2025 Testimonial Dinner Awards — Read all the speeches
Anil Arora
Former chief statistician at Statistics Canada
“Good data and evidence must not be an afterthought but a foundational piece of good governance and policymaking. After all, would you drive a sports car without a dashboard and rely on instinct, anecdotes or opinions? Sure, looks cool, until you crash. Bad data leads to bad policy. Good data builds trust. And goodness knows we could all use a little more of that these days. Good data won’t solve everything. But I can promise you this: We can’t do much good without it. An effective policymaker must then equally be a competent and responsible data steward.”
Elizabeth Dowdeswell
Longest-serving lieutenant-governor of Ontario
“Our way of life has been threatened before. Our unity has been shaken before. Perhaps the real danger in this moment may be the illusion that these problems can be solved only from the top down, only from distance. If I’ve learned anything from my journey in the last decade particularly, it’s that real solutions always depend on proximity. On being close enough to listen with your own ears, to see with your eyes, not just the scale of the problem, but the shared values and the shape of the solution.”
Marc-André Blanchard
Executive Vice-President of CDPQ Global and former diplomat
“They say that trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. And in recent years, here at home and around the world, we’ve watched too many of those buckets spill over. There is no shortcut to trust. There is only the steady, honest, often uncelebrated, work of listening, of engaging with people who disagree with us, not thinking we know better, of standing in someone else’s shoes, of doing the right thing and the right thing is often not theoretical perfection, but a good old Canadian compromise, even when it’s hard. Drip by drip. Act by act.”
Alfred Burgesson
Founder and CEO of Tribe Network, winner of the 2025 Emerging Leader Award
“My advice to every young person watching this is quite simple. To find your tribe in today’s world, you need to know who you are. And you should ask yourself these questions. What am I good at? What do I love? What does the world need more of? And how can I earn a living doing what matters? Answering these questions honestly for yourself will give you some clarity in a very loud and noisy world. That’s how you’ll find your purpose. And eventually, that’s how we’ll find our tribe.”
Chief Crystal Smith
Leader of the Haisla Nation
Read Chief Crystal’s full speech
“When I hear about the current election platforms and hear others speak about the need to build a national energy program, while I believe it is the right thing to do, Indigenous people must be included in the national discussions about our energy future. To do so, we need business leaders, government, advocacy groups like the PPF and others to come together to recognize the incredible value of partnering with Indigenous communities as owners.”
Steve Paikin
Longtime host of The Agenda on TVO, winner of the 2025 Hyman Solomon Award for public interest journalism
“I watched a lot of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson when I was a kid, and the words he signed off with the year I started at TVO really resonated with me today. He said I found something I always wanted to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it, and that’s all I feel, too.”
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