Canada’s top technology leaders honoured at 2026 CanadianCIO Awards

This year’s CanadianCIO of the Year winners run technology for an aerospace manufacturer, protect a province’s power grid, oversee the AI system that helps draft decision letters at Ontario’s physician regulator, manage technology and risk across a group of auto dealerships, and lead technology at an investment manager whose decisions affect more than 800,000 pension plan beneficiaries.

Five technology leaders were honoured this week at the 2026 CanadianCIO of the Year Awards, presented by the CIO Association of Canada (CIOCAN) at the Arcadian Loft in Toronto, with nominees from across the country. 

Guests filled long rows of tables under crystal chandeliers as each winner’s name and photo went up on screens along the room.

This year’s winners:

• Private Sector CIO of the Year: Brigitte Larivière, vice-president and chief information officer, Bombardier
• Public Sector CIO of the Year: Tony Payne, senior vice-president of technology and innovation and chief technology officer, BCI
• Not-for-Profit CIO of the Year: Eben Engelbrecht, director of information technology and facilities, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario
• Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of the Year: Rob Antonishen, director of cybersecurity and compliance, B.C. Hydro
• Fawn Annan Memorial Award: Jennifer Hutton, vice-president of information technology and risk and chief privacy officer, Steele Auto Group

CIOCAN is a national association of more than 675 technology executives, led by the organization’s new president and chair, Derek Cullen.

Fawn Annan founded the CanadianCIO of the Year Awards at IT World Canada, and CIOCAN relaunched them in 2025 in partnership with Jim Love and Tech Newsday, which is the awards’ national media partner alongside Digital Journal.

Cullen opened the evening by speaking to the technology leaders in the room.

“Canada’s future is being shaped not only by policies and headlines, but by the technology leaders in this room,” said Cullen. “You are modernizing systems, securing our digital infrastructure, scaling enterprises, and leading transformation across virtually every sector of our economy. Your decisions have lasting consequences, and tonight we recognize the people that make them.”

He also paid tribute to Shaun Guthrie, CIOCAN’s past president and chair, who passed away earlier this year.

“He was a great friend, a mentor, a leader, and truly a giant in our community,” said Cullen.

Gary Davenport, who chairs the CanadianCIO committee and judging panel and has been involved in the awards since 2014, gave the closing remarks.

“This evening has been about recognizing the people who are leading and contributing to Canada’s technology community,” said Davenport. “As one of the judges, I can tell you it is not easy. In fact, it’s very difficult. To be recognized among such an accomplished group is a significant achievement and a reflection of your dedication and excellence.”

Awards were presented in five categories. Here’s who won each and what they said on stage.

Private Sector CIO of the Year

Brigitte Larivière, vice-president and chief information officer at Bombardier, was named Private Sector CIO of the Year. 

Marcelo Tamaki, CEO of category sponsor Red X Carbon, presented the award.

Tamaki said the honour “recognizes a technology leader who has demonstrated outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact within a private sector organization. It celebrates CIOs who are helping transform their organizations and shape the future of business through technology.”

Larivière, who has spent 36 years in the industry, credited Bombardier’s IT team and the people across the company.

“Technology has an important role to play in the journey, but only one piece of the equation,” said Larivière. “The bigger challenge is bringing people together around a shared vision, navigating change, and creating an environment where people feel empowered to contribute, challenge the ideas, and continue learning.”

Larivière told Digital Journal she has given her team until the end of 2027 to automate about 80% of the infrastructure work Bombardier now pays outside firms to handle, which could mean more than 1,000 AI agents in production. Each one will have a named person accountable for what it does.

She’s also making departments answer for what they use. In 2027 they’ll see their AI usage and what it costs, and in 2028 they start paying for it, the same model Bombardier uses for phones, where a department is told what it used and pays for the handset and minutes. Her 2026 mandate to the infrastructure team was to automate whatever it could, such as patching and server reboots, with no requirement to show a return on investment. The team has automated more than 800 scripts since.

Also nominated were Cecilia Carbonelli, chief information officer at Haventree Bank, and John Comacchio, senior vice-president and chief information officer at Teknion, who joined Larivière in a Digital Journal roundtable on what AI costs, who pays for it, and the work that never needed an agent.

Comacchio told Digital Journal he takes his Teknion technology team on field trips to watch people work, including the Toronto Reference Library and a downtown park. Nearly a year of testing AI agents has shown his team how much of the work was never written down, like the call an employee makes when the system says no. An agent following the documented process wouldn’t know to make that call. He calls the spending a necessary evil, the money it takes to learn.

