The Power List 2023

Ranking the 100 Canadians Shaping the Country in 2023

Rachel Heinrichs, Emily Landau, Jason McBride, Philip Preville, Mark Pupo, Courtney Shea, Mathew Silver, Katie Underwood and H.G. Watson

March 8, 2023

After three pandemic-plagued years, Canadians have emerged, squinting and disoriented, into a new world order. While we were baking sourdough in lockdown, artificial intelligence evolved from the stuff of movie magic into big business. Basketball and soccer closed in on hockey to join the ranks of Canada’s national games. We finally began taking climate change seriously, churning out electric vehicles by the thousands and building skyscrapers out of renewable timber. And the coolest place to film a prestige TV show was suddenly...Alberta?

Commanding this weird, cool, occasionally scary new reality is a cohort of Canadians whose ideas and inventions are forging new industries and reinventing old ones. We’ve selected the top 10 changemakers in 10 categories. There’s Kris Collins, a former hairdresser who entertains some 48 million Gen Zers with her bite-sized TikTok sketches. Mindy Wight and Khelsilem of the Squamish Nation are in charge of a revolutionary $3-billion housing development in Vancouver. And tech whiz Raquel Urtasun is teaching cars how to drive themselves. Some of the people on our list are already household names. The rest are about to be.

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Sports Stars

Political Backroomers

AI Trailblazers

Real Estate Reformers

Health Care Innovators

Gaming Tycoons

Food Titans

Hollywood North Stars

TikTok Influencers

EV Entrepeneurs

SPORTS STARS

1. SCOTTIE BARNES
NBA

The Raptors’ budding superstar is ushering in a new era of Toronto basketball

Click here to find out why Barnes tops the list

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2. Alphonso Davies

For giving Canada a moment of global soccer glory

3. Felix Auger-Aliassime

For being a clay-court powerhouse

4. Christine Sinclair & Diana Matheson

For launching a league of their own

5. Peter Montopoli

He’s bringing the World Cup to Canada

6. Marie-Philip Poulin

For keeping Canada on top of the hockey podium

7. Masai Ujiri

For making Toronto a true basketball town

8. Leylah Fernandez

She’s turning her on-court talents into off-court riches

9. John Herdman

For putting Canadian soccer on a world stage

10. Hayley Wickenheiser

She’s pushing Canada’s national game into the future

POLITICAL BACKROOMERS

Campaigns are no longer about persuading swing voters to like you. They are about motivating your supporters to turn out.

Click here to find out why Byrne tops the list

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2. Katie Telford

For keeping Trudeau on track— and in office

3. Leslie Church

She’s the deputy’s deputy

4. Jeff Ballingall

For memeing his way to the top

5. Anne McGrath

For pulling off the deal of the decade

6. Martin Koskinen

He’s the CAQ’s smooth secret weapon

7. Nick Kouvalis

He’s the puppet master behind Ontario’s elections

8. Matt Smith

He’s preparing B.C.’s premier for the fight of his life

9. Steve Outhouse

For winning Alberta’s heartland

10. John Brodhead

For pushing Trudeau’s agenda ahead

AI TRAILBLAZERS

IVAN ZHANG, AIDAN GOMEZ & NICK FROSST
Founders, Cohere

Click here to find out why Zhang, Gomez and Frosst top the list

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2. Jamie King

For making it tougher to pull off financial crimes

3. Geoffrey Hinton & Yoshua Bengio

For helping make Canada a global hub for AI research

4. Christian Weedbrook

He’s bringing quantum computing to the masses

5. Raquel Urtasun

She’s training real vehicles in a virtual world

6. Geordie Rose

He’s getting robots to do our dirty work

7. Pablo Molina & Faizan Sheikh

They’re putting robots to work in a mall near you

8. Julien Billot

For funding an AI-powered supply chain

9. Joelle Pineau

She’s preparing AI for the messy ambiguity of real life

10. Jordan Jacobs

He's funding the AI projects of the future

REAL ESTATE REFORMERS

Khelsilem and Wight, young and ambitious, are poised to endow the Squamish people with unprecedented wealth and influence

Click here to find out why Wight and Khelsilem top the list

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2. Stephen Sidwell

He’s building an empire (from a low-carbon concrete dupe)

3. Robert Niven

His carbon-capture company has impressed Bezos and Gates

4. Cecilia Williams

For developing Canada’s urban epicentres

5. Alan Greenberg

He’s funding real estate’s green future

6. Michael Cooper

For reviving Toronto’s smart-city dreams

7. Carol Phillips

For imagining bigger, better Canadian buildings

8. Courtney Cooper

She’s Canadian proptech’s prime mover

9. Ian Arthur

For printing solutions to the housing crisis

10. Oliver Lang

He’s speeding up Canada’s construction

HEALTH CARE INNOVATORS

Lafontaine’s ability to consider the greater whole was his biggest asset when he assumed the CMA’s top job

