Four years after Rogers promised to hire 500 people for a “national centre of technology and engineering excellence” in Calgary, the telecom giant won’t say how many people work there.
Rogers first pledged to create the centre in its announcement of its plan to buy Shaw, in March 2021, as part of a list of commitments to keep and build on Shaw’s legacy as a western Canadian company.
Talking Points
Rogers won’t say how it’s measuring up against its own promise to hire 500 early-career technical experts for a Calgary “centre of excellence” once it bought Shaw
A stacked advisory council announced in 2022 has mostly fallen away
The centre would “support the needs of the new combined company, creating hundreds of new high-skilled jobs and opportunities to work with Canadian developers to create new consumer and business applications and services,” Rogers said then.
The promise got more specific just over a year later, with an announcement by Rogers’ then-chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes. The Shaw deal wasn’t consummated yet, but the centre got a name, an advisory council made up of business and academic leaders from Alberta and B.C. (part of the point was to train and employ new graduates, the announcement said) and a headcount.
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Five hundred people would be hired for “skilled technology roles,” doing cutting-edge work in areas like cloud computing, AI and cybersecurity.
Rogers repeated its promise to launch ThinkLab when it closed the Shaw acquisition in April 2023, though it never set a deadline for the launch or the hiring.
“ThinkLab has continued to evolve alongside our technology priorities with a focus today on applied research, experimentation and collaboration that supports practical outcomes with external partners,” Rogers spokesperson Leann Yutuc said in an email exchange this month. She did not answer The Logic’s repeated direct questions about how many people worked there.
Since the exchange, Rogers has offered buyouts to about 10,000 staff across the country.
As for what ThinkLab does, Yutuc said, “it remains a dynamic model.” It focuses on practical and applied research, she said, and currently those are “an initiative in the remote health space and early stages to support the safety of personnel within wildfire management agencies.”
Searching LinkedIn turns up hardly anybody who lists ThinkLab as part of their work history. Its self-described head left last September for Calgary’s economic development agency.
Yutuc said the “core ThinkLab team” works at Rogers’ western headquarters in Calgary and now answers to its current chief technology officer Mark Kennedy.
In an August 2024 interview with the Calgary Herald, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri answered vaguely when he was asked about ThinkLab. “It’s early days on that,” he said, a phrase he repeated when asked how many people worked at it then.
Rogers was still trying to decide what ThinkLab was going to be for, Staffieri said: “That’s been part of, if I’m frank with you, a bit of the—not slowdown—but we wanted it not to be R&D coming up with ideas that are looking for a problem.”
When Rogers appointed the ThinkLab advisory council in 2022, it noted the move in its quarterly earnings report—the only time ThinkLab has had a mention. The advisory council was a powerhouse, though if it’s done much, its members aren’t saying.
Deborah Yedlin, CEO of Calgary’s chamber of commerce, through a spokesperson, refused to answer specific questions about ThinkLab, including when the advisory council last met.
“From my perspective, what matters most is Rogers’ sustained commitment to Calgary as an innovation hub—through jobs, skills, collaboration and long‑term economic impact,” she said in a written statement. “On that front, Rogers has played—and continues to play—an active role in the Calgary business community across all sectors and sizes.”
In a similar vein, Yutuc pointed to broader self-reporting on the effects of its Shaw acquisition; in early April, Rogers said that it had created 2,599 of the 3,000 jobs in Western Canada that it said it would if the deal went through. The ThinkLab promise didn’t appear in that progress report or either of the previous two. Although Rogers did make that pledge publicly, it wasn’t among the formal commitments it gave the federal government.
Another advisory council member was Kory Wilson, the executive director of Indigenous initiatives and partnerships at the B.C. Institute of Technology. She said in an email that she hadn’t been involved with ThinkLab for a year and a half and didn’t respond to a follow-up query about what had happened.
Bill Rosehart, who was named to the advisory council when he was the dean of the University of Calgary’s engineering school (he is now the incoming president of the University of Waterloo), said he missed a first meeting of the council after the Rogers-Shaw deal was completed. He left the body when he moved from Calgary to the University of Guelph, in Ontario, because of ThinkLab’s western focus.
“I would have been eager to stay on it, just because it was looking very interesting,” he said in an interview. But if ThinkLab ever got onto a trajectory, Rosehart said, he didn’t get to see it.
Laura Jo Gunter, CEO of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, said via a spokesperson that she went to one meeting and then passed her advisory duties off to another NAIT staffer “who had more of a technical [and] operational lens.” She referred further questions to Rogers.
Bala Kathiresan, former head of BCNET, a not-for-profit IT service for British Columbia’s higher-education sector, said he couldn’t say anything about ThinkLab because he’d left his former job. Two other members named to the council didn’t acknowledge The Logic’s questions.