Public Sector CIO of the Year

Tony Payne, senior vice-president of technology and innovation and chief technology officer at BCI, was named Public Sector CIO of the Year. 

Gary Yorke, public sector executive director at Zoho Canada, which sponsored the award, presented it.

Yorke said the award “recognizes an exceptional technology leader whose vision and leadership are making a meaningful impact to government and public service,” and that Zoho is “focused on enabling cities and making sure that the citizen and overall experience and capabilities come first.”

Accepting the award, Payne credited the win to BCI, which he described as securing the futures of millions of pensioners in B.C., and its executive team’s support for innovation.

“Any one of us is worthy of this award,” Payne said, addressing the room. “The pace at which transformation is taking place, I would say it’s a really difficult job, and for us being a part of that leadership role, spearheading where we go in the future, deserves the recognition. I really feel humbled and privileged at the same time.”

In an interview with Digital Journal, Payne said he gave every employee at BCI, which manages nearly $314 billion in gross assets for 33 public sector clients, an AI licence from day one. 

About 95% of staff now use AI every week, and three-quarters of the more than 20 teams at a recent internal hackathon came from outside his technology group. He’s also preparing BCI’s systems for quantum computing, because future quantum computers are expected to break today’s encryption, and attackers can steal encrypted data now and unlock it once they can.

Bachar Khawajah, chief information officer at the City of Burnaby, and Brent Dyer were also nominated and joined Payne in a Digital Journal roundtable on why public sector technology work depends on trust. 

Dyer retired from the Calgary Police Service after more than 32 years and is now executive director of IT and information management at the new Alberta Sheriffs Police Service.

Khawajah told Digital Journal he inherited a technology estate about seven years behind Burnaby’s peers and ran a five-year modernization he says came in on time and on budget. He puts the job at 80% communication, most of it translating technology into terms the mayor and council can act on. 

The city’s AI cameras on Burnaby Mountain have already caught smoke from a fire in a neighbouring city and alerted Burnaby’s fire department before the call came in.

At the Calgary Police Service, Dyer put lawyers and privacy staff on the AI steering committee early, then let street officers build their own agents, including one that pulls evidence from cell phone records and saves months on some investigations. He says AI will never save anybody money, especially in the public sector, and measures it by the time it gives back to officers.

Not-for-Profit CIO of the Year

Eben Engelbrecht, director of information technology and facilities at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, was named Not-for-Profit CIO of the Year. 

Philippe Johnston, a past president of CIOCAN, presented the award.

“Technology leadership in the not-for-profit sector is more than about technology,” said Johnston. “It’s about using innovation and doing things with less. These people have to do what large corporations have to do with a lot less resources, a lot less money, a lot less technology, and so they have to be truly innovative, transformational, and they have to have meaningful impact for the communities and the people they serve.”

Engelbrecht’s team put his nomination together, which he said surprised him, and he thanked them along with his family, who he said bear the cost of his long hours.

“It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of long hours, and the team’s always pushing through,” said Engelbrecht. “My family and my wife [are] here. They’re the ones that have to suffer through the long hours.”

Engelbrecht told Digital Journal he found the college running WordPerfect on 32-bit Windows when he arrived. The years his team then spent cleaning up data for regulatory reporting turned out to give the college a head start on AI.

AI now drafts the college’s decision letters, which a decision writer reviews, fixes and submits, and nearly 95% of staff use Copilot.

The other finalists, Arun Dixit, vice-president of operational excellence at Professional Engineers Ontario, and Pradeep Nair, chief information officer at TRIUMF, joined Engelbrecht in a Digital Journal roundtable on why AI can’t put public trust at risk, particularly in organizations funded by member fees and public money.

Despite six years in a machine-learning PhD program, Dixit keeps AI out of decision-making at Professional Engineers Ontario, where people still answer all of the roughly 25,000 queries it receives each year. He also makes the case for cybersecurity spending to a board of engineers every year, because the threats it defends against keep changing.

Nair said he arrived at TRIUMF, a particle accelerator lab on the University of British Columbia campus, to find half its network exposed to the world and no security monitoring. Researchers saw little risk because the datasets were already public, until he pointed out they did their personal banking on the same machines. Asked for a hot take, he borrowed a former CEO’s joke that you can’t teach smart people not to be stupid, because the smarter you are, the narrower your focus.

CISO of the Year

Rob Antonishen, director of cybersecurity and compliance at B.C. Hydro, was named CISO of the Year. Greg Davison, managing director of category sponsor Armadin, handed out the award.

