By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Apr. 30, 2012.)
I don’t know how to resuscitate RIM. Maybe you don’t either. We have to place our bets on the devils we know about: founding genius Mike Lazaridis, new CEO Thorsten Heins and the Ottawa connection.
Ottawa connection? For those who have been out of touch for the duration, the Ottawa connection comprises QNX, Alec Saunders (pictured right on stage at a European developers conference) and shades of Prem Watsa. You know the first two. QNX has built the new operating system, known as BlackBerry 10. But it’s not yet in the phones. They’re pushing for the fall. Alec Saunders is a Waterloo-cum-Microsoft grad who has been Ottawa-bled in a decade-long struggle to get voicetech startup Calliflower off the ground. Now VP of developer relations at QNX/RIM, his goal is to enlist 50,000 app developers this year to . . . . . . develop apps for RIM.
And how about Prem Watsa, 61, CEO of Fairfax Financial. Reserved but revered for his canny and fantastically successful investment record, he’s walking the talk, for sure, becoming a RIM director, laying his money down. That’s good for RIM and by extension good for Canada’s tech sector. Whatever is good for RIM is good for Canada’s tech sector. The worst thing conceivable these days is that RIM should follow Nortel into the crater. God forbid. Prem’s doing his part. When Lazaridis flamboyantly announced he’ll invest another $50 million in RIM, Prem allowed as how he might follow suit. (If either actually did it that day, he’d have lost $8 million in the past month.)
Fairfax is already the fourth largest investor in the company. And it’s here that the Ottawa connection resides. No. 2 and “lead director” at Fairfax is Anthony F. Griffiths. Through the early nineties Tony Griffiths was chair and CEO at Mitel and mentor of the CEO-in-waiting, Kirk Mandy. Griffiths went home to help Watsa become Canada’s Warren Buffet. (As a matter of interest and disclosure, Griffiths was a modest investor in a publication I founded, Silicon Valley NORTH, in the mid-nineties.)
QNX is doing its part. Watsa is doing his. So is Alec Saunders, which brings me back to apps. Alec might not put it this way but he could use some help. Not only is he playing catch up with Apple and Android, he doesn’t yet have in hand the product that developers are supposed to develop apps for. What he has is 95% there and what he needs now is the trust of the community. Developers have to believe that BlackBerry is coming back and that it’s worth diverting some effort from making iPhone apps, or Google apps or now Microsoft apps. BlackBerry created mobile and it’s still early days for mobile. BlackBerry’s still a good bet. BlackBerry’s coming back big time.
RIM is important to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We let Nortel slide with scarcely a sigh. It should never happen again and if we have anything to do about it, it never will. In this case there is something we can do. We can contribute enthusiastically to RIM’s app store. We can build the apps. RIM is us. Let’s get to it.
And here’s something to do right now. Tomorrow, May 1, RIM’s BlackBerry Jam 10 conference for app developers gets underway in Orlando, Florida. If you’re not going yourself, take a minute to let Alec know that we’re here for him and RIM. It’ll be good to share news down south that the home team is putting in extra effort. His eddress is alec.saunders@rim.com.

May 14, 2012 03:48 PM          Comments (0)    

1 May 2012

Mr. Tony Patterson
SCAN
4-108 Queen Elizabeth Driveway
Ottawa, ON K2P 1E5

Dear Mr. Patterson:

As you are aware, in the summer of 2011, I refused your request for interview. At the time, we were doing very few as I was very pre-occupied with internal matters. You subsequently published a blog painting me in a very poor light. I am more than willing to accept fair and even unfair criticism. However, erroneous and blatantly misleading commentary falls into a different category. Your blog contained errors of fact, some of which we discussed yesterday, and many other statements that were directly or indirectly very misleading.

Yesterday when I pointed those things out, you said you thought "the article would have elucidated an immediate response from me". I told you the tone of your article actually said much more about you than it did about me, so I didn't feel that it was worth my time to respond.

