Remembering Shaun Guthrie, a CIO leader and friend to many

Shaun Guthrie, 47, passed away on June 28, 2026. He was a husband and father of four, a son, a friend to many, the president and chair of the CIO Association of Canada (CIOCAN), and the vice president of business technology at RJC Engineers. Digital Journal is CIOCAN’s media partner, which is how I came to know Shaun and how he became a friend. How we got there starts with a lunch in Edmonton.

It was a warm January morning. My Digital Journal colleague David and I had flown into Edmonton on our way to a run of meetings and interviews, and Shaun offered to meet us before our schedule took over.

Shaun was there to size us up.

We’d met a few times over video, but this was the first time in person, and he was assessing whether Digital Journal was the right outlet to become CIOCAN’s official national media partner. Given that we were to be trusted with the stories of the technology leaders he represented, he wanted to see how we approached things and if we could cut it.

When we got there, I expected the careful, polished and polite version of that conversation. But we never got around to it. We talked about my colleague David nursing a torn rotator cuff, and Shaun watched in amazement as he ate an entire meal with one arm all but tied behind his back. We got into big tech, AI, data, and the challenges that CIOs face that most people never see. We even touched on wine, and Shaun made it known that red was his vino of choice.

He listened to all of it with the kind of attention that comes from a person who is weighing what you say rather than waiting for their turn to talk. 

We got into technology hype cycles, and it turned out he had exactly as little patience for them as we did. We talked about scaling technical teams around complex topics, and about the upheaval running through his industry, which was retail at the time. And he was living through it in the most literal way, as his company Peavey was weeks from filing for creditor protection and closing all 90 of its stores.

Shaun spoke about it with a candour most people in his position would have hidden with strangers, but with us he jumped right into the tough stuff and how it felt to be in a business that was weeks away from shutting down.

When the news dropped officially in the weeks after we met, he spent his time on LinkedIn trying to help the people laid off alongside him, offering to review resumes, make introductions, give references, or just talk. “I will say that each of you deserved better than you got today, and for that I’m terribly sorry,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post the day it happened.

A week later he was still at it, telling anyone going through it that the hard part was normal. “It’s OK not to be OK,” he wrote.

That candour ran through the rest of our lunch. These meetings usually stay all business, and ours had plenty of it, but Shaun was also just straight with us about what CIOs value and what they don’t, and the ideas he wanted to chase. He didn’t have much experience dealing with the media, he told us, but he wanted to learn and he was willing to tackle any question we could throw at him.

When he talked about the CIO seat, he described it as demanding and underestimated, and he had no interest in pretending otherwise. What he wanted from us, he said, was a journalistic view of the world, with the raw detail left in and no spit shine.

In the days after we got back to Toronto, I got the call that Shaun, executive director Lorraine Bauer, and the CIOCAN board had given us the green light to become the association’s official media partner. And in the months that followed, Shaun and I built a real friendship that ran alongside the work.

As I got to know him, I realized the speed of the yes CIOCAN gave to Digital Journal was its own kind of tell.

He told me he wanted to work with us because of how we show up, and the more time I spent around him the clearer it became that he was describing how he worked too. He was professional and collaborative and, underneath that, someone who wanted to get things done without sugar-coating any of it. And most important to him was to lift up the people around him.

As president of CIOCAN, he was speaking for more than 675 CIOs across the country. He said if we tell business stories where people and technology intersect, warts and all, we’d be doing our job.

Shaun stayed himself in every seat

It was March 2025, two months after our lunch when he told me he was joining RJC Engineers as vice president of business technology, the firm’s senior technology leader and one of its first hires of that stature. I had heard of the company because a neighbour of mine worked there, and I also knew enough about Shaun by this point that I couldn’t wait to see what he would do with a business like RJC.

RJC was a new industry for him, but he’d built his career by moving between them. Retail, automotive, municipal government, engineering, he’d run technology across enough different businesses to know the job never really changed even when everything around it did. He would often repeat to me that technology was never the hard part, and that the real work was understanding the business it served.

At RJC he found exactly that. He called me in his first 100 days just to geek out about digital twins and predictive maintenance, the possibilities running ahead of him faster than he could get the words out. He had walked into an organization sitting on decades of drawings, records and history, which he saw as digital gold. It was a wealth of data waiting for someone to organize it and show what a CIO could really do with it.

Shaun’s energy was easy to catch on a call. In front of an audience, it worked a little differently.

Anyone who watched Shaun prep for a presentation or a speaking engagement figured out the trick — he was at his best when nobody handed him a script. He learned it the hard way with us, unfortunately, but it was something we came to laugh about. 

In late 2025 he was recording video interviews with our team and he told us he needed a script with key talking points, having decided for himself that was the best way to tackle the talk.

