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Disruptors

RBC Thought Leadership, John Stackhouse

Disruptors, now in its 11th season, has become your front-row seat to Canada’s innovation story—200+ episodes exploring the people, ideas, and technologies reshaping Canada’s future.

Each episode, hosted by John Stackhouse, SVP, Office of the CEO at Royal Bank of Canada—and former Editor-in-Chief of The Globe and Mail—cuts through the hype and focuses on what you need to know.

This season, we’re leaning into urgency: the global economy is shifting, geopolitics are noisy, and Canada needs to respond. You’ll hear from founders, investors, scientists, operators, and policy leaders at the forefront. Listen for a clearer understanding of the tech and innovation shaping Canada and the world—and practical insights to help you make sense of what’s coming next.

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  • 22 episodes
  • fortnightly
  • Avg 27 min
  • English

Episodes 22

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  • S11 · E2
    September 16 · 15 min

    Canada's A.I. Potential

    Two kinds of uncertainty met in Toronto this week: one in the bond market, one around AI. At the Milken Institute's Global Dialogues Toronto, timed to the Canada Investment Summit, AI Minister Evan Solomon, RBC CEO Dave McKay and Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez discuss who should write the rules for frontier AI, why access to the most advanced tools is uneven, and whether Canada can support a global champion. With Susan Li of Fox Business Network.

  • S10 · E18
    August 18 · 36 min

    REBOOT: The Trust Advantage: How OpenText is Securing Canada’s Information Layer

    The world is investing billions in data centres and compute. Canada’s edge isn’t bigger boxes—it’s Trust: rules enforced at home, private information secured under Canadian jurisdiction, and a clear path for enterprise data handling in the age of AI. That’s how “Canadian trust” becomes a competitive advantage. This week on Disruptors: The Canada Project, John Stackhouse takes us to Waterloo to map how policy as code, Canadian residency, and lineage + audit turn trust into a speed advantage. Gu

  • S10 · E17
    August 4 · 29 min

    REBOOT: Beyond the Battery: Inside Quebec’s Mine-to-Refine Transformation

    As the world electrifies—from cars and buses to datacentres and defence—demand for battery materials is exploding. Today, China refines more than 90% of the world’s graphite into the material used in virtually all EV battery anodes—that level of concentration is a strategic vulnerability Canada, and its allies, can’t ignore. But Canada is starting to respond. The federal Major Projects Office has just referred Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Phase-2 Matawinie Mine as a “Major Project of National Inter

  • S10 · E16
    July 21 · 26 min

    REBOOT: Port to Prosperity: How Roberts Bank Terminal 2 Is Rebuilding Canada’s Pacific Gateway

    Canada’s prosperity depends on how efficiently it can move goods to market — yet its largest ports have fallen behind the world’s best. With global trade accelerating and supply chains under pressure, Roberts Bank Terminal 2 represents a generational investment in Canada’s competitiveness. In this episode, Peter Xotta, CEO of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, Devan Fitch, the project’s Program Director, and Tamara Vrooman, CEO of Vancouver International Airport, join John Stackhouse to discu

  • S10 · E15
    July 7 · 23 min

    From Ottawa to Orbit: Two Views on Canada’s Big Day

    Season 10 of Disruptors asked one question, in a lot of different ways: does Canada have what it takes—the tools, the ambition and the will—to compete in the economy being built right now? For the season finale, John Stackhouse took that question to the RBC and Eurasia Group US-Canada Summit, where 500 leaders spent a day debating the most important economic relationship in the world. He came back with two conversations that, together, amount to an answer. Colonel Jeremy Hansen, the first Ca

  • S10 · E14
    June 30 · 27 min

    Own The Stack: Canada's Data Sovereignty Test

    There are roughly 11,000 data centres in the world. Canada has about 300. The United States has 5,000 and that number is growing fast. Canada is putting real money behind sovereign AI compute. But what does data sovereignty look like on the ground? In this episode of Disruptors, John Stackhouse visits Global Relay’s data centre in North Vancouver to see the physical side of the cloud: cooling systems, backup power, biometric access, data halls, and AI racks. Global Relay Chief Product Officer

  • S10 · E13
    June 23 · 26 min

    Can AI Fix ER Wait Times?

    Canada’s national AI strategy puts healthcare on centre stage – and for good reason. If you ask Canadians about the healthcare system, many will say they value it deeply, but that they are frustrated by wait times. In this episode of Disruptors, John Stackhouse looks at what we need to do to make artificial intelligence move the needle for wait times and quality of care. Mara Lederman, co-founder and COO of Signal 1, explains the pressure inside hospitals: rising demand, constrained supply, lon

  • S10 · E12
    June 16 · 26 min

    Canada’s Tech Growth Challenge

    Canada has helped shape major technology waves, from AI to quantum. But when companies move from promising startup to global contender, the harder questions begin: where does the growth capital come from, who becomes the customer, and how can long-term value stay connected to Canada? In this episode of Disruptors, John Stackhouse is joined by Boris Wertz, founder and general partner of Version One Ventures, and Sid Paquette, head of RBCx, for a conversation about Canada's growth capital gap an

  • S10 · E11
    June 2 · 28 min

    Permission To Prompt: AI’s Path From Experimentation to Scale

    AI is no longer a future technology. It is already changing how work gets done, how companies make decisions and how economies compete. This special edition of Disruptors was recorded at the Creative Destruction Lab’s Super Session during Toronto Tech Week. Host John Stackhouse is joined by Fabien Curto Millet, Chief Economist at Google and Sonia Sennik, CEO of Creative Destruction Lab, to explore AI adoption, productivity, jobs and Canada's competitiveness. Fabien brings a global view of AI a