In spite of those issues, when you called again a few days ago for an interview, I agreed to speak with you. When we connected, I immediately expressed my concerns about your prior blog and asked for an apology before proceeding further. You refused. Even so I agreed to provide clarifications regarding some of the errors and misleading statements in your blog. I also told you your subsequent response and actions would form the basis for determining whether there was any point in future discussions.

As committed, a few specific issues related to your July 2011 blog are addressed below by providing your words in italics followed by my clarifications:

1. "It's an image he pushed toward conclusion on his home turf, until he pushed too hard and got himself turfed out." "When four provincial R&D initiatives were merged into one under the name Alberta Innovates in January 2010, he was invited out."

I advised the ARC Board in the fall of 2007 to start looking for a successor. Not long thereafter, Alberta began to redesign its innovation system. The ARC Board and I both agreed to stay on at the request of the Province to provide continuity and input while Alberta completed their design and completed the legal transitions of the system. That ultimately occurred January 1, 2010 at which time I and the Board both departed.

May 02, 2012 01:14 AM     More     Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Apr. 02, 2012.)
News of the passing on March 12 of Rennie Whitehead (pictured below with wife Nesta and PM "Mike" Pearson) is a moment most apt to recognize the immense contributions of the British to Canadian science and technology.
Rennie was 94. For generations of British scientists and engineers coming from Britain through the post world war decades he was the dean, an unofficial title he inherited when W.B. Lewis died in 1987. Rennie always deferred to the brilliant W.B., who had worked with Ernest Rutherford, became head of Atomic Energy of Canada research and was known as the “father of the CANDU” reactor. These two were perhaps the biggest names in tech to set sail for the land of the maple since John By of the Royal Engineers came to cut the canal and set Ottawa en route for Silicon Valley North. But they were far from alone.
Peter Hackett brought a Ph.D. from the University of Southampton to the National Research Council, became VP there and later founding CEO at the National Institute for Nanotechnology. He remembers evaluation forms for applicants at NRC that “had a line for postgraduate degree with three boxes to check: Oxford, Cambridge and Other.” The story has been often enough told of the comings of Michael Cowpland and Terry Matthews to Microsystems International, which failed, and their subsequent successes with Mitel, Corel and Newbridge. They were not the only ones. Don Smith ran a later version of Mitel. Bob Harland and Dick Foss co-founded Mosaid. Peter Leach became CEO of CITO (Communications and Information Technologies Ontario).
Rennie Whitehead stood out, though, in the sheer diversity of his impacts. One of the pioneers of radar pre-WWII, he came to be associate professor of physics at McGill, despite a warning that he was emigrating to an “ill-developed country where scientific research is in its infancy.” He would later allow that “there was some truth” in these remarks, but promptly set out to give them the lie.
He led design and installation of the Mid-Canada Line of radar defence. It was Cold War time after all, an era of missiles and defence systems, requiring leading edge electronics skill. Joining RCA Victor Canada as head of R&D, he hired research physicists by the bunch, possibly for the first time in Canadian industry (Northern Electric Research Lab was established in 1957, but Bell-Northern Research wasn’t underway until 1971). RCA Canada would get a good slice of work on the ISIS and Alouette satellite programs. By 1960 RCA labs in Montreal had more Ph.D. physicists on staff than any other company in Canada and was winning research contracts here, in the U.S. and further afield.
Then Ottawa called and Rennie became principal science advisor to two prime ministers (Pearson, Trudeau), wrote terms of reference for the newborn Science Council of Canada, which was unfortunately, misguidedly canned by another PM (Mulroney) and sat for the country on the most prestigious international science councils. He left to finish his career as a consultant after responsibility for advising government on science policy was moved from the Privy Council Office to a newly minted but powerless ministry of state in the mid-1970s.
If you’re not old enough to remember Rennie in his prime, perhaps you’ll recall Arthur Carty. He was also science advisor to a couple of prime ministers (Martin, Harper), appointed in 2004, the first since Rennie. And he came to much the same end in 2008, ushered out of PCO to marginalization in a department. He now heads the Institute for Quantum Computing, one of Mike Lazaridis’ philanthropies, at the University of Waterloo. He too is a Brit.

