Since 2020, she has been President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), the country’s largest private land conservation organization. Although her journey from business school to national conservation leader wasn’t a straightforward one, it was deeply shaped by her time at uOttawa.
Turning a love of the outdoors into a career
Grenier grew up loving sports and being active. But it wasn’t until she joined Parks Canada during her MBA that she realized where her real passion lay.
“I thought it was all sports,” she explains. “But sports were the way for me to connect and be in nature.”
That realization opened the door to a whole new career path for Grenier. She ended up spending a decade at Parks Canada, followed by five years leading Québec’s park system, Sépaq. In 2020, she stepped into the top job at NCC.
“I felt that at the time, we all needed to do more for nature. And NCC was the perfect forum to bring more people together to get more nature protected—faster.”
Becoming a conservation leader in Canada
When Grenier took over the helm at NCC, her vision was ambitious: increase the scope, scale, and impact of conservation in Canada. And over the past six years, she has delivered.
NCC now protects 18 times more land annually than when she began—driven by major land protection projects, stronger partnerships with Indigenous communities, and new collaborations with governments, ranchers, forestry companies, and industry.
But that kind of progress didn’t come out of nowhere. She says that the skills she learned during her MBA shaped how she approaches the work.
“A lot of people in the conservation world were conservationists. I was coming in with the love of nature, but also the business and management background,” explains Grenier. “What I learned at uOttawa—the business acumen, the multidisciplinary approach—allowed me to step off the beaten path and figure out new ways to do more for nature, connect more people with nature, and create new ways for nature to be protected.”
Putting conservation on the map in Canada—and globally
Grenier’s leadership at NCC is grounded in a clear understanding of Canada’s global responsibility.
“Canada has a third of the world’s intact forests. We have 25 per cent of the world’s wilderness. We have a quarter of the wetlands,” she explains. “We have the responsibility to protect it for the rest of the world.”
That responsibility also means finding better ways to understand the value of conservation. She points to research happening at uOttawa as a way to deepen that understanding and help put Canada at the forefront of global conservation efforts. In particular, she sees Professor Stewart Elgie’s economic valuation research as playing a key role in quantifying the financial benefits of conservation—everything from flood mitigation to wildfire resilience to mental‑health impacts.
“Being able to put numbers and associate economic impact for the work that we do is critical,” she says. “That economic component is something that, as a team, we don’t have, so there’s really good complementarity.”
The connection between NCC’s priorities and research happening at the university underscores a shared goal: demonstrating that conservation is not only environmentally essential, but economically smart.
Looking ahead with optimism
Despite the challenges facing conservation today—from biodiversity loss to climate change—Grenier remains hopeful because she has seen firsthand what is possible when people work together. Over her 20‑year career, she has also witnessed attitudes shift regarding nature protection.
“I’ve never been in a boardroom where someone has said, ‘Nature? We don’t need that,’” explains Grenier. “The challenge is going from intention to action.”
But she sees things moving in the right direction. Grenier says conservation consistently draws support from 80 to 90 per cent of Canadians, regardless of geography and political affiliation. And every day, NCC’s work demonstrates that progress is possible.
“We could look at the big picture and feel overwhelmed,” she says. “Or we could look at every little step along the way that gets us closer to a thriving world.”