Electricity, hospital care, banking, and the services provinces and cities provide are things people rarely think about until they stop. The five cyber leaders below, in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, and Nova Scotia, are responsible for keeping those services dependable in the face of cyber threats. Their paths in started in power engineering, hospital help desks, corporate strategy, municipal systems, and service management, and each brings that operating experience to the question of what needs protecting first.
Rob Antonishen – Director, Cyber Security & Compliance, BC Hydro
“Compliance is not the same as security,” says Rob Antonishen. BC Hydro must meet mandatory cybersecurity requirements for the North American power system, but he calls them “the low bar,” not the ceiling. When he joined in 2021, the utility had no single person accountable for cybersecurity across the organization. Some of its systems date back more than 30 years, and since not everything can be brought up to modern standards at once, he puts the most critical and exposed systems first, making those calls with operations colleagues because cyber risk has to be weighed against outage risk. He came up through operations himself, starting in protection and control engineering at Ontario Hydro and spending two decades at Ontario Power Generation, where he built OT security teams supporting four regional control centers and more than 60 generating stations. He wants engineers to design for someone deliberately trying to break a system, not just for equipment failures and storms. He also speaks openly about burnout, which he experienced himself, and makes sure his team takes time off. In October 2026 he was named CISO of the Year at the CanadianCIO Awards.
Keith Lawson – CISO, London Health Sciences Centre
Keith Lawson started on a hospital help desk in 1996. Over more than two decades at St. Joseph’s Health Care London, he moved through web development, healthcare systems integration, and 12 years of Linux and Unix administration before managing IT technology and security. He joined London Health Sciences Centre to manage IT security operations in 2022 and became CISO in July 2023. In a March 2026 Senate submission made in a personal capacity, he described building and leading a managed cybersecurity services program covering 32 Ontario hospitals, and argued that privacy law constraints can stand in the way of health information sharing. He has discussed patch prioritization and testing in hospital environments, identity controls, and a culture that encourages people to report mistakes, and he brings site reliability engineering principles into security operations. Alongside his day job, he is pursuing a doctorate in engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, researching reinforcement learning, and he earlier founded a healthcare software development firm.
Innes Holman – SVP, Technology Strategy, Architecture, Risk & CISO, ATB Financial
At ATB Financial, technology strategy, architecture, and cybersecurity all sit with Innes Holman. In the role since September 2022, Holman is responsible for building ATB’s technology for 2030 and beyond while safeguarding its data and technology assets, and also oversees its client experience and technology first-line risk team. Holman came to the role through ATB’s digital and technology leadership, including digital engineering and architecture, technology strategy, and a stint as interim CTO. Before ATB, Holman spent more than seven years leading IT strategy, planning, and performance at ATCO, including its cloud strategy and first machine learning application, and nearly 12 years at Canadian Pacific Railway in program management, corporate planning, and strategic sourcing. Holman joined the board of the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange in 2026, leads a Gartner CIO and CISO governing body, and advises the Women in Technology program at Making Changes Association.
Kevin Martin – Executive Director, Cyber Security and Enterprise Risk, Government of Nova Scotia
Kevin Martin’s career began implementing tax and water billing systems for municipalities. Over the following decades he held technology and business leadership roles at SolutionInc, Nova Scotia Community College, and several technology companies, before joining the Government of Nova Scotia in 2019 to lead the health portfolio at Nova Scotia Digital Service. He took on cybersecurity and enterprise risk on an acting basis in February 2023 and was confirmed as executive director that May. His focus includes building awareness and training among public servants, with resilience treated as a shared responsibility across government.
Bruce Roosen – Director of Cyber Security, Halifax Regional Municipality
Business continuity has run through Bruce Roosen’s career. As a systems analyst at Eastlink, he led business continuity and disaster recovery for more than 35 applications and services, and as an IT consultant he led cryptographic key management and an encryption migration project and documented incident response procedures. Earlier, he was an incident and problem management lead at CGI. He joined Halifax Regional Municipality as a security analyst in 2020 and has been its director of cyber security since January 2022. He holds the Certified Information Systems Auditor designation.
Different Systems, Same Responsibility
Antonishen protects a power grid, Lawson a network of hospitals, Holman a financial institution, Martin a provincial government, and Roosen a city. They came from engineering, systems administration, corporate strategy, and service management, and each now carries responsibility for keeping services people rely on running securely.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
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- Security Without Shutting the Door: The University CISOs to Watch
- Banking Without a Branch: Europe’s Digital Finance CISOs to Watch
- Securing the Physical Economy: Europe’s Industrial Cyber Leaders to Watch
- Ready Before It Happens: New Zealand’s Cyber Readiness Leaders to Watch
- Protecting the Mission: Australia’s Not-for-Profit Cyber Leaders to Watch
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.