  • S10 · E10
    May 26 · 26 min

    The Canadian Unicorn Who Stayed

    Canada has a scaleup problem. We create entrepreneurs, but too many of them feel they need to leave to build world-class companies. Fred Lalonde is one of the exceptions. He is the founder and CEO of Hopper, the Canadian travel-tech company that used data, prediction and fintech to help travellers book with more confidence. Now Lalonde is bringing that same ambition to Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon removal company. In this episode of Disruptors, recorded in front of a live audience, John Stackh

  • S10 · E9
    May 12 · 35 min

    From MLB to Metallica: The Canadian Company redefining live events

    In this episode, John Stackhouse visits Ross on the outskirts of Ottawa to talk with CEO David Ross about how the company grew from a small Canadian manufacturer into a global live-production infrastructure player. They discuss why the economics of live events changed so dramatically, how cheaper and more powerful screens transformed stadiums and concerts into multimedia platforms, and how Ross helps turn live data into visual storytelling through graphics, overlays, motion systems and productio

  • S10 · E8
    April 28 · 25 min

    Street Smarts: The Waterloo company tackling global gridlock

    Congestion isn’t just annoying, it's an economic drag. In this episode of Disruptors, John Stackhouse speaks with Kurtis McBride, co-founder of Miovision, about how a Waterloo-built company turned intersection data into a real-time operating layer for cities and how that platform is scaling globally. McBride explains how Miovision began with a simple insight from manual traffic counts, then evolved into a digital twin approach that helps cities reduce congestion, improve safety, support transit

  • S10 · E7
    April 14 · 34 min

    AI's power, pitfalls, and potential

    We’re all using AI more, but how many of us actually trust it? AI is now used by more than a billion people worldwide, but trust in these systems is far from settled. In this episode of Disruptors, John Stackhouse speaks with Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner, founder of Mila, and Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero, about whether AI is getting safer or more dangerous as it becomes more powerful, more agentic, and more embedded in work, public systems, and everyday life. They explo

  • April 7 · 30 min

    REBOOT: Building Canada: A new generation takes charge.

    As Disruptors: The Canada Project earns a Webby Award nomination, we’re re-releasing the season finale, “Building Canada: A new generation takes charge.” How does Canada actually build faster, smarter and at greater scale? In this episode, John Stackhouse speaks with Daniel Debow and Lucy Hargreaves of Build Canada about what it will take for Canada to move from big ideas to real execution. After a season exploring defence tech in Newfoundland, sovereign launch capacity in Atlantic Canada,

  • S10 · E6
    March 24 · 28 min

    Trust at Scale: Lessons from Wikipedia

    Trust at Scale: Lessons from Wikipedia Wikipedia is one of the internet’s most-used public resources, but what makes people trust it in an era shaped by AI, misinformation and institutional decline? On this episode of Disruptors, John Stackhouse speaks with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales about how Wikipedia built trust, why neutrality still matters, and what generative AI gets wrong. They discuss community governance, social media, local journalism, online accountability, young people’s infor

  • S10 · E5
    March 10 · 31 min

    Tech Wins Gold: How Canada Can Rebuild Its Olympic Pipeline

    Canada’s Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics delivered unforgettable moments — and also a hard signal: podium success is increasingly won upstream, through systems, sport science, and technology. In a world where competitors treat sport science as infrastructure, Canada is trying to win with a thinner pipeline and a funding model that can push costs onto athletes. That’s not just unfair — it’s strategically risky. In our latest Disruptors episode, host John Stackhouse sits down with David Shoe

  • S10 · E4
    February 24 · 22 min

    Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: The Quantum Era's Encryption Challenge

    Quantum computing is accelerating — and putting today’s encryption on a clock. John Stackhouse goes inside Xanadu’s Toronto lab with Christian Weedbrook to meet Aurora, a networked quantum computer built to push scale in the right direction and speaks with Photonic’s Dr. Stephanie Simmons about “harvest now, decrypt later,” fault-tolerant quantum, and why every organization needs a post-quantum cryptography (PQC) transition plan. It’s not all doom and gloom. Simmons also lays out what quantum c

  • S10 · E3
    February 11 · 28 min

    The $15m Cliff: Keeping Canadian Agri-Food Startups Scaling at Home

    Canada is exporting too much of its agri-food upside—IP, talent, and value-add—because growth-stage financing doesn’t fit the sector. From Ottawa, John Stackhouse speaks with RBC’s Lisa Ashton to unpack Seeding Scale—RBC’s new report on Canada’s agri-food growth-capital gap. Joined by Vive Crop CEO Darren Anderson and Emmertech Managing Partner Kyle Scott, they break down why agri-food is “different money,” why companies hit a wall around the $15M mark, and the first moves to keep more Canadian

  • S10 · E2
    January 27 · 23 min

    Risk as Signal: A Canadian Playbook

    Fresh from Davos, John Stackhouse shares field notes on how the world’s economy is reorganizing — and what that means for Canadians. He is joined by Gerald Butts, Vice Chairman and Senior Advisor at Eurasia Group, to unpack the new RBC–Eurasia Canada risk outlook: what matter most, how to separate signal from noise, and the practical playbook for where to invest, what to protect, and how to diversify.

Showing 1–20 of 22 episodes