Ian Faris, who served as president and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade from 2013-19, has joined Maple Leaf Strategies as a strategic adviser in the firm’s Ottawa office.
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The former head of one of the National Capital Region’s largest business advocacy groups is now advising clients of a major public relations firm.
Ian Faris, who served as president and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade from 2013-19, has joined Maple Leaf Strategies as a strategic adviser in the firm’s Ottawa office.
The firm says the Queen’s University alumnus will provide government and stakeholder relations as well as communications services to clients from all levels of government.
Faris brings more than three decades of government and public relations experience to his new role.
After serving as an adviser to various senior federal government officials in the early 2000s, he spent two years as a senior vice-president at Hill & Knowlton Canada before heading the Brewers Association of Canada (now Beer Canada) from 2007-13.
Most recently, Faris served as senior vice-president of chamber network relations and advocacy at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, a job he held from late 2019 to last November.
But he’s perhaps best known in local business circles for his six years at the helm of the organization now known as the Ottawa Board of Trade.
As president and CEO of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce, Faris helped spearhead the drive to merge that organization with the West Ottawa Board of Trade and the Orléans Chamber of Commerce. In 2018, the three groups united to create the Ottawa Board of Trade.
The move followed more than a year of negotiations and sometimes contentious debates, but Faris told OBJ in 2018 he felt a single, united organization would have more clout when lobbying various levels of government.
“It’s important that the business community speak as a strong voice,” he said. “We’re able to better service our membership, we’re better able to represent those members at City Hall, at Queen’s Park and on the Hill in an advocacy fashion. Frankly, we want to have better, more cohesive policy created in those governments, and we want to be able to help fashion that. I think we can do that with a more consolidated group of businesses.”
Faris and the board also weren’t shy about voicing their frustration with the slow pace of development on key city-building projects.
In early 2019, for example, the organization called on the National Capital Commission to return to the bargaining table with previous bidders on the LeBreton Flats project after plans for a group led by then-Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk and Trinity Development Group founder John Ruddy to redevelop the 55-acre property with an NHL arena at its core fell through.
Under Faris’s watch, the Board of Trade also helped launch the Capital 2020 Task Force aimed at kickstarting momentum for various infrastructure projects, including the LeBreton Flats redevelopment, a light-rail line linking Ottawa and Gatineau, a new Civic Hospital campus and efforts to revitalize the ByWard Market.
