC, the railway created by the combination of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern. Running people strategy for a railway means unionised, safety-critical, round-the-clock work, and doing it across a network that now reaches from Canada into Mexico.
Her remit covers talent management, recruitment, total rewards, occupational health and leadership development across North America. Occupational health sitting inside the same portfolio as leadership development is worth noticing. In heavy operating environments, the people who design the reward system and the people who own physical safety benefit from being accountable to one leader.
3. Kelly Bradley
Chief Human Resources Officer, RBC
Kelly Bradley is Chief Human Resources Officer at RBC and lives in Markham, Ontario. She began her career with RBC in 1995 and held increasingly senior roles in personal and commercial banking before moving into human resources, so she came to the people function through the business rather than around it.
Her responsibility extends to more than 97,000 employees in 29 countries, alongside brand, marketing, citizenship and communications. Very few Canadian people leaders operate at that headcount, and pairing it with the brand portfolio is a deliberate choice: what a bank promises externally and what it asks of employees internally are handled by the same executive.
4. Melanie Burns
Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, TD Bank Group
Melanie Burns is Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at TD Bank Group, working from Toronto. TD is one of the largest banks in North America, so the Canadian people agenda she sets has to work alongside a substantial United States retail business.
She is accountable for all people and culture strategies across TD's global footprint. The framing matters: culture is named as part of the accountability rather than treated as a by-product of it. For readers building a people function, it is a clear example of an organisation putting culture inside a single executive mandate instead of spreading it thinly across the leadership team.
5. Yvonne Dimitroff
Executive Vice-President and Chief Human Resources Officer, People, Culture and Talent, CIBC
Yvonne Dimitroff leads the global People, Culture and Talent team at CIBC. The team name is itself a signal of how the bank has organised the function, folding talent and culture into one structure rather than running them as separate specialisms reporting to different executives.
Her stated responsibility is to foster a high-performance culture and to raise the bank's focus on human capital. That second part is the interesting one for practitioners. Elevating attention to human capital is a description of influence inside a leadership team, not a description of process, and it is the part of a senior people role that rarely appears in a job advertisement.
6. Pragashini Fox
Chief People Officer, Manulife
Pragashini Fox is Chief People Officer at Manulife, the Toronto-headquartered insurer and financial services group. She joined the organisation in January 2025, which makes her one of the more recent arrivals among Canada's large-cap people leaders.
She oversees the company's global people and communications functions. Combining the two is a pattern that recurs across several of the organisations in this directory, and it reflects a practical reality: in a large insurer, most significant people changes are communication problems before they are process problems. Joining a global function from outside also brings a fresh read on what an established people organisation actually needs.
7. Hélène V. Gagnon
Chief People and Sustainability Officer, CAE
Hélène V. Gagnon is Chief People and Sustainability Officer at CAE, the Montreal-based simulation and training company that trains pilots and other safety-critical professionals worldwide. She sits on the management team of a Quebec-headquartered business with a genuinely global training footprint.
Her title joins people and sustainability in a single executive role. That pairing is still uncommon in Canada, and it puts workforce capability and environmental and social commitments under one accountability. For a company whose product is training, the overlap is more than symbolic: both agendas depend on the same question of what an organisation is willing to invest in developing.
8. Yabome Gilpin-Jackson
Vice-President, People, Equity and Inclusion, Simon Fraser University
Yabome Gilpin-Jackson is Vice-President, People, Equity and Inclusion at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Universities are unusual people environments, combining unionised staff, academic governance and a student-facing mission, and the portfolio here explicitly brings equity and inclusion inside the people function.
She is a past chair of the Organization Development Network, an international professional body for the field. That is a distinctive credential among Canadian people executives, because it places her at the centre of the practitioner community that develops organisation development methods rather than only consuming them. Practitioners who want to follow how the discipline itself is evolving will find that useful.
9. Josée Girard
Senior Vice-President and Chief Human Resources Officer, CN
Josée Girard is Senior Vice-President and Chief Human Resources Officer at CN, the Montreal-headquartered railway whose network runs across Canada and into the United States. She was appointed to the role on 1 August 2023.
Railways carry one of the most complex labour relations environments in Canadian industry, with multiple bargaining units, safety regulation and operations that never stop. A people leader in that setting spends a large share of the year in negotiation and consultation rather than in programme design. It is a good reminder that the shape of an HR job is set by the operating model far more than by the title.
