You're looking at our About page, which means you're doing your due diligence. Good. We respect that — and we think you deserve more than polished corporate language. So here's the honest version of who we are, how we got here, and why 23,400+ dentists across every province and territory trust us to represent their profession.

// The Origin

"Where do I go for affordable dental care in Canada?"

In 2007, Dr. Marc-Antoine Bhérer was volunteering dental screenings at an Ottawa community health fair. His friend Khalil Haroun — a recently immigrated engineer — asked where he could find affordable dental care, and who was looking out for the dentists who wanted to help people like him. Dr. Bhérer had no satisfying answer. Not a partial answer, not a "well, it depends" answer. Nothing satisfying. He realized there was a staggering gap between practicing dentists who wanted to serve broader populations and the fragmented provincial systems that left both practitioners and patients under-supported.

That evening at his kitchen table in Ottawa's Alta Vista neighbourhood, he sketched a framework: a national association that would serve as the definitive voice for dentistry in Canada. One that tracked every metric, measured real-world impact, and translated data into policy change. He recruited three colleagues within weeks — a health economist, a public health dentist, and a communications specialist. By the end of 2007, the CDA was incorporated at 1815 Alta Vista Drive — blocks from where that first screening took place. It's still our headquarters today.

Then something unexpected happened. Dr. Bhérer published a single post on a dentist's forum describing what he was building. Two hundred inquiries arrived overnight — from dentists in Manitoba, dental hygienists in Halifax, a periodontist in Vancouver who'd been thinking the same thing for years. Before breakfast the next morning, he had a decision to make: go back to the cubicle of comfortable clinical routine, or take the leap. He chose the leap, gave two weeks' notice at his private practice that afternoon, and hasn't looked back. That initial wave of interest became the foundation of our membership and advocacy programs — systems we've refined every year since, now serving practitioners at every career stage.

// The Methodology: Why Data Drives Every Decision We Make

"If you can't put a number on it, it's an opinion, not a strategy."

That's Jean-François Lalonde, our COO, and he's said it so often it's practically embroidered on the office wall. Here's what it means in practice: every program the CDA launches is benchmarked before it starts, tracked while it runs, and reported with transparent numbers when it's done. Our National Dental Data Repository holds 87 million anonymized patient records — the largest longitudinal dental dataset in the country. Our annual State of Oral Health in Canada report is peer-reviewed, openly published, and cited by policymakers, insurers, and academic institutions across every province and territory. That dataset informs everything from our policy advocacy briefs to our community oral health interventions.

We've made mistakes. Early on, we launched a member resource toolkit that nobody used — because we built what we thought dentists needed instead of asking them. That failure taught us to survey first, build second. We've surveyed 4,500+ practicing dentists every year since, asking detailed questions about clinical workflow obstacles, insurance navigation headaches, CE format preferences, and regulatory pain points. The toolkit we eventually rebuilt became one of our most-used member resources, with a 73% annual utilization rate among active members. But the lesson stuck harder than the success: listen before you build.

This data-first philosophy is also why our research and analytics services produce evidence syntheses that policymakers actually use. When the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority needed a 112-page evidence synthesis for a council vote, Dr. Fenton-Blackwood's team delivered in 11 weeks — not because they rushed, but because the data infrastructure was already built. That's the payoff of investing in systems years before the deadline lands on your desk.

We're a small team of specialists, not a sprawling bureaucracy. Here's how we handle that: every person on our team is a deep expert in one domain. We don't generalize. We hire people who've lived the problems they're solving. That means when a member calls our Dental Benefits Helpline with a complex insurance coding question, they're talking to someone who has spent years navigating the exact same regulatory landscape — not a call centre operator reading from a script.

// Clinical DNA, Not Bureaucratic Distance

We're bilingual by design, clinical in our DNA, and allergic to bureaucratic distance. Dr. Chandrasekar volunteers weekly at a newcomer dental clinic in Vanier, working directly with patients who face the same access barriers that inspired our founding. Dr. Gill navigated the internationally trained dentist pathway himself — he knows what it feels like to have your credentials questioned, your experience discounted, your pathway unclear. That firsthand understanding shapes every resource in our ITD support and continuing education programs. Catherine publishes poetry in both official languages and insists that health communications should be as carefully crafted as literature — a philosophy that's helped our public education campaigns reach 18.6 million Canadians annually.

We're not bureaucrats administering a profession from the outside. Our founder is a periodontist with 37 peer-reviewed papers. Our advocacy officer is a dentist with an MPH who architects national policy scorecards. Our member services director navigated the ITD pathway himself and delivered 1,247 CE hours to members last year alone. When we advocate for you in Ottawa — whether it's testifying before a parliamentary committee on fluoridation policy or negotiating with insurance carriers on claims processing timelines — we're advocating from clinical experience, not talking points.

One more thing — and we share this because it matters, not because it's a good story. Every member inquiry gets a response within 24 hours. Not an auto-reply. A human response from someone who understands the question. We logged 6,200+ member inquiries on the Dental Benefits Helpline last year alone. Same-day callbacks. That's the standard, and it's tracked in our operations dashboard — you can ask Jean-François for the numbers if you doubt it. If you have a question right now, our contact page is the fastest way to reach us.