Catherine Blair

Manager, Emergency Preparedness at Alectra Utilities

Catherine Blair HBSc, BSc, CEM, ABCP, CMM III-EMP is the Manager of Emergency Preparedness for Alectra Utilities, the second largest municipally-owned utility in North America. She is widely known across North America as a leading professional with on-the-ground experience of a wide-ranging number of different emergency events. She has been a guest speaker and trainer at many emergency preparedness conferences over the years.

Before joining the Alectra (originally with legacy PowerStream) she was the Emergency Management Coordinator for the City of Mississauga, Canada’s sixth largest city, the Emergency Planning Officer for the Toronto Transit Commission. Prior to this she was Technical Representative and Emergency Response Coordinator for a major chemical distributor and is qualified as a Hazardous Materials Technician.

Catherine Blair is a graduate for the University of Waterloo with a BSc and an Honours BSc in science specializing in chemistry, and initially graduated from Fanshawe College’s Science Laboratory Technology program.

Catherine was one of the few Canadians to be accredited as a Certified Emergency Manager by the International Association of Emergency Managers and was the elected President of IAEM-Canada. She represented the Canadian Council on the IAEM Global Board of Directors during her term as President.

Her emergency management experiences includes; severe weather events, power outages, terrorism, health events (pandemic influenza and SARS), G8/G20 planning, evacuation and shelter, mass fatalities planning, critical infrastructure protection, hazmat, and a broad range of other hazards.