April 08, 2012 05:00 PM          Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Mar. 05, 2012.)
I/O in digital speak — input/output — describes communication between a tech system and the world outside. Last month Ottawa got its own I/O connector. Invest Ottawa will help develop Ottawa’s goods and services, present them to the world and bring local business what it needs (talent, capital, recognition) from away.
I/O is the third vitalization of OCRI, a good idea gone awry. Born in the 1980s as the Ottawa-Carleton Research Institute, OCRI was the heart of a tech community that grew to be known around the world as Silicon Valley North. For two decades it was the builder of networks, applauding success, featuring leaders, encouraging mentors, facilitating partnerships. It was a model of its kind and much imitated. You can see its modern iteration at Communitech in Waterloo, a direct descendant.
The first column ever I wrote for OBJ (April 2, 2001) concerned OCRI’s merger with Ottawa’s economic development agency, OED. My instinct was to take a swing at the union, because I thought I saw a winner taking on a loser, risking dilution of its essence in the deal. But I didn’t swing. I gave a “cautious benefit of the doubt” to the takeover. I should have trusted my instinct. Dilution was exactly what happened.
My comment to the new CEO at that time, Jeffrey Dale, was “OCRI is now an acronym in search of a name.” He reminded me of this recently and said, “Now it has a name.”
Invest Ottawa will tighten focus and add capabilities, while shedding non-core activities such as school breakfasts, secondary school programs, recruiting members and staging events. Mayor Jim Watson is putting his hands on as co-chair. The city will pump in $3.6 million annually, an increase of better than 50%. I’m going to risk the same mistake and give I/O an optimistic wave of welcome. But I think it bears close watching to make sure our baby doesn’t disappear with the disposables.
Bruce Lazenby and his team, not all of whom have been hired, have a powerful new tool to work with. The city’s money has bought incubation space for as many as 90 startups at 80 Aberdeen in Little Italy, the new I/O headquarters. They’ll have access to growth accelerators such as financial, legal and marketing assistance, mentorship, export intelligence and trade missions. This model has proved successful in Waterloo and Toronto and had been on OCRI’s “to accomplish” list for five years or more.
Of course it makes sense to shuck the ed programs and school breakfasts. Worthy as they are, they’ll find other sponsors. And they’re tangential at best to economic development, at least in the short run. But shedding membership and events gives rise to other considerations.
You might notice, for instance, that they don’t talk much about technology at Invest Ottawa. It’s knowledge-based business they’re concerned with, which when you get down to it is just about any business. As Mr. Lazenby has famously said, “If you get off the bus in Ottawa and say, ‘I want to start a barbershop’, we’ll help you out.”
There was a time when OCRI membership and participation in its programs and events were part of the fabric of the tech community in Ottawa. I/O will not give that same impetus to community and connection.
On the other hand there will likely be tight cohesion among the 90 startups in I/O’s accelerator program. They may well become evangelists for a new era of clusters and networks. And while any new knowledge-based startup will be welcome at 80 Aberdeen, nine out of every ten are pretty certain to be technology-based. Because that’s what Ottawa does best. That’s our natural advantage. Even if we speak it softly these days.

March 08, 2012 06:36 PM          Comments (1)    

