Coming Soon: the $500 Entrepreneur

It's easy to start a business in Canada. But how easy is it to make it last?

That depends on whether you have a good business plan, a good marketing plan, you know your market and the viability of your product, and have justified why you think you can more than 'cover' your expenses.

When you add sufficient startup funds and analyze possible problems in advance so that surprises are eliminated, you have fulfilled the keys to launching a successful business and joining the ranks of the entrepreneur.

Economists are saying that the way things are going, 20 percent of working Canadians are expected to be self-employed within five years. Many of them are disenchanted with short stints of 'long-term job security'.

But economists also say that only 20 percent of small businesses last more than two years.

Being your own boss offers up some pretty big challenges, not the least of which is holding your focus (i.e., Business Plan) while avoiding energy-sapping entanglements.

One has to learn to be a "jack of all trades" to launch a business in a first-class kind of way, according to Andrew Patricio, an entrepreneur par excellence from South Africa whose new business in Toronto, BizLaunch, teaches people how to start businesses and run them successfully.

"Many people get a great idea, get some funding, set themselves up quickly and then find they can't pay expenses because of dwindling cash flow," says Patricio.

"If you've come directly from a corporate environment where you didn't pick up certain essential entrepreneurial skills, you may be a $100,000 disaster waiting to happen."

Patricio wonders why people in small businesses don't prepare their skills just as plumbers and carpenters do, and he has credentials to prove that the concept of skill development is completely valid.

With 20 years of entrepreneurial experience in his back pocket, he has launched and sold six separate companies in South Africa involving supermarket retail and distribution, a restaurant, training, consulting, peanut wholesaling and a plant nursery.

During all of these activities he kept boosting his knowledge, fine-tuned his entrepreneurial skills and became an international conference speaker, not of the inspirational kind but of the skills-and-training variety.

Patricio found time to write the top-seller Up & Running -- A Guide to Running Your Own Business. Meanwhile, he was lecturing and training in Canada, Russia, Portugal, Sweden, Korea, Northern Ireland, Netherlands, Namibia and South Africa, including engagements worldwide at International Small Business Congress sessions.

He is famous as a business coach to more than 2,000 entrepreneurs and, reportedly, hundreds of millionaires. In fact, he trained the three 'Business Woman of the Year' winners of South Africa from 2001 to 2003.

Now Patricio is in Canada, having moved here 21 months ago and joined with a new business partner, Roger Pierce. Based on what he's seen and experienced here, he's sold on becoming a Canadian.

"I'm having great fun, teaching entrepreneurs in Toronto area and showing them how to have fun. It's vibrant."

In order to maintain and increase his enjoyment, Patricio insists that students and graduates use his "BizCoaching for Life" service, in which they keep in touch with him (and the instructors) even long after they've started their businesses. The reason: he hates to see a problem fester in a business without getting a chance to help fix it.

With his problem-solving business experience, the "fix" could be a simple statement or question by phone or email, or more tutoring on an intricate business issue.

After a couple of years, BizLaunch has many examples of newly launched businesses. In Mississauga, for example:

"Iwanna B" is a business that stages charade-type, special parties for kids who act out roles they fantasize about; a website design business was set up and is running well; a software product was launched which maps a company's client base and quickly delivers the shortest street route; "Brainamania" was launched as a spelling game for kids, like Scrabble but more lively and effective; a heating and air-conditioning business whose owner took the course to boost it; and a "Bombshell" lip-gloss product that's undergoing launch and financing.

"One of the key classes we provide is on how to get financing," says Patricio, "and this involves ongoing, post-course coaching in some cases."

The standard, 30-hour BizLaunch course costing $495 has chapter titles very familiar to the business world. They include how-to lectures on creating a business model, making decisions, focusing the marketing strategy, and developing a strong business plan.

Course attendees include people who've run businesses for up to five years, and people who don't even have a business idea. The business sections of local newspapers have run numerous articles (especially in weekend editions) on unique new companies that have emerged from BizLaunch training seminars.

There are many lures in the BizLaunch course, including where to find money, pricing the product, developing brand names, registering, managing time, and staying motivated.

Currently about a hundred students per month are trained and let loose into the business world, says Patricio, "and the response is terrific, because people realize that when they pay for something rather than taking freebees from government-run programs, something will come of it."

An offshoot of the main syllabus is the BizLaunch Program for Women which focuses on many gender-specific issues women face, such as balancing family and work, handling child care, building professional credibility, and dealing with negative family support.

For potential entrepreneurs who still want a few freebees before developing a business idea, BizLaunch runs two free, 90-minute seminars per month at various Indigo Book Stores around the GTA. The last two were at Eaton Centre and Bay-Bloor.

For the main courses, one is presently underway Saturdays at the Halton Enterprise Centre in Oakville, one starts June 1st at the North York Community Hall in Toronto, and the third runs Saturdays at Markham Community Centre beginning June 25th.

A surprising number of people under 30 are taking a keen interest in running their own business. In fact, according to Patricio's partner Roger Pierce, "They make up 30 percent of new business ventures, and typically they start by negotiating contract work in the service sector."

A caution Pierce frequently throws at fledgling entrepreneurs is: "Beware the perils of insufficient cash flow, because it can take you under."

Another piece of advice from Pierce: "Don't rush, but ease into it. Maintaining some outside income while you organize, launch and incubate your business will boost your success."

Pierce is no stranger to entrepreneur training in Ontario. His biography reads like Patricio's: seven businesses under his belt, a passionate launching coach and seminar-giver, a champion of programs such as Junior Achievement, COIN, the Youth Business Centre, YMCA and the Toronto Junior CoC, and a widely known columnist and talk-show guest.