10. Marina Harris
Chief People Officer, Clio
Marina Harris is Chief People Officer at Clio, the Canadian legal technology company. Clio is one of the country's larger software scale-ups, and the people questions there are the ones that come with fast hiring: how to keep standards steady while the organisation changes shape every year.
She brings more than 25 years of experience building workplace cultures at scale, including at Wealthsimple, Netflix and Cisco. That is an unusually direct line between a large United States technology culture and a Canadian scale-up. Practitioners weighing how much of a famous culture model actually transfers will find her career a useful case to follow.
11. Katya Laviolette
Chief People Officer, 1Password
Katya Laviolette is Chief People Officer at 1Password, the Canadian security software company, and is based in Montreal. The company runs a fully remote model, which turns almost every ordinary people practice, from onboarding to performance conversations, into something that has to be designed rather than absorbed from an office.
She has grown that fully remote workforce to more than 1,400 employees across five countries and reached a 93 per cent offer-to-acceptance rate. The acceptance figure is the telling one. It is a clean measure of whether candidates believe what a company says about itself, and it is hard to move without genuinely improving the hiring experience.
12. Laura Mably
Executive Vice-President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Co-operators
Laura Mably is Executive Vice-President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Co-operators, the Canadian insurance and financial services co-operative. A co-operative answers to its member organisations rather than to public shareholders, and that ownership model shapes what leaders are expected to optimise for.
Her portfolio covers talent acquisition, performance management, business restructuring and organisational alignment, employee wellness and total rewards, explicitly in service of the organisation's culture and values. Naming restructuring in the same list as wellness is honest. Both are real parts of a senior people job, and separating them tends to make organisations worse at handling either one well.
13. Mona Malone
Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Human Resources Officer and Head of People, Culture and Brand, BMO Financial Group
Mona Malone is Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer at BMO Financial Group, and Head of People, Culture and Brand, working from Toronto. She sits on both BMO's Executive Committee and its United States Management Committee.
Holding the chief administrative and chief human resources roles together is the distinctive feature here. It gives the people agenda direct control of a wider set of enterprise functions than a standalone HR mandate usually carries. For anyone studying how people leaders gain organisational leverage, the structure is more instructive than any single programme would be.
14. Caroline Maso
Senior Vice President, People and Sustainability, Bombardier
Caroline Maso joined Bombardier's leadership team in January 2025 as Senior Vice President, People and Sustainability, based in Montreal. Bombardier designs and builds business aircraft, so its workforce is heavily weighted towards skilled manufacturing and engineering talent that is genuinely difficult to replace.
She leads the global human resources practice with a stated focus on making Bombardier a top employer in every country where it operates. Setting the standard country by country rather than as a single global average is a harder commitment to meet, and it forces attention onto the smaller sites that a headquarters-led people strategy usually overlooks.
15. Jacqui McGillivray
Group Executive Vice-President and Chief People Officer, WestJet
Jacqui McGillivray joined WestJet in October 2024 as Chief People Officer and works from the airline's Calgary base. Airlines run on tightly scheduled, highly regulated crewed operations, where a people decision made centrally shows up within days in whether flights actually depart.
She oversees people, labour relations, health, external affairs and communications. Grouping labour relations and communications under one leader is a practical response to how aviation disputes actually unfold, since they are argued in public as much as at the bargaining table. It is a useful structure to study for anyone in a unionised, customer-facing industry.
16. Sandy McIntosh
Executive Vice-president, People and Culture and Chief Human Resources Officer, TELUS
Sandy McIntosh is Executive Vice-president, People and Culture and Chief Human Resources Officer at TELUS, one of Canada's major telecommunications companies. He leads the people and culture agenda for a workforce spread across network operations, retail, customer service and a growing health business.
His remit also covers corporate citizenship and communications strategies. Putting citizenship beside people and culture connects what a company does in its communities with what it asks of its employees, which is the point at which stated values either hold up or quietly fall apart. He also speaks publicly on well-being and the future of leadership.
17. Arielle Meloul-Wechsler
Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer and Public Affairs, Air Canada
Arielle Meloul-Wechsler is Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer and Public Affairs at Air Canada, based in Montreal. She leads the people function at the country's largest airline, across flight crew, airports, maintenance and corporate teams.
