Steering Committee

A strategic thinker and innovative leader, Sandro holds over fifteen years of executive management experience. He held previous leadership roles with Workplace Safety & Prevention Services and Ontario Service Safety Alliance and was a sitting member of the Ministry of Labour’s Prevention Operations Forum. Sandro is currently the Chair of the Board of the Construction & Design Alliance of Ontario, and on the Board of Directors of Minerva Canada, which strives to embed health and safety curriculum into business and engineering programs across Canada.

John is the President of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, representing 220,000 union members in Canada’s largest urban centre. A carpenter by trade, John is the Vice-Chair of United Way of Greater Toronto, and co-chair of the Toronto Community Benefits Network, focused on winning community benefits and equity hiring on major infrastructure projects. He recently authored the Greenprint for Greater Toronto, a plan for climate action in every sector of the economy.

Rosemarie Powell is a passionate advocate for social, economic and environmental justice. She has led for over 20 years from the grassroots up, managing and developing several innovative and impactful community programs and services to support under-represented group’s access to the labour market. Her community engagement work in Jane Finch earned several awards for leadership and imagination. Rosemarie is currently the Executive Director of the Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN).

Tony is a professional engineer with 38 years of experience in engineering, facilities management and capital development and is the inaugural Research Chair, Sustainability at Mohawk College. He provides leading-edge research that will contribute to a low-carbon economy, while engaging students to develop a multi-disciplinary focus on finding real world solutions to social, economic and environmental challenges. In his leadership capacity at Mohawk College, he was responsible for the planning, design, construction and operation of Canada’s largest institutional, zero carbon building – The Joyce Centre for Partnership and Innovation. He has a doctorate degree in Civil Engineering with a focus on green buildings and policy and is a former adjunct faculty member at McMaster University.

He is responsible for managing and facilitating the development and delivery of educational contents, programs, and initiatives that promote energy efficiency, sustainability, and regulatory compliance to the membership. Bala is also actively involved in the association’s advocacy initiatives, working closely with all three levels of governments and industry stakeholders contributing to policies and programs impacting the commercial real estate industry. Bala is an industrial engineer and a Certified Energy Manager with over eighteen years of experience in the energy and manufacturing sectors. Prior to his current role Bala was with an energy consulting firm as their Senior Program Manager responsible for the design and delivery of CDM services to multiple local electricity distribution companies in Ontario, and prior to that he managed the BOMA Toronto’s multiple-award winning Conservation and Demand Management Program as its Director of Projects and Operations.

Mae Shaban is a licensed Architect in Ontario and a member of the Sustainable Built Environment Committee (SBEC) with the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA). In recent years, she has worked on several large-scale transformational initiatives within the Corporate Real Estate group of a large organization, including the development of enterprise-wide sustainability guidelines. Mae’s past project work experience has touched on a wide range of sectors, scales, and complexities influenced by a firm with strong Passive House principles aimed at building healthy environments.

With 12 years of experience in sustainability and green building policy and programs, Akua has a strong background in energy benchmarking, market engagement, and program design. She led the work to develop a national framework for energy benchmarking in Canada and has been working with local, provincial, and federal governments since 2014 to advance energy benchmarking and retrofit initiatives. She has expertise in policy and market drivers related to benchmarking and retrofits, as well as implementation strategies. Akua led the outreach and development of CAGBC’s Investor Confidence Project financial advisory group, which brought together stakeholders from major financial institutions to advance recommendations on private sector retrofit financing. Over the course of her career, she has honed a deep understanding of tools to drive change including government regulation and policy, strategic use of market-based levers such as industry standards, and public engagement strategies such as behavioural economics.