About
Over his career, David has served on 39 different boards of directors in Canada, America, Mexico, Australia and England, and been chairman of nine public companies. Currently, he chairs two startup companies and runs governance courses for incubators in Canada.
David was the founding Managing Director of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance (2003-2008), an organization that today represents 50 institutional investors with ~C$3 trillion of assets under management. While there, David created and still oversees, the Canadian Directors’ Education Program a rigorous 12-day series of classes that has now graduated over 6,000 senior Canadian entrepreneurs, directors and family office members.
David was President of Weston Foods, a multi-billion sales company in food processing from 1984 until 1994. He then took control and became CEO of a publicly traded closed-end investment trust. He began teaching at the University of Toronto as a Professor of Strategy in 1998. Today he directs the Johnston Centre for Corporate Governance Innovation at the University.
As an advisor on corporate governance, he has worked in many jurisdictions from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia where he developed and then led Aramco’s training for their Joint Venture directors. He has worked extensively for the Australian Institute of Corporate Directors and the Board Development Institute of Dubai. As a member of the Public Sector Advisory Group of the IMF, he has facilitated conferences on corporate governance all over Europe. He now sits on the Advisory Boards of both ecoDa and Hawkamah.
In 2013 he was inducted into the Order of Canada (the C.M. above) the nation’s highest civilian honor and was earlier awarded the Queen’s Jubilee medal. In 1994, he was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (the O.B.E. above) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for his services to Papua New Guinea. On June 26, 2018 he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) a grouping of global asset managers with AUMs ~$33 trillion.
David was educated at the University of Toronto and Queens’ College, Cambridge, in mathematical economics.
David speaks English, Nuigini Pidgin and some Swahili.