GoCast Podcast: Julien Turcot & Emilie Roy (Hydro Québec)

A GoCast interview with Emilie Roy, who leads cybersecurity governance in Quebec at Hydro-Quebec, on a path into the field through physical security rather than a technical background. She started in physical security at NRJ, then moved to Hydro-Quebec after a journalist's intrusion into a facility triggered a major physical-security overhaul, and found her way into cybersecurity through NERC CIP compliance, whose standards are overwhelmingly about cybersecurity despite the physical-security label. She contrasts IT's default posture of cutting or disconnecting a threat with operational technology, where the grid must keep running, so risk management and cross-team communication matter as much as tooling. Her cybersecurity team runs 250 to 300 people across employees and consultants inside a roughly 22,000-to-23,000-person company, with hiring now in a maintenance phase rather than the rapid growth of recent years, and retention leaning on Hydro-Quebec's mission of protecting essential public infrastructure and a strong internal culture rather than on salary alone. She credits shared responsibility, training every employee to own some part of cybersecurity, over relying solely on specialist headcount. On AI, she favors being a fast, structured early follower rather than an early adopter, coining the phrase live during the conversation.