As soon as the camera turned on, he became his own biggest critic. Take after take, he fumbled trying to remember his lines. A few takes in, he was dropping f-bombs as often as apologies, and he laughed a little harder every time the words came out backwards. 

He read the script, then looked into the camera and said:

“United people and purpose through technology…because what she did is she led… fuuuuuuuck,” he cursed loudly after tripping over his prepared speech yet again. “This sucks. This is the shittiest part,” he laughed with our video team, making self-deprecating jokes while wishing for a miracle to save him.

The lesson he took from the day was simple, and he repeated it to us after: never let him try to work from a script again.

He was the same at events, and would walk off stage after speaking to hundreds of senior technology leaders and look at me, sometimes with a serious look on his face, and sometimes with a giant grin, and ask “Did I suck as bad as that felt?”

Shaun held a high bar for himself. He never sucked, but he also wouldn’t let me tell him that and be done with it. Every time he asked, he wanted me to share something he could learn from. 

Shaun showed up without armour

As I write this, I am flipping between a calendar, my notes, our text messages and social media DMs, and memories of working with Shaun. It was only a year and a half, but like a lot of people who knew him, I feel like I knew him far longer than I did.

Over the course of the first year of our partnership with CIOCAN, we stayed in touch in a way few busy people manage. 

We connected on social media, and whenever he travelled he would send me something he found interesting. It wasn’t always related to work (we shared a lot of laughs over standup comedy clips and tech memes), sometimes it was serious about work, and sometimes it was just nonsense he wanted to call out.

When I invited him to speak at the mesh conference about career transitions after the Peavey layoff, he showed up as his full self. He talked openly about identity and what it costs a person to separate it from a job title. He cried in front of a room of very senior people, and made the point himself that men need to allow themselves to be vulnerable, and that there’s nothing to hide in being human.

It wasn’t a one-time thing on a stage, either. He challenged himself to 2,000 push-ups over 23 days to raise money for the Canadian Mental Health Association, which stood for a cause he was very passionate about.

And whenever we talked, he wanted to learn as much as he wanted to lead. 

He saw a few of my LinkedIn posts about being at events run by Toast, a community supporting women in Canadian tech, and the systemic barriers women face. He reached out to ask me for advice on how he could apply learning to being a technology leader and he listened to the things I had learned with Toast. But like everything, he threw himself at it and he took it in as homework, working out how to be a better leader for the women on his teams.

That instinct, to turn what he heard into how he showed up for others, ran through his work at CIOCAN too.

At the organization’s Peer Forum in Ottawa in May 2025, he was the easy, warm host out front, and then he ran closed-door sessions on the stress CIOs carry, where he showed up just as completely without armour.

The more time we spent in the same room, the more the work turned into friendship. After that I would try to catch him in Toronto when he was in town, or find time with him in Edmonton or Calgary when I passed through. 

I introduced him to “shafts” during a late-night pub crawl in Calgary (for those who don’t know, it’s a cold brew coffee, vodka and a bit of bar magic for a late night cocktail). He loved them. Later at a restaurant in Toronto, we laughed when he learned an espresso martini is the fancier name for roughly the same thing, and it became a standing toast whenever we got together.

We were often ships passing in the night on the conference circuit, so we got into the habit of debriefing each other afterward, him filling me in on what he had seen and me doing the same. We kept talking about running roundtables together and going deeper on the world of CIOs, and he never stopped offering names I should talk to and introductions wherever he could make them. He understood from a lot of our conversations how hard it is to run a media company, and every time he turned around he was looking for an opening for us, because he could see how hard we were trying.

Shaun also talked about his kids and his family constantly. They were his whole world.

I remember him pulling up his Facebook page with me to scroll through recent memories. His face lit up when he talked about taking his son to his first Oilers game. He laughed when he told me about the first ice cream of the season with his daughters, celebrating it like it was a national holiday. And he turned the volume up to show me a video of “Bun Bun,” his youngest’s stuffed animal that was an absolute must to bring anywhere if anyone wanted to sleep well.

Whenever we were out at events and he came across something he thought the kids would like, he’d pull his phone out and jot it down so he wouldn’t forget what he wanted to take back home.

That was Shaun off the clock. On it, he was just as easy to be around.

The last long conversation we recorded together was in a hallway in a Vancouver hotel this past April during CIOCAN’s annual Peer Forum. He walked me through the unglamorous work of getting an engineering firm ready for AI, the data underneath it, the governance nobody finds exciting, and his refusal to chase pilots for their own sake. 

The last thing he talked about with me on the record, behind a camera (this time without a script) was the work he does with others. His peers. And the kind of honest, trusted conversations he said existed nowhere else.