By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Feb. 06, 2012.)
Nortel was a business failure. The sad evidence now piled in the Toronto courtroom will prove that. But here’s something worth remembering. Nortel was not a technology failure. The sale of its patent portfolio for a record setting $4.5 billion must end all argument on this point.
Nortel’s business problem was twofold.
It failed to capitalize on advances in its own shop. For instance the tech team had a smart phone ready in 1998. Ten years ahead of the iPhone, let alone Android, Nortel’s Orbitor handset was on display at an international trade show. But John Roth (pictured), then the CEO, said the company had no experience with consumer products. He didn’t think mobile units could be produced cheaply enough. He canned the project. The lead designer of the user interface later left for Apple where he led the team that designed UI for the iPhone.
The muddling of accounts, which is at the heart of the Toronto trial, was endemic. Finagling was part of Nortel culture, at least as far back as Microsystems International Limited (MIL). Originally established by Nortel in 1969 to manufacture semiconductors, with millions of dollars in federal grants, MIL was shut down after five years to realize the tax benefits of $50 million in losses. Ottawa paid coming and going. It was very clever. But in retrospect the culmination of such cleverness was the financial loopiness that pushed Nortel into the crater of 2010.
This Nortel, the business of Nortel, was run from Brampton. That’s where John Roth retired from and Frank Dunn operated, with a little help from the long-serving chair in Montreal, Red Wilson. But Brampton and Montreal were not where Nortel got its gusto.
Anyone involved with Bell-Northern Research (BNR) knew in the seventies what it would be like to work at Apple in the eighties, Microsoft in the nineties or Google today. BNR, which became Nortel’s tech division, was a community of high achievers, where creativity and intelligence combined to produce telecom innovations such as computer-controlled switching. Nortel introduced the world to digital communication and phone users to handy extras like voice mail and call forwarding, as well as much reduced costs. This was no little thing. It was paradigm-shifting in one of the world’s essential industries.
This Nortel, the tech of Nortel, was run in Ottawa, where it was a pillar of what became known as Silicon Valley North, which was growing up all around it. Nortel didn’t build Silicon Valley North. That was being done, ironically, by survivors of the imploded MIL. But Nortel drew strength from the community of tech entrepreneurs such as Doyle, O’Brien, Cowpland, Bryden, Foss and Matthews. And it supported their growth.
Now that Nortel itself has imploded, a new generation is let loose in the valley. The shape of things to come is not altogether clear. But the alignment is not unlike what’s been seen before. There’s this huge company, RIM. It’s not Nortel but it’s not insignificant. It could use a new product line based on next generation technology. It’s looking to Ottawa’s QNX to supply it. It’s also bulking up R&D in the capital to soak up some of the creativity on offer.
If it achieves anything to rival BNR’s intro of Digital World in 1976 that “launched the telecommunications industry into a new era,” it could anchor a tech revival in the valley that will leave silicon in the sand and eclipse memory of that nasty Nortel business.

February 10, 2012 10:44 PM          Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Jan. 09, 2012.)
This column is not about OCRI. OCRI is as OCRI does and what it’s doing now is quite different from what it used to do. But let me remind you that it began life as the Ottawa Carleton Research Institute. It is now, purportedly, Invest Ottawa. At Queen’s Park, until the recent re-election, there was a Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI). MRI in fact has ceased to be, folded back into the econdev ministry in a penny pinching move. Today, neither of these government outlets pretends any involvement with research. Both are tilling the broad fields of economic development. Best of luck to them.
It’s intriguing that the research focus has disappeared. It appears we’re not as proud of our technology sector as we once were. We’re embarrassed by Nortel and increasingly uncertain about RIM, which is now on a lifeline to Ottawa’s QNX for a new operating system. Those years when Ottawa shared mention in the international press with Route 128 Boston, Raleigh-Durham and Silicon Valley are almost a generation ago. It was last century, an old story. Who cares? High tech is passé. Ottawa isn’t a high tech capital any longer. It’s now a knowledge-based economy.
It may surprise the authors of this mantra change that the knowledge-based economy is not a new concept. It was introduced by Fritz Machlup in the 1960s and I recall writing a brief for the Board of Broadcast Governors (later the CRTC) on the information society posited by Machlup. Knowledge as an economic resource, information expanding to solve more problems and fill more time, it’s all pretty much as he described.
But here’s something Machlup knew that seems to have eluded his current admirers among Ottawa’s economic development elite. Technology is not just part of the knowledge economy. Technology is the very foundation of the knowledge economy.
Not only that, technology is the very foundation of the Ottawa economy. This city was carved from the wilderness nearly two hundred years ago to be the primary work site for one of the great engineering accomplishments of the age. The Rideau Canal is a world heritage site today because it was, as the UNESCO application says, “a masterpiece of human creative genius, in its concept, design, and engineering.” That was the start. Since then we’ve known George Desbarats and lithography, one of the earliest colleges and engineering faculties in Ontario (now uOttawa), Thomas Ahearn and electric heating/cooking, Thomas ("Carbide") Willson and the invention of acetylene, the modern crew led by the likes of Denny Doyle, Mike Cowpland, Dick Foss, Terry Matthews and Rod Bryden. I haven’t touched on the federal government, Charles Saunders and the invention of rust-resistant Marquis wheat, Sanford Fleming’s universally applied time zones, the National Research Council (firebrick and hearing aids invented there), CRC (Alouette satellites), cobalt 60 cancer therapy units, world’s first automated electronic post office.
Technology gave Ottawa a global reputation as a place of achievement and opportunity. But if there’s no buzz about tech — if the people promoting Ottawa’s economy don’t feature it — it implies there’s no tech sector worth talking about. Perception shades reality and morale in the sector is impacted, as well as enrolment at colleges and universities and ultimately economic growth. Tech is a light we shouldn’t be hiding under a bushel of economic newspeak.