Click here to find out why Lafontaine tops the list

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2. Gabor Maté

For mainstreaming the notion that there’s no such thing as normal

3. Michael Dingle

For bringing virtual care to millions of workers

4. Tomi Poutanen

He’s putting AI to work in our ERs

5. Leigh Chapman

For stopping the mass exodus of nurses

6. Timothy Caulfield

He’s treating misinformation like the pandemic it is

7. Mona Gupta

For forging the future of MAID

8. John Sinclair

For working to lower lengthy surgical wait times

9. Patricia Gauthier

For bringing the vax back home

10. Alan Forster

For helping to build the hospital of the future in Canada’s capital

GAMING TYCOONS

Haven Studios’ work on that secret Sony multiplayer title has become a huge talent draw

Click here to find out why Raymond top the list

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2. Chris Overholt

He’s making gaming enthusiasts out of Canada’s irl sports fans

3. Rémi Racine

He’s the biggest name in indie gaming

4. Christophe Derennes

For uploading diversity to the gamersphere

5. Imane Anys

She’s a Canadian Twitch trailblazer

6. Shyang Kong

For taking the Halo franchise to new heights

7. Henri-Charles Machalani

For giving big bonuses to Canada’s loyal gamers

8. Nour Polloni

For hearing the Call of Duty. . . call of duty

9. Peter Kieltyka

He’s made blockchain gaming bankable

10. Sasha Hostyn

She’s StarCraft II’s winnigest woman

HOLLYWOOD NORTH STARS

With his unique ability to meld mass appeal and uncompromising artistry, Villeneuve has the best chance of pulling it off

Click here to find out why Villeneuve tops the list

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2. The Weeknd

The Scarborough singer has gone from stadium shows to HBO

3. Sarah Polley

She’s making prestige feminist films—and the Oscars are taking note

4. Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann

They turned Calgary and Edmonton into blockbuster TV towns

5. Domee Shi

For infiltrating Pixar’s boys’ club

6. Brendan Fraser

He’s back—and standing by his values

7. Michael Hackman

He’s making space for movie magic

8. Sharon Taylor

She’s working on family-friendly fun for everyone

9. Iman Vellani

For superheroically breaking barriers on television

10. Tantoo Cardinal

She’s having a cinematic renaissance

FOOD TITANS

While Canadians struggled to pay their weekly grocery bills, Weston has received heat for his astronomical wealth

On to the list

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2. Janet Zuccarini

This Toronto-born restaurateur Is a Hollywood phenomenon

3. Riad Nasr

For bringing culinary star power back to Midtown Manhattan

4. Michael Medline

He’s bringing Farm Boys to every street

5. Mohammed Ashour

For his bug-first approach to solving world hunger

6. Kirstin Beardsley

For tackling food insecurity at the root

7. Ted Fleming

For taking the booze out of craft beer

8. Barry Murchie

For future-proofing our country’s greens

9. Jessica Rosval

She’s cooking world-class Italian cuisine

10. Isha Datar

For paving the way to lab-grown meat

EV ENTREPRENEURS

The feds are pumping billions into making Canada a nation of EV drivers. Marissa West is making it happen on an industrial scale.

Click here to find out why West tops the list

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2. Swamy Kotagiri

He’s leading an old-school company into an electric future

3. Guy Belleau

For spearheading a lithium empire

4. John Chen

For rescuing an iconic Canadian company

5. William Trainer

For electrifying dirty diesel workhorses

6. Fraser Atkinson

He’s making commercial transport clean and green

7. Chris Doornbos

For digging up Alberta’s next big resource

8. Cara Clairman

She’s spreading the EV gospel far and wide

9. Marc Bédard

For turning yellow school buses into green machines

10. Mark Ang

For cleaning up the shipping business

TIKTOK INFLUENCERS

To a large corner of the internet, Collins is Cameron Diaz meets Carol Burnett meets Amy Schumer

Click here to find out why Collins tops the list

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2. Josh Richards

This Ontario star is breaking into Hollywood—and big business

3. Celina Myers

For bone-chilling thrills and adventures in sleepwalking

4. Luke Davidson

He’s the boy next door turned comedy star

5. Linda Dong

For her bold skits and unfiltered content

6. Tate McRae

Her TikTok breakup ballads get billions of listens on Spotify

7. The Bee Family

They’re an ABC sitcom come to life

8. Che Durena

For bringing stand-up to our phones

9. Jet Bent-Lee

For making gourmet food fun

10. James Jones

For shedding light on Indigenous culture through dance