She has been a member of Air Canada's executive team since 2013. That length of tenure is genuinely unusual at this level and covers a period in which the airline industry was disrupted about as thoroughly as any sector can be. Continuity of that kind is worth attention on its own, because it means one leader carried the workforce through both the collapse and the rebuild.
18. Krista Mooney
Chief People Officer, PwC Canada
Krista Mooney is Chief People Officer at PwC Canada and a member of the Canadian Leadership Team, working from Calgary. Professional services firms live or die on their ability to attract and keep skilled people, so the people role sits unusually close to the commercial engine.
She holds the people role while also leading forensic services in Western Canada as a partner. Practitioner credibility of that kind changes how a people leader is heard by partners, because the advice comes from someone still carrying client work. It is a reminder that in partnerships, influence often follows demonstrated expertise rather than reporting lines.
19. Penny Partridge
Chief People Officer, KPMG in Canada
Penny Partridge joined KPMG in Canada as Chief People Officer in January 2026, leading the firm's people strategy in support of its growth, culture and business objectives. She is among the newest of the senior people leaders in this directory.
She holds both an accounting designation and a chartered human resources designation. That dual qualification is uncommon and it matters in a partnership, where a people leader has to argue the case for investment in the same financial language the partners use every day. For practitioners considering further qualifications, it is a concrete example of how credentials can convert into influence.
20. Jenny Poulos
Chief Human Resources Officer, Scotiabank
Jenny Poulos is Chief Human Resources Officer at Scotiabank, working from the Greater Toronto Area. Scotiabank has a wider international retail footprint than most Canadian banks, particularly across the Americas, so the people function spans very different labour markets and regulatory settings.
Her responsibility covers global human resources including talent, global HR services, total rewards and HR business partners. Listing HR services as a named pillar alongside talent and rewards is telling. It signals that the operational spine of the function, the part employees actually touch, is treated as a strategic asset rather than back-office administration.
21. Asifa Samji
Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Stantec
Asifa Samji is Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Stantec, the Canadian design and engineering firm, and is based in North Vancouver. Stantec's work is delivered by professional staff spread across a large number of local offices, which makes consistency of employee experience a genuine design problem.
She is accountable for all human resources functions across the company, with a focus on a people-first culture that supports growth and the communities the firm serves. Tying the internal culture to the communities served is a natural fit for a firm whose projects are physically built in those places, and it gives the people strategy an external test rather than only an internal one.
22. Carla Smith
Executive Vice President and Chief People and Communications Officer, Intact Financial Corporation
Carla Smith is Executive Vice President and Chief People and Communications Officer at Intact Financial Corporation, Canada's largest provider of property and casualty insurance. She was appointed to the current role in October 2025.
For more than four years before that she was Chief People, Strategy and Climate Officer at the same company. Holding people, strategy and climate together in one role, then reshaping it around people and communications, is a rare and visible example of an organisation deliberately rebalancing what it wants its most senior people executive to own.
23. Sarah Walters
Executive Vice President, IT and Chief People Officer, Nutrien
Sarah Walters is Executive Vice President, IT and Chief People Officer at Nutrien, the Saskatoon-headquartered crop nutrient producer. Nutrien's workforce spans mining, manufacturing and a large agricultural retail network, so the people function reaches from underground operations to farm-facing sales.
She holds the information technology and people portfolios together. That combination is still rare in Canada and it is a pointed answer to a common frustration, because the systems that shape everyday employee experience and the people strategy that depends on them report to the same executive. Anyone who has watched an HR technology programme stall between two functions will recognise the value.
24. Dean Winsor
Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, Teck Resources
Dean Winsor is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Teck Resources, the Vancouver-headquartered mining company, and was appointed to the role in 2024. Mining people strategy has to work in remote operations where the workforce often lives on site or flies in and out on rotation.
His responsibility covers human resources and office services. That pairing looks modest on paper but is significant in resource operations, because the physical conditions people work and live in are a large part of whether they stay. Treating the workplace itself as part of the people portfolio is a sensible response to that reality.
What these leaders show us about HR leadership in Canada
Read across these 24 profiles and a few patterns stand out clearly.
The first is scope expansion. A striking number of these leaders hold something beyond human resources: communications at Intact and Manulife, brand and marketing at RBC, citizenship at TELUS, sustainability at CAE and Bombardier, public affairs at Suncor and Air Canada, information technology at Nutrien, and enterprise administration at BMO. The senior people role in Canada is increasingly a broader enterprise role that happens to be anchored in the workforce.
