OTTAWA — A lifetime of banking experience might not be an obvious qualification to lead the federal agency tasked with rearming Canada and building its defence industries into powerhouses, but RBC executive Doug Guzman has skills the government needs, his new boss says.

“Doug brings 30 years of private-sector experience in finance and in financing big programs,” Stephen Fuhr, the secretary of state for defence procurement, told The Logic in an interview after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Guzman’s appointment as chief executive of the brand-new Defence Investment Agency.

The government has military and procurement experts. It is not laden with private-sector investment experience. Fuhr, the Liberal MP for Kelowna, B.C., is a former air force and private-sector pilot and was CEO of an aerospace technology company—giving him some broad experience, but not in every area of the defence sector.

“This isn’t just about Doug or me or anybody else. This is about how strong is our team, and do we have the requisite skill sets to deliver on this massive ambition of ours?” Fuhr said.

Again, Carney has reached outside the government for someone to lead a new body to attack a national problem he was elected to solve. In this case, he dug deeper into his own Rolodex than he had to to find former energy executive Dawn Farrell to run the new major-projects office, or former Toronto city councillor Ana Bailão for Build Canada Homes.

The agency Guzman will lead is meant not only to speed up multibillion-dollar purchases of weapons and vehicles, but to “help Canadian firms scale up, develop cutting-edge capabilities and compete globally,” according to Carney’s announcement. 

That’s why it’s called the Defence Investment Agency, Fuhr emphasized. Canada spends about 75 cents of every defence procurement dollar on American products, he said in a Thursday press scrum on Parliament Hill talking about the agency, and the government wants to push that down—to buy Canadian where it’s possible, from other countries if it isn’t, and from the United States if there’s no other choice.

Using Canadian money to promote Canadian industry amid major economic turmoil only makes sense, he told The Logic. “Doug will bring, in my opinion, excellent perspective on how we can do that.”

Guzman himself did not respond to The Logic’s request to talk about the job or his qualifications.

David Perry, CEO of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a specialist in defence procurement, said Guzman’s apparent lack of history in the field (“I don’t know him from a hole in the ground,” said Perry) means he’ll have to get up to speed quickly, but applying fresh eyes to a long-standing problem could be valuable.

Besides, nearly anybody taking on Guzman’s new job would have limitations.

“If you had selected an existing bureaucrat, very few of them—not none, but very few of them—have private-sector backgrounds,” Perry said. “If you had somebody that only had defence industry experience coming into that position, they would have to learn how the government side of the equation works. And you need both sides of those equations to be effective.”

Even a veteran of the defence sector—someone with a background at a contractor like MDA, Lockheed Martin or Irving—would know only part of a sprawling industry, Perry said.

Although Guzman lives in Toronto, he was raised in Ottawa, the son of two doctors—his mother Carole was an internist who was president of both the Ontario and Canadian medical associations; his father Antonio was a neurologist and early leader in dementia care. Their other son Andrew is a law professor and senior vice-president for academic affairs at the University of Southern California.

Doug Guzman’s banking credentials are sterling. He was named deputy chair of RBC last year after nearly nine years in charge of its wealth management and insurance businesses. Before that, he was head of RBC’s global investment banking work.

“He’s very smart, he’s very capable,” said Gordon Nixon, a former chief executive at RBC who was Guzman’s boss earlier in his career. “He’s very sensible and pragmatic, with a very high degree of integrity around process.”

Guzman is also a Mark Carney fan. The two both worked at Goldman Sachs as younger men (their careers overlapped at the finance giant from 1996 to 2003), and Guzman has sung the now-prime minister’s praises in media profiles dating back to 2009.

More recently, Guzman co-chaired a committee at Western University’s Ivey Business School (where he earned a business degree in the 1980s before getting an MBA at Harvard) that named Carney as Ivey’s business leader of the year in 2024. The dean at Ivey at the time was Sharon Hodgson—sister of Tim Hodgson, whom Carney recruited into politics and named natural resources minister after this year’s election.

“We are fortunate to have leaders like Mark, who have personal and passionate interest in leading efforts to find the solutions to Canada’s, and indeed the world’s, most complex challenges,” Guzman said in a statement at the time.

He’s put money where his mouth is, donating $1,750 to Carney’s campaign for the Liberal leadership, according to Elections Canada records. Guzman also gave $1,121.57 to the Liberals’ riding association in Toronto Centre in 2014, the constituency Bill Morneau would win for the party the following year.

Carney’s office did not respond by deadline to questions about the pre-politics relationships between him and Guzman—and Tim Hodgson, for that matter, another former Goldman Sachs man.

In his RBC jobs, in wealth management and as deputy chair, some of Guzman’s work has been catering to RBC’s most important accounts. As the bank put it in a now-deleted biography, he provided “senior RBC coverage to select individual, family, corporate, institutional and government clients.”

Were it not his job to make those key customers feel the bank’s love, Guzman might have been one of them. A public filing from RBC said the bank paid Guzman more than $7.5 million in 2023 and $9.2 million in 2024, after a $1.35-million bonus “in recognition of his role serving ultra-high net worth clients and in ensuring a successful transition of the wealth management business to new leaders” upon his promotion.

Guzman owned nearly $46 million in RBC shares, the same document disclosed.

He will make much less from the government, though considerably more than the “dollar-a-year men” who left corporate Canada to oversee military production during the Second World War. Fuhr said Guzman will be paid like a deputy minister, though Fuhr didn’t know the details—somewhere between $248,400 and $420,600 before performance bonuses, according to current salary scales.

Guzman’s family home in Toronto’s Lawrence Park neighbourhood has been the site of at least one protest: in 2022, opponents of the Coastal Gas Link pipeline project accused RBC of funding genocide against the Wet’suwet’en and set up a mock construction site blocking the driveway. Now that he’s entering the weapons business, he might need to get used to such confrontations.

Public property records don’t reveal what the property cost; the last transaction on file was in 2015, when Guzman’s wife, Sheila Brown, transferred ownership of the property to a family company, GB Gator Investments, for $2. The records indicate that Brown bought the home in 2005, but not how much she paid.

Besides GB Gator, Guzman and Brown are listed as directors of their own charitable foundation, which last year alone distributed tens of thousands of dollars to Western University, Toronto hospitals, the Shaw Festival, Young People’s Theatre and other causes; the Shaw Festival credits Guzman and Brown with donating more than $250,000 over the years. The pair was even photographed at the Tony Awards for New York theatre in 2023.

At the Defence Investment Agency, part of Guzman’s responsibility will be integrating public servants pulled from the departments of defence, industry and public services and procurement into an efficient machine. He is not yet on the job, Fuhr said, and won’t be for a little while yet: “He has to dismount his current obligations, and he’s doing that as quickly as he can.”