Keynote Speakers

Melissa Leong is one of Canada’s best-loved authorities on personal finance. A sought-after speaker, national media personality, bestselling author, and award-winning podcast host, she is currently the resident money expert on CTV’s The Social, Canada’s leading daytime talk show, and a repeat guest on The Drew Barrymore Show. Leong is on a quest to help people better manage their money while maximizing their happiness. She delivers high-energy, informative, and practical talks about behavioural economics, positive psychology, and personal finance in her signature frank and funny style.

For almost two decades, Leong worked as a print journalist, reporting on a variety of beats including crime, politics, terrorism, arts, and business for The National Post, The Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. She spent several years as the personal finance writer for the Financial Post and is now a go-to money expert for radio and television programs such as BNN and CBC.

Leong graduated from the esteemed Bachelor of Journalism program at the Toronto Metropolitan University (former Ryerson University). She is the bestselling author of the feelgood finance guide, Happy Go Money, and host of the award-winning business podcast, Money Moves: Conversations About Investing.

Lisa LaFlamme has been at the forefront of journalism for over 30 years, tackling some of the biggest issues of our time, traveling the globe, delivering breaking news, and bringing it back home to Canadians. The internationally respected journalist has interviewed major newsmakers, Prime Ministers, Presidents and Princes while always keeping the spotlight on the injustices that plague the world’s most oppressed.

LaFlamme has traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places and through her extensive war coverage of Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine has documented the reality of how conflict warps society, punishes the most vulnerable and benefits the most corrupt.

A native of Kitchener-Waterloo, LaFlamme began her career in local radio and TV in her hometown in 1988 before making the move to CTV National News in 1997. She moved from prime-time anchor of CTV Newschannel to an Ottawa correspondent in CTV’s Parliamentary bureau. In September 2001, LaFlamme became co-host of the number one morning show Canada Am. Her second day on the job, 9-11, the attacks on the World Trade Centre pulled her out of the studio once again to report from New York City, the United Nations, the Pentagon and, ultimately, Iraq and Afghanistan.

For more than a decade, LaFlamme went from conflict zone to disaster zone delivering award winning coverage of hurricanes, earthquakes and climate crises including Southeast Asia in the wake of the deadly 2005 tsunami and Japan’s devastating nuclear emergency in 2011. That same year she was named Canada’s first female anchor of a national nightly newscast replacing longtime anchor Lloyd Robertson.

As Chief Anchor and Senior Editor of CTV National News for almost 12 years, LaFlamme led the country’s number one newscast and cemented her role as the face of news in Canada. During her career, she has received critical acclaim for her live special broadcasts from around the world marking moments in history from Royal weddings to funerals, major political upheaval at home and abroad, the rescue of the Chilean miners, the opioid crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing resilience of refugees. LaFlamme has reported extensively on the humanitarian crisis facing the Afghan people and has worked intensively on helping Afghan women and girls under threat by the Taliban.