(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.

(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.

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.

(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.

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.

“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.”

(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.

I was out walking the canal on the first day of the tulip festival. It was the start of a rainy spell, the air damp chilled. I was all alone out there of a Saturday. The tourists had opted for room service and snuggling up. The flowers were just starting to open and would be in full blossom in a week.

In the late days of the festival they were wilted but still a kaleidoscope of colour though wet and cool continued in the weeks after my walk. The Bollywood film program would be cancelled “due to inclement weather” on India Day. But it’s not foul weather that tolls the last gasps of this traditional celebration of spring and welcome for the summer oncoming. Public indifference will kill it. The city doesn’t care. NCC gives the festival no financial support. Saved from bankruptcy five years ago, the festival has responded by dropping $2 million since.
I passed the polished stone tribute to Doug Fullerton and thought of Ottawa’s other weather-plagued festival. It was Doug who invented the Rideau Canal Skateway, the longest skating rink in the world, which led to Winterlude, which led to god only knows how much wealth for Ottawa merchants. Not only that. Fullerton, an affable economist who had put the Canada Council on a sound financial footing as its investment guru before being handed responsibility for the NCC, understood the importance of people and spaces in urban planning. He conceived and had built, I quote from his stone near Patterson Creek, "the network of recreational pathways that weave their way through the National Capital Region, uniquely linking waterways, green spaces and the urban core." Hard to believe he only held the job for four years, 1969-73.
Then I thought of David Luxton, who rescued the tulip festival when it was about to go under a few years back and has been its moral centre as well as its chief idea guy ever since.
Not that he’s around a lot. The last time I had seen him was over a year before. As we were chatting, he excused himself while he took a few brief calls. He spoke in English, French, German and Arabic. He was spending much of his time in Afghanistan and other exotic places. He often moved, he mentioned, in a convoy of armored vehicles. He’s not an arms dealer. More an anti-arms dealer. It just happened that when the weapon of choice for terrorists became the improvised explosive device (IED), David Luxton had the antidote — electronic gear that jams cellphone-triggered improvised bombs. Not a hundred percent effective, of course. This is war after all and a hundred and fifty five Canadians have died, almost two out of three of them as the result of IED explosions. But there could be hundreds more casualties, and thousands more in other armies now engaged, without the kind of protection David’s company provides.

He died pretty much alone, in one of those places where people go to die. They call it palliative care. His shriveling body he willed to science so there was no burial, no ceremony. He called himself Roberto. He had no kids, wife gone decades before.

Six days before he died he hosted a party for himself in the apartment overseeing the gates of Mount Pleasant where he lived the final fifth of his eighty three years. The call went to friends near and far, new and old. A crew that must be called motley if that word has any meaning, numbering perhaps four or five dozen through the six hours the party lasted, gathered around. Some sang and danced a bit, though there wasn’t much room. Some brought rare single malt, some brought pot, for which Roberto had medical permission. Nobody else had permission, other than his, but that didn't inhibit their using.
And the emails! The calls! Pierre Juneau phoned. Pierre Juneau!!! Tell me you knew he was still living in the land! Well he is and the old mandarin wants Roberto, whom he knew as Bob Russel way back when they were something of a team until a media misstep tripped them up, to do something for him. Juneau wants Bob to send whatever papers and speeches he has kept to his biographer. The great public servant, inventor of the CanCon solution, saint of the eponymous Junos, now eighty eight, is getting a book.
“Well deserved,” said Bob, and of course he had preserved everything. It was part of history now. At one time it was fodder for the futurist and mandarins with the courage to hear.
(It occurs to me that there will be some readers who are not Canadian, more's their pity. They will be unfamiliar with some cultural policies peculiar to Canada. Elucidation of some of it is provided at the end of the piece. Press More below.)

(In the photo Bob Russel is at right, the artist Mary Daemen at left during their years living high in the Manulife Tower on Bloor, around the corner from the Windsor Arms when that was the place in T.O. to be seen. Yours truly is in the middle. Mary and Bridget, my late wife, were sisters. Bob and Mary didn’t marry but he always referred to us as brothers-in-common-law. On the wall can be seen one of Bob’s unique methods of idea mapping.)

There were some odd birds about at the party. There was a fellow who said Roberto had known about a lot of stuff before any of the rest of us. He was writing about laptop computers, for instance — the electronic briefcase he called it —in the 1960s. He was writing about the pending economic bioshift just a week before his farewell party.
In the 1980s he had written a book called Winning The Future. It was a cause of no little annoyance as he was dying that American politicians were mangling the meaning of a phrase Bob felt some entitlement to. After all, isn’t that what title means?
“As you know,” he wrote to me in March (I didn’t), “Newt Gingrich, who recently published a book called WINNING THE FUTURE, is planning to run against Pres. Obama on behalf of the Republican party (should he get their nomination).

This piece was first published in September 2006, just after Ontario put out $46 million in grants for various tech initiatives, "a smidgeon of which comes to OCRI." The money was to be dispensed by OCE and MaRS. What follows is the gist of what could be foreseen five years ago:

Then the premier of the province, The Honourable Dalton McGuinty, was given an award as "personailty of the year", partly for promoting research and innovation in Ontario. This honour, bestowed by by an obscure British financial publication, seems to have come the Premier's way because he named himself head of the new provincial ministry of research and innovation. A senior bureaucrat, whose continued employment depends on anonymity, allowed as how "McGuinty spoke in Chicago and there just happened to be a reporter there from the magazine."

What is it said about a woman scorned? Hell hath no fury? That’s probably hyperbole. But you have to watch out when she’s not happy.

Shirley Westeinde was not happy when OCRI and OCEDCO merged. (For the benefit of readers who don’t live in Ottawa, more’s their pity, I will unravel the acronyms at the end of this article. Simply press More below.) That was eleven years ago. I was writing a column for OBJ at the time and I gave the merger a cautious benefit of the doubt. There were reasons that could be put forward in its favour and I allowed that “a takeover of OED by OCRI may be a good thing. There is a spirit to OCRI, a dynamic that will transform the economic development process for Ottawa, which has lingered in the doldrums lo these many years.
“OCRI rocks. It is a unique and precious creation, the envy of jurisdictions in Canada and beyond that are seeking the secrets of cluster building.

GreenCentre Canada, a Queen's U initiative, reaches a significant milestone as the number of invention disclosures it has received tops one hundred.
Founded by PARTEQ Innovations at Queen’s just 14 months ago year ago, GreenCentre Canada (GCC) has received more than $20 million from Ontario and from the federal government, which has designated it a National Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research. To date the centre has attracted a total of 110 technologies from chemists and researchers at 25 academic institutions across nine provinces.
GCC is trying to de-risk and commercialize early-stage green chemistry discoveries generated by academic researchers and industry. These technology disclosures are the first step in identifying promising new green chemistry innovations.
Technologies brought to GCC undergo a 90-day review process by an in-house committee of industry and commercialization experts. To date, 15 technologies have been recommended for further development. Three additional technologies have also been granted funding for further early development work under GreenCentre’s in-house Proof-of-Principle program, with five more funding announcements pending.
GCC maintains that its commercialization model is unique for the way that it involves industry partners in governance and in the decision-making process about which green technologies are selected for development. Its arguments in this regard appear to have been persuasive in attracting some impressive private sector sponsorship. Among the industry partners are Ford Motor, Nova Chemical and the Paris-based global leader in water treatment, Veolia Water Solutions and Technologies.