January 09, 2012 09:48 PM          Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Nov. 28, 2011.)
There are a couple of things you may not know about the Jenkins Report — Innovation Canada: A Call To Action — which was released recently to much disdain and more yawns.
First, it wasn’t written by Tom Jenkins, chair of OpenText and of the panel that worked on the study. It was written by a team I’m tempted to call “the old guard,” except that such a label significantly understates its venerability. The pen was actually wielded by Peter Nicholson (right), an advisor to prime ministers and others back to and including John Turner. Lead researchers were John Curtis, first encountered in the late1970s when he was front man for the government’s run at regulatory reform, and Fred Gault, who was the S&T guru at StatCan until retirement a few years back.
Second, it doesn’t say what Tom Jenkins (below right) really thinks Canada needs in order to become more innovative and therefore more productive. Jenkins wrote what he really thinks a month before the report with his name on it was published. It’s in the September edition of Policy Options magazine and what he really thinks, to summarize ten pages of well-reasoned and very persuasive argument, is that Canada’s private sector has been protected long enough and must be opened to competition. Stacked against that macro-vision, the handful of recommendations in the Jenkins Report are inconsequential.
They are also controversial. To recalculate the way SRED credits are calculated. To set up a super coordinating agency within government. To elevate the minister of state for S&T to a real Minister for S&T. And my favourite, to reorganize the NRC. Recommendation No. 4: “Transform the institutes of the National Research Council (NRC) into a constellation of largescale, sectoral collaborative R&D centres involving business, the university sector and the provinces . . .”
Perhaps it escaped the notice of the Jenkins panel that Canada’s primary S&T agency is undergoing radical renovation even now under an enforcer from Edmonton, the first CEO at NRC to be appointed by the Conservative government. To remake it again within, say, the next decade would seem cruel punishment for several thousand highly skilled Canadian researchers who are trying to help Canadian industry stay technically hip.
That apart, the model that the report puts forward is remarkably like the Networks of Centres of Excellence. We know a great deal about NCEs because they’ve been around for more than twenty years. They’ve also been much promoted by the current government, almost as posters for its largely subliminal S&T policy. What is proposed essentially is to turn NRC into a “constellation of largescale” NCEs.
The distinguishing feature of the proposed NRC collaborative networks is that they would be largescale. The existing bunch of research networks, funded and overseen through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, get along on $2-$5 million a year. Presumably the transformed NRC centres would be an order of magnitude larger. This is in line with what’s going on already. NRC is allocating resources to projects bigger and better, in the eyes of the new CEO, than before.
The current remake will inevitably swing support to bigger enterprises at the expense of the small and medium-sized. The Jenkins Report talks the talk of support for SMEs, but in its walk around the NRC it stumbles into the same quandary. The nation needs big projects. Big projects need big players. Most Canadian players aren’t that big. Do we field imports and our few native stars? Or do we build for the future by supporting our up-and-comers? Sad to say, the brains trust behind the Jenkins Report has been unable to square this circle any better than the enforcer. The pity is they all have taken a jewel at the core of Canada’s S&T practice for their experimenting.

