New Canada Council Member from Infrastructure Ontario

We are pleased to welcome on board John Traianopoulos, Senior Vice President, Transaction Structuring, Infrastructure Ontario, as a Canada Council Member:

We asked John a few questions to get to know him a bit better:

• If you could personally change or influence one thing within infrastructure and/or energy, what would it be?

I would like to help make the delivery on infrastructure more efficient. For a host of reasons, it takes projects a long time to develop and ultimately deliver. I would like to learn if there are innovative approaches from around the world to help us close the infrastructure gap as quickly and efficiently as possible.

• Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to yourself at the start of your career?

I would advise my younger self to be a little more open minded and patient.  Working in infrastructure has taught me that there are many different perspectives and opinions on issues.  Just having an appreciation that there might not be one right way to do something, or that there may be some information that I do not possess that is influencing a specific decision making process goes a long way.

• What do you hope to bring to the Canada Council?

I hope I can share some real life project and program experience that I have gained while working over 17 years at Infrastructure Ontario.  From being involved on so many projects, I have the benefit of having worked through several issues at both the ground level and at a higher/more strategic level. It would be great to be able to share some public entity perspective on how we think of things so that the relationships between public and private entities can continue to develop.