By Vanessa Chiasson
There aren’t many people who can say that their careers in Nova Scotia and southern Ontario came via Sudan and Myanmar. Enter Geoffrey Hamilton who doesn’t exactly make a habit of following traditional paths.
Hamilton recently became President & CEO of Commissionaires Great Lakes, a veteran-focused not-for-profit security provider in southern Ontario. It’s not his only job at the moment, “I’m concurrently serving as CEO of Commissionaires Nova Scotia, where I’ve worked for the past four years, while they search for my replacement there.”
Commissionaires Nova Scotia will have big shoes to fill. During Hamilton’s tenure in Nova Scotia, which began in 2018, he led the organization to realize its first significant surplus in more than ten years. Just like so many people during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hamilton had to lead his organization through many pivots, adjusting training and recruitment methods to meet the sudden focus on remote work. His flexibility and hard work paid off. As a result, recruitment and deployment of staff increased.
Hamilton’s positions with Commissionaires in both Nova Scotia and southern Ontario are part of a long career in the military and security services. He joined the Navy through the reserves straight out of high school, following in the footsteps of his father and his brothers. He completed his undergraduate degree at Dalhousie University and later earned a master’s degree in law specializing in international dispute resolution from the University of London (Queen Mary and University Colleges). He subsequently spent several years in full-time military service and became a graduate of the Canadian Forces College’s Joint Command and Staff Programme. It was excellent preparation for the career he has now. In Hamilton’s words, “Working in the defence and security space seemed like a natural transition to civilian life.”
His time in the military directly impacted his vision for his civilian career. Hamilton describes serving during a military deployment to Sudan with the United Nations. After working in the country, he was inspired to start developing a project for a civilian company operating there. However, long-term plans for the agro-forestry business he was working on weren’t meant to be. The region’s brutal civil war disrupted everything.
Opportunity arises from the most difficult of circumstances, though, and led Hamilton to direct his talents in another equally challenging location. Hamilton was referred by one of the Sudanese project’s investors to run a newly established security company in Myanmar. Exera would become Myanmar’s leading security risk management firm.
Working in Myanmar with Exera was anything but ordinary and the stakes were incredibly high, “My company provided security services to United Nations agencies operating in the affected areas of Myanmar during the 2016 Rohingya genocide. We had about 200 employees living in the conflict zone.”
It’s hard to imagine a more challenging work environment and Hamilton is frank about the difficulties and rewards of his unique position, describing this period as “not a pleasant time in my career, but I’ll always remember what our team was able to do through an anxious and dangerous period to keep our clients safe while taking care of our employees and helping to reunite them with their families.”
That security company was sold after about three and a half years and Hamilton returned to Canada to become CEO of the Nova Scotia Division of Commissionaires—or, as he wryly puts it, “That old story.” Before leaving, he made an indelible contribution to local culture, appearing in a Burmese pop video that he fervently hopes will never see the light of day.
In addition to his new role as CEO of Commissionaires Great Lakes Division, Hamilton was recently elected to serve a three-year term as chair of the Corps’ national-level business management committee. With many irons in the fire, he knows life will be hectic, saying, “Getting established in my two new roles will definitely keep me busy for the balance of 2022.”
He also has his hands full at home, “I started a family relatively late in life, so I’m still juggling diapers and daycares at a time when it feels like most of my colleagues of the same age are getting ready to send their kids to university.”
The hardships and stresses of working in multiple conflict zones have given Hamilton a unique outlook on the ups and downs that come with his career, advice that applies to any field of work. He philosophically says, “I’ve certainly set out to do many things that didn’t ultimately pan out; whether that’s because those challenges were objectively insurmountable or not, I can’t say. I’ve come to realize that being critically receptive to the opportunities you didn’t expect would arise along the way is a good way to develop a career.”
Throughout his military career and his ongoing work in security, Hamilton has come to appreciate the opportunities he has had to work in very different places with what he describes as “wonderful people from all over the world.” When he ponders what he would say to a young executive entering the defence industry, he offers an optimistic outlook, as well as some practical advice. He describes the defence industry as a “great space” to develop a career and sagely observes that, “There are few other industries that offer such opportunities for advancement across the full range of job functions—from technical to finance to general management to sales—and which also offer the chance to live and work literally around the world.”