“The CISO of the Year Award recognizes a security leader that demonstrates excellence, resilience, innovation, leadership, commitment,” said Davison.

Armadin is an AI-native cybersecurity company that uses autonomous AI agents to find weaknesses in customers’ systems before attackers do. The company announced a $255.5-million Series B on the day of the awards, valuing the company at more than $2.5 billion.

Antonishen credited his team at B.C. Hydro and told the room cyber risk at the utility spans both information technology and operational technology.

“I’ve learned that cybersecurity is most effective when managed as an enterprise risk and not a technology problem,” said Antonishen. “Too often, organizations will address cyber risk in separate pockets with different teams, different priorities, and different perspectives. Real resilience is built when we bring those perspectives together and manage risk as one organization.”

In an interview with Digital Journal, Antonishen said he became the first person accountable for cybersecurity at B.C. Hydro in 2021, where some systems date back more than 30 years. 

For Antonishen, regulatory compliance is the minimum. When his team took down a set of fake B.C. Hydro billing sites, he reported it to the board as a win for customer trust. He burned out from overwork himself, and he and his direct reports now check whether staff are taking time off.

Also nominated was Biying He, director of cybersecurity, resilience and information management at TransLink, who joined Antonishen in a Digital Journal roundtable on what AI agents mean for identity, access and accountability.

She told Digital Journal she has grown the TransLink team from about 11 people to 29 since joining in 2023, three years after a ransomware attack.

When she set a target of 45% of TransLink staff completing security training, her CEO doubled it to 90%. Zero-day fixes that once took weeks or months now take hours, and she’s building an intake process for AI agents, which she describes as half human, half machine.

Fawn Annan Memorial Award

Jennifer Hutton, vice-president of information technology and risk and chief privacy officer at Steele Auto Group, received the inaugural Fawn Annan Memorial Award, named for the late IT World Canada CEO who founded the CanadianCIO Awards. Grace Martins, president of sponsor QRX Technology Group, presented it alongside Debra Christmas, vice-president and executive partner at Gartner and a close friend of Annan’s.

“It is an opportunity to recognize not only professional achievement but also the values of leadership, mentorship, community, and service,” said Martins.

Hutton, who called CIOCAN a big part of her professional journey, shared the recognition with her team at Steele.

“Over the years, a lot of people have looked at the boat I was steering, saw me standing at the helm, and trusted me enough to climb aboard,” said Hutton. “Sometimes we sailed through calm waters, sometimes we found ourselves in the middle of a storm, but they trusted me anyways, and that’s not something I will ever take for granted.”

Hutton told Digital Journal she was hired to run IT and cybersecurity at Steele and now also runs insurance, privacy, and health and safety. When ransomware took down CDK Global’s dealer software in 2024, she and her team were at a restaurant prepping a tabletop exercise for that exact scenario, and Steele’s nine affected dealerships kept taking payments through about two and a half weeks of outage.

Helen Knight, president and founder of Helen Knight Nonprofit Technology Consulting, was also a finalist and joined Hutton in a Digital Journal roundtable on build versus buy, shadow AI and governance that can’t keep pace with new tools.

Knight said she found Windows 98 and one computer with 1,024 viruses when she took over technology at the Calgary Drop-In Centre in 2016. A few months later, she was mopping a flooded server room barefoot. Before pitching a new system, she prices the old one, and she says she’s never found less than $2 million being lost to inefficient software. Knight counts Annan as a mentor, and in 2019 Annan presented her with a Transformation Leader of the Year award.

Five leaders join the CanadianCIO Hall of Fame

All five winners join the CanadianCIO Hall of Fame, sponsored by Lenovo, alongside past award recipients, CIOCAN Lifetime Achievement Award recipients and honorary members.

“Canada’s technology leaders have guided organizations through digital transformation, cybersecurity, cloud, data, and more recently, the rapid evolution of AI,” said John Barkla, general manager of Lenovo Canada. “The Hall of Fame honours that journey, connecting those who built the industry’s foundation with those shaping its future.”

CIOCAN’s other flagship event, the CIO Peer Forum, comes to the Hilton Toronto on May 5-6, 2027, under the theme The Execution Era: Orchestrating Intelligence, Value and Trust at Scale. 

The program centres on what it takes to run AI at scale, balance innovation with risk, and build the trust and talent organizations need. Sessions will also look at the technology leader’s career itself, from board seats and advisory roles to fractional leadership.

Digital Journal is the national media partner for the CIO Association of Canada.