There were more than 200 CIOs in the room beside us, and he smiled at me as we walked toward the plenary where he was about to address the room.

“Make sure you tell me if I suck, Chris,” he said as we walked in, jabbing me in the shoulder, smiling as he walked toward a table of people he hadn’t said hello to yet.

Shaun gave a decade to Canada’s CIOs

Shaun started as Edmonton chapter president of CIOCAN in 2015, then joined the national board as national membership director. He became national vice president in 2021, and took over as president and chair in 2024. It was a steady climb built on showing up, and along the way he won the association’s President’s Award in 2020 for the way he led.

I reached out to the leaders who served alongside him, and they kept describing the same person over and over. Generous, kind, and present whether the room was full or empty.

Gary Davenport, a board member and past president of the association, first met Shaun when he took over the Edmonton chapter.

“It was obvious from the start that he had tremendous leadership potential for the Association,” says Davenport. “He could be counted on to challenge the status quo while at the same time respecting the rights of others to have a different point of view.”

Lorraine Bauer worked beside him as the association’s executive director, and she points to what he built for members. He saw that his technology peers needed more than another conference session, she said, and he pushed the association toward the honest, difficult conversations the job usually forces leaders to have alone.

“He knew his fellow members needed support grounded in peer connections and real, honest, ugly conversations,” says Bauer. He wanted the association to be a place where they could “find solace in one another’s experiences.”

Nastaran Bisheban, the association’s national vice president, worked with him at the board level.

“He taught me how to balance high-stakes responsibility with absolute joy and warmth,” says Bisheban. “Even when navigating complex, high-pressure digital transformations or organizational challenges, you can still bring a smile, a sense of humour, and a calming presence to the room.”

Derek Cullen, CIOCAN’s vice president and leadership development director, kept coming back to the Peer Forums, where Shaun was in his element.

“Whether it was during a discussion, over dinner, or simply catching up between sessions, Shaun always made time for people,” says Cullen. “He had a warm sense of humour, a quiet confidence, and an easy way of making everyone feel comfortable.”

By the time I reached Philippe Johnston, a past president of the association, I could almost have predicted what he’d say because it matched everyone else.

“No matter how busy he was, he was always willing to listen, offer thoughtful advice, and provide encouragement,” says Johnston.

And Bisheban says the way he showed up as a leader stood out.

“You can reach the highest levels of executive leadership without ever losing your empathy,” she says. “His true legacy isn’t just what he built, but the beautiful way he treated people.”

For Cullen, it was in the questions Shaun asked.

“He wasn’t just interested in your work, he wanted to know how you were doing, how your family was, and what was happening in your life,” he says. “Those conversations were sincere, and they reflected the kind of person he was.”

Davenport saw the same generosity in how Shaun handled his own setbacks.

“He openly shared his own career struggles and challenges with others so as to help them in their own journey,” says Davenport.

And Bauer told me how important it was for Shaun to be human.

“He publicly declared that it’s OK to be vulnerable, stressed, scared, or to cry,” says Bauer.

What it was like to work with Shaun

RJC Engineers brought Shaun in as its vice president of business technology to change how the firm thought about its own future. 

“We weren’t looking for someone simply to manage technology,” says Roger Steers, the firm’s executive principal. “We wanted someone who could help us think differently about the future of our firm. Someone who would bring new ideas, challenge our thinking, and help take us in new directions. That is exactly who Shaun was.”

It didn’t take long for the firm to feel it.

“From day one, he embraced the challenge before him,” says Steers. “He brought fresh ideas, asked thoughtful questions, and encouraged us to look beyond where we were toward where we could be.”

What stood out was how he pushed for change without ever making it feel like a threat.

“Shaun wasn’t interested in change for its own sake. He believed there was always a better way, and he genuinely enjoyed helping others discover it,” says Steers. “He approached challenges with curiosity, optimism, and a willingness to question assumptions, qualities that helped move conversations forward and opened the door to new possibilities.”

For Steers, the technology leadership was only part of it.

“Those qualities made Shaun an exceptional technology leader. More importantly, they made him an exceptional colleague,” says Steers. “He brought enthusiasm to his work, generosity to his relationships, and genuine care for the people around him.”

Everyone I spoke to kept saying the same thing about Shaun.

He was the rare person who could make you feel like an old friend the first time you met him, smart, funny, and ready to get things done.

He spent years telling Canada’s technology leaders that the job is human before it is technical, and he lived that way himself. Honest and candid, sometimes to a fault, as his friends would say, and he didn’t care. That’s the Shaun all of us are going to miss.

A GoFundMe has been set up to support Shaun’s family. Those who would like to contribute can do so here.