November 30, 2011 09:30 PM          Comments (0)    

By James G. Hynes

Canada is saying no yet again to a project our history suggests we should be eagerly embracing. Since January, governments in Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec City have been sitting on a report that updates previous studies of proposed high-speed rail (HSR) lines from Quebec City to Windsor. Officially, it’s still under wraps; it only became public last month through the efforts of an advocacy group, High Speed Rail Canada.
Having commissioned the report a couple of years ago at a media conference where they expressed bubbling enthusiasm for the HSR concept, why are these governments now so unenthusiastic about it? They’ve paid $3 million to the independent EcoTrain consortium to tell them something they already knew, but now they don’t want to hear it.
The cheery outlook changed over the time it took to get the report, during which all three governments proceeded to run up huge deficits stimulating a flagging economy, while also discovering new liabilities, like massively leaky water mains and crumbling bridges. So now they don’t want to be told that an HSR line from Montreal through Ottawa to Toronto would be profitable at a cost of $9.1 billion for 200-kilometre-per-hour trains, or $11 billion for the real thing, 300-k.p.h. all-electric trains. Stretching the lines east to Quebec City and west as far as Windsor wouldn’t pay for itself, but still might be worth it due to non-financial benefits, such as reduced air pollution and highway congestion, and greater all-weather safety.
So what’s not to like about this? Well, in a booming economy with government balance sheets in a heathy condition, it looks like a no-brainer. Assuming a public-private joint venture, as has been done with many HSR projects elsewhere, the project looks like a horse many a savvy politician might ride to electoral victory. But oops, now the cupboards are getting bare, and there are all sorts of newly hungry mouths to feed. What previously might have been easily done will now take something that has become exceedingly rare in this country: the vision and daring that once built the CPR.
Bombardier CEO Laurent Beaudoin, certainly a knowledgeable observer of this scene, put it succinctly. “To do that kind of project,” he said, “you need political will.” That’s what it took to push Canadian rails across this continent, creating what would otherwise be an impossible country. That gargantuan achievement put us in the forefront of railway technology, and made possible the economic ties that still bind us today. Now a Canadian company is still in the forefront, but Bombardier is building its trains everywhere but here.
Faced with this situation, what would John A. Macdonald have done? I think his response might have been different from Dalton McGuinty’s when he was asked about the HSR report. He said he thought it was time to “pause and reflect on the merits” of such a project. Fortunately for all of us today, John A. wasn’t much good at pausing and reflecting. He was too busy getting things done, come hell or high water. Click here to read more of Jim Hynes on the compelling case for Canadian high speed rail.

November 18, 2011 08:04 PM          Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

