Hi {{first_name}},

I spent a month interviewing the finalists for CanadianCIO of the Year, and they didn't act much like competitors. On Thursday at the Arcadian Loft, with almost all of them in the same room, nothing changed. Finalists traded notes all night, including the ones up for the same award. 

Outside, it poured rain. Inside the CIO Association of Canada had umbrellas waiting at the door. 

A full house turned out to watch five technology leaders win.

The winners, with our profile of each:

Each award comes with another honour. All five winners enter the CanadianCIO Hall of Fame, alongside past recipients and CIOCAN lifetime achievement winners.

In case you missed it, we also got the finalists in each category together for a discussion:

→ Private sector: Humans might be cheaper than the robots after all
→ Public sector: For these public sector CIOs, technology is the easy part
→ Not-for-profit: For these not-for-profit CIOs, AI can't risk public trust
→ CISO: In conversation with Canada's CISO of the Year finalists
→ Fawn Annan: Why technology governance keeps getting harder

For more, including what each winner said on stage and who else was nominated:

→ Read: Canada's top technology leaders honoured at 2026 CanadianCIO Awards

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"Do you want my honest answer? I suck at advocating for myself," said Janet Lin, senior vice president and CIO of EQ Bank, on stage at Nrth Festival.

As Jennifer Kervin reports, Lin grew up in a culture that told her good work gets recognized on its own. She now calls that idea completely wrong, which I find interesting coming from someone who got the job anyway.

She also says the role gets lonely. She's often the only person in the room carrying the technology conversation, and the work turns into business fluency, financials and outcomes.

For more, including how EQ Bank trains its staff on AI, what Lin wants executives thinking about instead of models, and the succession rule she put in place at Loblaw:

→ Read: What it takes to keep growing as a technology leader

Kervin also reports that Mark Carney named a National Council on Artificial Intelligence on Oct. 2, with Yoshua Bengio, Cloudflare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn, CPP Investments CEO John Graham and Bell chair Louis Vachon among the members. It advises on the AI for All strategy announced in June.

Ottawa wants organizational AI adoption in Canada at 60% by 2034, up from just over 12%. The strategy also projects an additional $200 billion in economic growth and 250,000 new AI-related jobs over five years.

The council is also meant to weigh in on sovereign infrastructure, AI safety, and helping Canadian AI companies grow. Nobody has said what sovereign infrastructure means in practice, and that definition decides whether a Canadian company buying compute from a hyperscaler is part of the problem or part of the plan.

There's no meeting schedule, no reporting date, and no commitment that anything the council recommends becomes public. A team inside the Privy Council Office supports it, and ministers stay accountable for the decisions.

So we'll find out what they advised when somebody decides we should. And secret government advice has such a good track record.

For more, including the full membership and how this connects to Digital Transformation Canada:

→ Read: Carney names new council to advise Ottawa on AI

Some light reading for when you read the slides faster than the presenter

Canada Rocket Company to build first large-scale engine test site Canada has built satellites for decades and has never had a way to launch them, so they go up on other countries' rockets. Canada Rocket Company is putting $30 million into a static engine test facility at London's airport, the first in Canada able to fire engines above one meganewton of thrust. CEO Hugh Kolias puts full Canadian launch capability at about $500 million over eight years and calls it more a capital problem than an engineering one.

Why do large language models agree with users, even when users are wrong? Anthropic's research on sycophancy found that models will match a user's stated assumptions over the evidence, and the cause is the training. Reinforcement learning from human feedback rewards responses people rate highly, and people rate agreement highly. The practical version: confident wrong input tends to produce confident wrong output, which matters once the tool is in a workflow where somebody acts on the answer.

Toast Summit is evolving with the moment Among 734 Canadian tech professionals surveyed by Toast Institute, 25% of women said they believed they had to leave their organization to advance, against 11% of men. Only 35% of women reported a senior leader advocating for their career, compared with 51% of men. Women with an active sponsor were more than twice as likely to say they could advance where they are. Toast has also taken its talent marketplace out of beta, with more than 15,000 women, 65% of them in technical roles.

Who should pay for Canada's AI infrastructure boom? Saskatchewan now expects new data centre developers to supply their own electricity. Ontario's draft playbook proposes premium rates for any facility drawing more than one megawatt, and Alberta prioritizes projects that bring their own generation and makes developers pay for the grid upgrades they trigger. Ottawa's Responsible Data Centre Development Principles, out in September, say projects shouldn't push costs onto other customers. Manitoba halted a proposed hyperscale project after local opposition built.

We hand problems to language models now the way we used to ask the person at the next desk.

Three years ago, that would have been the story. Now CIOs are deciding whether AI agents need employee numbers, who owns their work, and what happens when one gets something wrong.

Ferris Bueller said life moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Technology has a way of making strange things feel ordinary very quickly.

That's part of the value of nights like the CanadianCIO Awards. They make you stop long enough to notice the work that has become normal before the next strange thing arrives.

— David

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