Quebec City runs on institutions: the provincial government on the hilltop, the financial cooperatives and insurers along the St. Lawrence, one of Canada’s oldest research universities, and a health technology sector selling into hospitals worldwide. The province created its own Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital Affairs in late 2021, one of the first governments anywhere to make cybersecurity a full ministry. The five leaders below work in government, cooperative finance, insurance, higher education, and health technology.
Bianca Lavoie – Directrice générale, Sécurité de l’information gouvernementale, Ministère de la Cybersécurité et du Numérique
Bianca Lavoie came to government-wide security governance from provincial policing. She spent years inside the Sûreté du Québec, most recently directing performance improvement, before taking over information security for the Quebec government in December 2024. She was confirmed in the permanent Directrice générale role in May 2025. Her mandate covers governance and oversight of information security across the entire provincial government, setting the requirements every ministry and public body operates within. Her directorate is where the ministry’s policy mandate becomes operational practice.
Guillaume Dubé – CISO, Université Laval
Founded in 1852, Université Laval enrolls tens of thousands of students and maintains deep ties to the capital region’s hospital network. Guillaume Dubé has served as its Chief Information Security Officer since August 2021. The scope is broad: student records, research data, clinical partnerships, and a campus full of connected infrastructure all sit inside the perimeter. Five years in, he has worked to move security from an IT function into a governance conversation at one of Canada’s oldest research institutions.
Christian Emond – Responsable de la sécurité de l’information, Desjardins
Desjardins is the largest cooperative financial group in North America, headquartered across the river in Lévis, and it still operates under the shadow of the 2019 data breach that affected millions of members and reshaped how Canadian regulators approach privacy. Christian Emond took on the information security lead role there in April 2026. He came from BRP, the Quebec-based powersports manufacturer, where he built his security leadership experience in a global industrial environment.
Alexandre Girard – Directeur, stratégie et services de cybersécurité, Beneva
Beneva was born from the merger of La Capitale and SSQ Insurance, a deal that created one of Canada’s largest insurance groups overnight and left two legacy technology estates to fold into one security program. Alexandre Girard has directed cybersecurity strategy and services at the Quebec City-headquartered insurer since November 2023. His path ran through IT governance and technology portfolio leadership, with earlier work in infrastructure and security program management. Nearly three years in, his work still centers on harmonizing systems across the merged organization.
Benjamin-Hugo LeBlanc – Directeur principal cybersécurité (CISO), LGI Healthcare Solutions
LGI Healthcare Solutions builds software that runs inside hospitals and health networks across Canada and abroad, which places the company in the supply chain of hundreds of healthcare organizations at once. Benjamin-Hugo LeBlanc has been its senior cybersecurity director and CISO since October 2024, with CISO-titled roles in health technology going back to mid-2023. His security decisions reach directly into clinical environments where uptime and data integrity affect patient care.
Five Institutions, One Capital
The organizations these leaders protect are among the oldest and largest in the province. Lavoie sets information security requirements for every ministry and public body in Quebec. Emond and Girard defend a cooperative financial group and an insurer that together hold the accounts and policies of millions of Quebecers. Dubé secures a university founded in 1852, and LeBlanc protects software running inside hospitals well beyond the province’s borders. The capital region’s security work is concentrated in institutions rather than spread across a startup economy, and the people running it tend to stay long enough to know them well.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
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John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.