Scott Stevenson is a former federal government senior Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM). Since the autumn of 2020 he has been an independent consultant, providing leadership and advisory services to public and private sector clients. His areas of expertise include strategic leadership, public procurement, real property management and relations with Indigenous peoples. He has extensive experience in institutional and policy leadership in national security and defence.
Since 2021, he is a Senior Mentor for the National Security Programme, on contract at the Canadian Forces College. He also serves as a volunteer on two not-for-profit boards, as the Chair of Habitat for Humanity Greater Ottawa, and as a director with the Royal Military Colleges of Canada Alumni Association, where he chairs the advocacy and promotion committee.
His public service experience includes 13 years in senior executive roles managing federal real property. From 2007-13, as ADM Infrastructure and Environment, he was responsible for the Department of National Defence’s (DND) real property portfolio, a complex portfolio of over 20,000 buildings and 13,000 works assets with a replacement value of $26B. His responsibilities included leading the strategic disposition of high value surplus properties to Canada Lands Company CLC Limited (CLC), which entailed negotiation of complex agreements for partnerships with First Nations. He provided functional advice supporting Treasury Board approval of the $3B Public-Private-Partnership project for Long-term Accommodations for the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). He co-led, with Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), the successful negotiation of the former Camp Ipperwash Final Settlement Agreement. He led the conception, planning and launch of the transformation of DND’s real property business from an outdated decentralized model to a modern corporate real estate model with a single national portfolio manager, through the establishment of the Real Property Operations Group as a formation in the Canadian Armed Forces.
From 2013-15 he was Senior ADM Regional Operations at INAC, leading a sector responsible for more than $1.1B annually in Community Infrastructure programming for on-reserve housing, water, wastewater, roads, schools, and other asset classes. He was also responsible for leading the department’s seven regional offices, which managed $5.5 B annually in transfer payments for other socio-economic programs.
In 2015-16, he completed an action research project on leadership and organizational transformation in partnership with the Canada School of Public Service, while serving as a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. From 2106-17 he took on a series of enterprise level senior advisory roles, focused on leading transformational government-wide approaches to managing special purpose real property portfolios for national security and science. He finished his public service career with a three-year interchange at CLC as Visiting ADM Public Services and Procurement Canada – CLC
Collaboration, leading projects to optimize value of under-utilized assets, such as the Tunney’s Pasture campus.
He joined the public service in 1999 as an economist at the Department of Finance Canada. In 2001, he moved to DND as Director Cabinet Liaison in the ADM Policy Group. From 2005-07 he was Director General Policy Coordination at DND, with responsibility for Cabinet Liaison, Parliamentary Affairs and Public Policy, including relations with the defence academic sector.
Prior to joining the Public Service, he was an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, serving in the infantry in the Royal Canadian Regiment, and as an intelligence officer. He has a Master of Public Administration from the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, ON (1999) with a specialization in defence management, and a Bachelor of Arts in Military and Strategic Studies from Royal Roads Military College, Victoria, BC (1988).
