Stewart Muir has spent more than a decade trying to convince the rest of the country that the resource economy belongs at the centre of the national conversation. Now he’s finally given a seat in one of the rooms where that conversation gets set.
Muir, the Vancouver-based president and CEO of Resource Works Society, is one of nine members of the Empire Club of Canada’s inaugural CEO Advisory Council. The club announced the 2026-2027 roster this week.
A think tank, not a board
The Empire Club describes the council as a strategic think tank. Members will work alongside chief executive Kent Emerson as the club plans its next phase of growth.
The mandate is short. There is no formal board authority, just the chance to push back on programming and strategy.
For an organization whose real power is deciding who gets the podium and what ends up in the permanent record, that is not nothing.
The company he’s keeping
The rest of the roster is deliberately mixed: Lisa Raitt, vice chair at CIBC Capital Markets and a former federal cabinet minister; Dr. Andrew Furey, vice chair at National Bank of Canada and former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador; David Coletto, founder of Abacus Data; Fiona Blondin, senior vice president at Sterling Ridge Power Technologies; Lisa Lambert of the quantum computing firm IonQ; James Villeneuve, former Canadian consul general in Los Angeles, now advising Fasken; Chris Benedetti of Sussex Strategy Group; and Vass Bednar of Shield.
There are representatives from banking, polling, quantum computing, power development, diplomacy, and public affairs. Resources is the one that usually has to fight for oxygen in these rooms. The club at least noticed.
Why the podium matters
The Empire Club started in 1903, born out of Canadian political unrest. Since then, it’s hosted roughly 3,500 speakers.
The list is genuinely remarkable: Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, The Dalai Lama, Bill Gates, Roberta Bondar.
What makes the club unusual is the record-keeping. Every speech delivered at the podium is chronicled and archived. For years the club mailed a printed yearbook, the Red Book, to universities, libraries and consulates free of charge.
It’s digitized now and open to anyone, which means the things said on that stage still travel further than the evening news cycle.
What it means west of Bay Street
What matters from this side of the country is simpler.
The Empire Club sits in Toronto. Its audience skews toward the country’s financial and political core. The people who make decisions about Canadian capital tend to be in that room.
The communities Resource Works writes about are usually somewhere else: Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Fort St. John, Trail. Places where a project approval decides whether the local school keeps its enrolment and whether the hardware store stays open another year.
Those two worlds don’t always talk to each other well. Distance is part of it. So is a persistent habit of treating resource work as Canada’s past rather than its present.
An advisory seat won’t fix that on its own. But it puts a Western voice in a room where the national agenda gets drafted, and that’s a start.
The conversation about Canada’s economic future is happening in Toronto boardrooms. It’s also happening in mill towns and port terminals and band offices. Getting those conversations into the same room is the whole point.
That work is now underway.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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