Karen Restoule

Vice President; Senior Fellow, Crestview Strategy; Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Karen is a bilingual strategist and communications specialist. She is an expert at fostering collaboration among parties by identifying common goals and objectives to bring divergent views together to develop partnerships and shared success. She offers clients expertise in organisational governance, transformational leadership, change management, policy development, and stakeholder engagement.

Throughout her two-decade long career Karen has built a reputation for her mastery of crisis management, her ability to identify challenges and how to leverage opportunities to deliver client objectives.

Prior to joining Crestview Strategy, Karen led an environmental consulting firm working with Indigenous communities towards self-determination, building on a previous role supporting First Nations leadership at Chiefs of Ontario where she played a pivotal role advancing innovative and strategic policy solutions to legacy challenges. She also led the modernisation of Ontario’s administrative justice system at Tribunals Ontario, including key transformations at the Licence Appeal Tribunal, Ontario Parole Board, Human Rights Tribunal Ontario, and most recently the Landlord and Tenant Board.

Karen is committed to advancing projects to create a brighter economic future for the country. In 2016, she co-founded BOLD Realities, leading initiatives to advance economic reconciliation. In 2018, they partnered with TakingITGlobal to launch www.whose.land, a web-based mobile app that provides users with information about Indigenous territories.

A graduate of the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa’s French Common Law Program, Karen was the youngest and most recent graduate to be inducted into the Faculty of Law’s Honour Society in 2014 for using legal education as a foundation for making significant contributions to society. She was named Public Policy Forum’s 2018 Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow and received CivicAction’s 2018 Emerging Leader Award.

Karen sits on governance boards for the Banff Forum and Canadian Club Toronto, and advisory bodies for the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase, and Connected North. She serves on juries for both The Donner Prize and The Hunter Prize and is a contributing writer at The Hub Canada.