The second is that operating reality shapes the job far more than the title does. The portfolios that pair labour relations with communications, or human resources with office services, are not accidents of reporting lines. They are sensible responses to industries where disputes are argued publicly, or where the physical conditions of work determine whether people stay.
The third is the value of route variety. Some of these leaders came up through the business rather than through human resources. Others hold professional qualifications in accounting or law alongside their people credentials, or continue to carry client work. In partnerships and technical firms especially, that dual standing seems to convert directly into influence.
The fourth is tenure. Several of these people have held senior roles through a decade that included a near total disruption of their industry. Continuity of that kind is easy to overlook and hard to replace, and it is worth as much attention as any new appointment.
None of this suggests a single right model. It does suggest that the Canadian people function is being deliberately redesigned, organisation by organisation, around where each business actually feels workforce risk.
How to use this list
The most useful way to read a directory like this is as a set of live examples rather than a leaderboard.
Start with the organisations closest to your own operating conditions. If you work somewhere unionised and safety-critical, the railway, airline and resources profiles will be more instructive than the software ones, regardless of company size. If you are building a people function in a fast-growing firm, the scale-up profiles will speak more directly to your problems.
Look at portfolio design next. If you have ever lost a people technology programme in the gap between two functions, the organisations that put those responsibilities under one executive are worth studying. If your culture work keeps drifting away from your communications work, look at the companies that stopped separating them.
Connecting is straightforward and worth doing well. Follow the people whose organisations resemble yours, read what they publish, and if you reach out, be specific about the problem you are working on rather than sending a generic request. Senior people leaders receive a great many vague approaches and very few precise questions.
Finally, use the list to check your own assumptions about what a senior people career looks like in Canada. The routes represented here are more varied than the standard advice suggests, which is good news for anyone whose background does not follow the usual path.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a chief human resources officer in Canada actually do?
A Canadian chief human resources officer sets workforce strategy for the whole organisation, covering talent, total rewards, employee relations and leadership development. At the organisations in this directory, many also hold communications, brand, sustainability or technology responsibilities, and most sit on the executive committee reporting to the chief executive.
What is the difference between a chief people officer and a chief human resources officer?
In practice the two titles describe the same seniority. Chief people officer is more common in technology firms and professional services, while chief human resources officer remains standard in banking, transport and resources. Several leaders here hold hybrid titles that name people alongside culture, communications or sustainability.
Which industries employ the most senior HR leaders in Canada?
Financial services, transport, energy and resources, telecommunications, retail, professional services and higher education all support executive level people roles. This directory covers all of them. The pattern reflects Canada's economy, where large employers concentrate in banking, natural resources and regulated network industries.
Do senior HR roles in Canada require professional certification?
Certification is not universally required, but it is common and valued. Canadian designations are administered by provincial bodies within the Chartered Professionals in Human Resources network, and by the Ordre des conseillers en ressources humaines agrees in Quebec. Several leaders in this directory hold those designations alongside other qualifications.
How is human resources leadership changing in Canada?
The clearest change is scope. Senior people roles increasingly include communications, brand, sustainability, public affairs or information technology. The second change is expectation: people leaders are now asked to argue their case in commercial and operational terms, and to take direct accountability for culture rather than treating it as a by-product.
Conclusion
A directory is only useful if it helps you do something differently. The 24 people gathered here are running the people function at some of Canada's largest and most demanding employers, and the detail worth taking away is not who is on the list but how their roles have been built.
The clear direction of travel is towards broader mandates. Communications, brand, sustainability, public affairs and technology are being pulled inside people portfolios because organisations have concluded that workforce decisions cannot be made well in isolation from them. The leaders here are the practical evidence of that shift, across industries that could hardly be more different from one another.
If you work in human resources in Canada, the useful next action is specific rather than general. Pick two or three organisations from this directory whose operating conditions genuinely resemble your own. Look at how their people function is structured, what sits inside it and what does not, and compare that honestly with your own remit. Then decide what you would need to take on, or hand over, for your people strategy to carry the same weight.
That comparison takes an afternoon. It is a better use of time than another framework.
Related Reading
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About the Author
Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. He works with schools, corporates and nonprofits around the world. To enquire about a keynote, workshop or facilitated leadership session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.