(Published originally in Ottawa Business Journal, Oct. 31, 2011.)
On the Monday after Bruce Lazenby (pictured right) was named the new president of OCRI I was speaking with one of the centurions of Ottawa’s newtech sector. This is a guy running a hundred million dollar private company heading for a billion. He’s still young but he was here in the heyday, a living, thriving reminder that Silicon Valley North wasn’t so long ago.
He hadn’t heard of the CEO turnover at OCRI. Lazenby? Never met him.
Before taking off to Florida, there to bronze his body and work his memoirs, Larry O’Brien spoke to a group of private business owners and CEOs assembled by the good consultants at Welch. Among some astute observations about business and politics, both of which he knows from the inside, O’Brien made the point that politics is all about short-term decision making. What will work before the next election? The big idea for the long term is a hard sell.
I was thinking that Mayor Jim Watson, our politician par excellence, has named himself co-chair of OCRI, which is in bad need of fixing. The early signs are not cheerful. The city has curtailed at least one OCRI program that was designed to mentor entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
I was lunching at the Manx with C.L., a peerless observer of Ottawa’s tech scene who would shudder to have his identity bandied in the tabloid press, when the conversation turned to reviving the tech sector. What will it take?
“Surely it’s all about leadership,” I said.
“Well maybe not all,” said C. L. Right. Leadership is just a part of the mix. But it’s the gaping part in the middle that went missing while Nortel, the pride of generations of Canada’s telecom engineers, was allowed to slide to oblivion. Nortel people asked no quarter of the best in the world of tech and they left behind the most valuable portfolio of intellectual property the world has ever seen. Who cared?
The genius that made Ottawa into Silicon Valley North is still here. But it’s milling about, doing its own thing, isolated from the local community. This is not surprising. More and more business is done internationally, where the markets are and suppliers and talent. It takes sixteen hour days to manage an enterprise on the run. Hard to keep all the home fires burning.
But that was always the case. John McLennan, who would later become president of both Bell and AT&T Canada, was a pioneer at Mitel with Terry Matthews and Mike Cowpland. At a breakfast meeting years ago he said “… we essentially travelled the world every month. Seven years in a row. And you did not do it necessarily because you wanted to get up and do it every morning. You did it because if this is what it took to win, you did it.”
One difference is that OCRI picked up the slack in those days. OCRI merged community interests through networking and research projects. OCRI was tech-specific, an original conception that inspired a host of imitations. But OCRI became a victim of its own success. As the bubble burst at the turn of the millennium and the tech community disintegrated, OCRI’s hands were filling with other worthy tasks.
Today a new troika is pulling the chariot. Mayor Watson and CEO Lazenby are joined by OCRI chair Jeff Westeinde, scion of the construction family. If they care to take us where the future is now, they'll turn back to tech.

November 01, 2011 02:04 PM          Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

The president of the National Research Council, which is now under renovation on his watch, is not entirely uncommunicative. When Canada’s establishment newsletter came calling, John McDougall made time. The reporter was thus able to lead his article by revealing Mr. McDougall’s “theory about why Canada doesn’t get full value out of the billions it pours into research."

The reporter explains that Mr. McDougall blames it on health care. He says that the country spends nearly half of its research dollars in an area that produces relatively few spinoff benefits because Canada isn’t a global player.
In 33 paragraphs summing up the new goals and style at the NRC the article (Globe and Mail, Aug. 6) devotes just two to the controversies surrounding this transformation, including complaints that Mr. McDougall lacks qualification (no Ph.D.), that he favours technology with western application (he’s from Edmonton) and that he is steering the publicly funded research council toward projects “in areas he put his own money as a private investor.” None of this is explored. It’s passed off with, “Mr. McDougall is unapologetic.”
Perhaps he’ll apologize for leading the reporter astray about health care research. Canada does not spend anywhere close to half its research dollars there. The last reported number (2007) was 22% and that had been teetering downward for years. Spending in 2007 was marginally below spending in five of the prior seven years.
Mr. McDougall told the Globe that “We don’t have a health industry, other than a consuming one. So it’s not really a surprise we don’t get much out of it.” (Mr. McDougall isn’t surprised we don’t get much out of university research, either.)
Of the total health research spend, $6.3 billion in 2007, about a quarter was spent by industry developing bio-genetic-pharma medical treatments and devices. Presumably these companies are spending the money with some expectation of return. Well over a quarter ($1.7 billion) went to higher education, principally teaching hospitals to train doctors.
Presumably it is the remainder of the total spend on health care research that “produces relatively few spinoff benefits,” in Mr. McDougall’s view. But this amounts to only about 10% of public and private spending on research, not the “nearly fifty percent” that the NRC president cites as a primary reason to change the agenda and culture at the venerable council.

