The Canadian academic most worth watching right now: ‘The plan was just to have a positive impact’

The Waterloo region is known worldwide for one reason: it builds world-class tech companies and, with good cause, is often called Canada’s Silicon Valley.

Behind the success stories like BlackBerry, OpenText and Arctic Wolf, there’s a powerful ecosystem at play: Perimeter Institute, the deep-science and big-idea pillar; Communitech, the practical, membership-driven startup hub; and Velocity, the University of Waterloo’s engine room of startup culture, turning researchers and students into builders.

The region has surprisingly little political muscle at the cabinet tables. Aside from MPP Mike Harris Jr. in Kitchener-Conestoga, there are no federal or provincial ministers rooted here. Still, it’s clearly on Ottawa’s radar, as is the man freshly in charge of the region’s, and potentially one of the nation’s, most important institutions: the University of Waterloo.

Earlier this month, new U of W president Bill Rosehart joined a roundtable hosted by federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly at the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo, where she met with local dual-use tech companies to discuss innovation, defence capabilities, and supporting Canadian SMEs in the region.

I spoke to Rosehart to understand how this new president plans to ensure Waterloo plays its full part in rebuilding the region and the country. Ten days into the job, Bill Rosehart leans into the camera wearing a dark suit jacket and open-collared blue shirt, looking every bit the polished engineering dean turned university CEO. He speaks in complete, thoughtful sentences. No woke rambling. No ivory tower bafflegab.

He arrives in the job at a crucial time. Canada needs more Waterloo. The country is hungry for entrepreneurs and for success, and if you listen to people like Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, a harsh critic of the policy factors that have led to national stagnation, it’s no longer built that way.

Rosehart is ambitious, and not just for Waterloo: “I want to see the whole country grow,” he tells me.

Rosehart, 53, is the first alum to hold the presidency at the University of Waterloo. Born in Thunder Bay where his father was president of Lakehead University, he later watched his dad lead Wilfrid Laurier, just across the street from Waterloo. Now the son has come full circle.

It’s a great homecoming story, and there’s no question he’s qualified. Rosehart is a three-time University of Waterloo graduate: BASc in electrical engineering in 1996, MASc in 1997, and PhD in 2001. From there, he spent 23 years at the University of Calgary, rising from engineering professor to department head to dean. The past two years, he served as provost and vice-president academic at the University of Guelph.

“I wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me when I graduated,” he says with a smile. “This was never the plan. The plan was just to have a positive impact in everything I did and really put my heart into it.”

That sounds sentimental until you think about the challenges he’s walking into. A serious budget deficit. Staff cuts over the past two years. The lingering trauma from the 2023 campus stabbing. And that’s before you get to the impacts of federal international student caps, Ontario’s shift to performance-based funding for post-secondaries, and the overall strain on the provincial and national economies triggered by a trade war with America.

Full disclosure: I grew up on a farm south of Kitchener-Waterloo, did my undergrad at Wilfrid Laurier literally just across the street from Waterloo, and was Rosehart’s MLA in the Alberta Legislature when he was appointed dean in Calgary. I’ve seen firsthand how cost-cutting and funding pressures play out in post-secondary education. That background makes me particularly curious about how this homecoming president plans to navigate the same headwinds here.

Rosehart knows the stakes. He says he’s focused on “amplifying what we’re doing in the entrepreneurship and innovation transfer and startup space…making it a whole lot easier for our faculties to take their research and get it into practice and generate economic activity from their work.” It’s what he feels the community wants the university to do.

That mindset shines through when he talks about Waterloo’s secret weapon — its co-op program, its relationship with the outside world beyond the ivory tower. From day one, the university bet on a model that forces deep integration with the real world. For Rosehart, co-op is the perfect embodiment of his leadership style: it supports the success of students by giving them real problems to solve, supports companies by bringing fresh talent and ideas, and supports the university by keeping it grounded in the economy it serves.

“AI is changing everything,” he acknowledges, but instead of wringing hands over AI-generated student essays and cheating, Rosehart sees opportunity. Waterloo is already placing co-op students inside local companies to help them rethink their operations with “fresh eyes and very AI-ready eyes.” The students get real problems. The companies get innovation help. The university stays relevant. It’s classic Waterloo: experiential learning that forces the institution to stay connected to the real economy.

He leans forward when talking about the bigger picture. “You can’t do community building or nation building if you’re not connected into the community.” He repeats once more with emphasis. When I push him on what nation-building actually looks like from a university president’s office in Waterloo, he doesn’t dodge.

“There are a lot of challenges in the world. We need to step up as a nation and help ourselves create these opportunities to support our true prosperity.”

It’s the kind of language that could easily slide into politician-speak, but coming from an electrical engineer whose PhD was on power systems, it carries a certain grounded credibility (pun intended).

His research into electrical energy systems, integration of renewables, and energy storage is highly topical. Yet he assures me he’s never been tempted to exit academia for the private sector. “I love it here,” he says, and it looks like he does. “I love supporting the students.”

That same systems-thinking mindset applies to one of the region’s biggest upcoming projects: the new regional hospital planned for Waterloo’s North Campus. The previous administration got the photo-op with Premier Doug Ford. Rosehart gets the harder part: turning the project into something more than bricks and mortar.

“We’re not running a hospital. We’re not training medical students,” he clarifies. “Our focus is going to be innovation — from technology to policy to overall healthy community approaches.” He sees the university’s role as figuring out how to adopt new tools, design better systems, and rethink care delivery.

Partnership-heavy, interdisciplinary, outward-facing. Exactly what you’d hope from Canada’s most entrepreneurial university.

Still, there’s an undeniable tension. Rosehart talks a strong game about the Velocity startups, the Perimeter and Communitech connections, the tech ecosystem. But that story can’t happen inside the institution. It has to be lived in the community. It’s about real relationships.

Rosehart has advantages — he’s an alum with family roots in the region — and he’s also highly credible on his own merits. But the clock is already ticking. He has reached out to David Johnston (the former Waterloo president who went on to become Canada’s governor general) and Elizabeth Cannon (former University of Calgary president) for advice. Cannon, in particular, knows him well: she chose him as dean of the Schulich School of Engineering and built a strong reputation for partnering with the private sector and attracting significant industry investment. Both told him the same thing: get out of the building.

In our conversation, on day 10 in the new job, Rosehart sounds like he understands what’s required. The next few years will be challenging as he steers the university through a changing higher-education landscape and economic tumult in the country. The homecoming story is compelling. Now comes the harder part: making it matter.