August 07, 2011 07:51 PM          Comments (0)    

By Tony Patterson

“The President of the National Research Council has declined your request for an interview.”
No surprise. Not a whole lot of people have seen — let alone interviewed — John McDougall since he took control at Canada’s primary pump for science and technology a little over a year ago.

But I won’t say I wasn’t miffed. I’ve been looking at a picture of John on my wall for more than a dozen years.
Fact is, he’s not around Ottawa as much as most. He and his 2-i/c Ian Potter, who has been installed as VP Engineering, commute from Edmonton to Ottawa, where NRC has its headquarters and its history and where billions worth of S&T firepower is housed and maintained by teams that include all manner of Canada’s best and brightest, not excepting rocket scientists. He’s building a big house in the provincial capital, where his family is entrenched in the real estate business.
Here or there, Mr. McDougall is intent on remaking NRC in an image he’s held in mind for a number of years. It’s an image he pushed toward conclusion on his home turf, until he pushed too hard and got himself turfed out.
Mr. McDougall’s vision is to make NRC a “purposeful outcome based organization” that will “generate significant incremental third party revenues.” The quotes are from an internal memo circulated in March. He intends this will happen by reshaping the organization from 25 research institutes focused on serving emerging technological frontiers (photonics, nanotech, biotech) and the needs and problems of specific industrial sectors (construction, surface transportation, chemical processing), into a handful of “flagship programs” that will target major national challenges.
In essence, human and financial resources that have been allocated in dozens of directions until now will be re-allocated to fewer, larger programs. More decisions will be made by senior management rather than at the level of the institutes. (One director general, Dr. Nils Petersen who led the National Institute for Nanotechnology, based in Edmonton, resigned shortly after the McDougall March memo.)
A primary objective of the re-org is to triple revenues from the private sector to $150 million annually. It’s well understood that accomplishing this must mean winning contracts for work that currently is done for industry in university labs.
Plucking resources from academic researchers is no sin in Mr. McDougall’s philosophy. He’s on record that, “We are investing all our innovation resources on academic or curiosity-driven research which is not wise under any circumstances and particularly misguided when Canada has a huge gap to close to reach even average innovation performance levels. . . There really should be no surprise that there is low, or slow, take up of academic research by the markets when, in most cases, no one asked for the research in the first place.”

July 25, 2011 04:28 PM     More     Comments (1)    

By James G. Hynes

(Editor's Note: Less than six months after this prescient note from Jim Hynes, the Conservative government announced that "workforce transition" costs associated with the deal would cost $285 million this fiscal year.)
How about the whopping $15 million the feds are getting as a return on the Canadian taxpayers' 60-year, $21-billion investment in cash-sucking AECL? Is this really and truly the end of a boondoggle so massive and long-lasting it's become part of the nation's geography, the financial equivalent of Niagara Falls? Shovelling another few hundred million dollars into AECL every year has been a necessary seasonal evil for decades, like shovelling the driveway in January. But now it's gone...sort of.

SNC Lavalin will quickly prune the tree to a more modest size, concentrating on the refurbishment of existing reactors, where there may actually be some money to be made under better management. But what about new reactors? Will the new owners keep chasing rainbows as a bit player in a field where even the multinational biggies find it hard to make ends meet? Ontario Power Generation has been playing hard to get over a deal for two new AECL reactors, but now the shoe is suddenly on the other foot; OPG — it's Darlington nuclear plant is pictured here — may be left in the lurch, if AECL's new owners decide not to continue that high-cost, high-risk, low-or-no-return part of the business. That would send OPG shopping among the big Franco-German and Japanese-American providers, a move with bad political optics and worse financial consequences for OPG, out shopping with no more federal taxpayers trailing behind, moneybags in hand. So what will happen? A deal will get done so AECL will end up building two more reactors for OPG after all. And guess whose money will provide the big, fat risk-reduction cushions required to make it happen? The AECL vampire will probably live on, still sucking taxpayers' blood, only we won't own it anymore. We'll just keep providing the free lunch after dark.

July 06, 2011 05:44 PM          Comments (2)