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Fasken: Help Us Develop Brownfields

Redevelopment of brownfield sites in Mississauga and elsewhere in Ontario requires some bold, new strategies, according to Mitchell Fasken, president of Jannock Properties.

Brownfield sites -- abandoned and contaminated industrial properties -- are subject to increasingly complicated regulations for developers who would like to build on them. Mr. Fasken, who is called a "brownfields guru" by many of Mississauga's land developers and municipal officials, is disturbed about a new set of Ontario government regulations that will have negative impact on utilizing them.

Tackling the brownfield sites entails a "broad venue of municipal and regulatory approvals," he says, "including site remediation and approvals, official plan amendments, draft and secondary plans for subdivision, servicing and engineering agreements, and project financing."

Fasken is chairman of the Urban Development Institute's brownfields committee, and redeveloper of Mississauga's 182-acre Cooksville quarry at Mavis Rd. and Dundas St. The 60-acre quarry-and-brickworks site in Streetsville also is about to undergo first phase of redevelopment. Over the past 10 years he has built projects in Arizona, Texas, Hamilton, Kitchener and Burlington.

The new (in June) document called Ontario EPA Regulation 153-04 covering brownfield sites is a backword step, according to Fasken. There aren’t a lot of brownfield sites in cities as young as Mississauga, and the city has not moved into a brownfields strategy because it’s not a major priority.

But there are a few major exceptions that need attention. The Imperial Oil refinery site at the bottom of Credit River lies completely dormant, while the old Armory site at the foot of Dixie Rd., held jointly by the city, Peel Region and federal government, is earmarked for cleanup.

The first problem with brownfield redevelopment involves who pays, or should pay for the cleanup. Most people agree that it’s the polluter who should pay. Coming second, says Fasken, is the difficulty in obtaining final closure or approvals after cleanup. Thirdly, if a purchaser can't be certain he won't be sued over contamination in the years to come, liability becomes the issue, with litigation lawyers sitting on the fence.

Fasken supports the "polluter pays" principle and believes that purchasers of brownfield sites should be given a "liability holiday" to help overcome the obstacle of regulatory liability. He calls on the federal and provincial governments to revise tax rules and allow for the expensing of remediation costs.

“Liabilities are the biggest barrier not so far addressed adequately by any government. The problem rears its head at the time when you reach the site-decommissioning stage.”

Issued by the Environment ministry in June, the new regulations come into effect in October. Their intent was to clarify and legislate the procedures for documenting the “record of site conditions”, and for clean-ups leading to decommissioning. “Their effect,” says Fasken, “is to move the process backwards, increasing the uncertainties having to do with liability, possibly freezing sites like Imperial Oil’s for even more years to come. If no-one is prepared to release liability, you’re on the hook forever.”

“The regulation doesn’t put performance standards into actuality. Everything appears to be enacted by regulation, rather than by clearcut policies such as those of the Municipal Affairs ministry. It’s a tough read for a 65-page document. It has ineffective transition provisions. For instance, the usefulness of existing site-condition records has been removed.

“We’ve been working on a site-specific risk assessment for the past 18 months in a Kitchener project, but the new regulations will force us to start over if we’re not finished it by October, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. “

Jannock Properties, with active projects in Hamilton and Kitchener, has virtually completed the Cooksville quarry redevelopment costing more than $100-million and including a residential subdivision, a Loblaws, a Home Depot and an elementary school.

Says Fasken: “Projects like these bring big value to municipalities. The cleanup cost, involving site decommissioning and regrading into 'greenfield' status, was about $15.5-million. These costs are mostly for fill management, testing, consulting fees, and minimal disposal activity.”

Brownfield redevelopment has become what Fasken calls a “high-tech” field. “Although many of the smaller sites such as the Credit Landing commercial-residential complex on Lakeshore Rd. are easily processed, local developers now are moving into sites with much-more-difficult contaminants. PCE, for instance, is a dry-cleaning solvent but its threshold is only 5 parts/billion, or virtually impossible to measure. Even if they’re not a very high toxic risk, these contaminants require more creative solutions of chemical treatment, soil management and so on. The old dig-and-dump system of 25 years ago isn't valid anymore.”

Growth Management has become the buzz phrase ever since the Ontario goverment introduced the Brownfield Statute Amendment Act in 2001, according to Ed Sajecki, the Commissioner of Planning for the City of Mississauga.

“The government is now offering initiatives to promote the brownfields because they are well served by the municipal infrastructure of roads, public transit, sewers and watermains. Of course they prevent a certain amount of urban sprawl and are cost-efficient by making use of otherwise-derelict sites.

Mr. Sajecki hopes the new legislation will deal more effectively with liabilities by clarifying them and making developers less reluctant to invest. He believes that the new regulations should fix some liability issues and solve some of the problems of documenting soil conditions at the sites.

Projects like Fram’s residential-commercial development on the lakeshore at Hurontario St. are part of a major trend in North America to reuse old industrial properties near the hearts of cities. “Brownfield cleanups offer major enhancements to the community, particularly if new legislation supports the concept," says Sajecki.

The Ontario government, speaking through Environment Minister Leona Dombrowsky, said the new regulations covering brownfields will open up “vast tracts” of reusable and already serviced land.

And perhaps – if only because the original polluters weren’t forced to clean up their mess -- the Municipal Affairs and Housing ministry may help municipalities offer tax breaks and/or deferrals to brownfield developers. “That remains to be seen,” according to MA&H minister John Gerretsen, who joined Ms. Dombrowsky at the podium in June.

For owners: an easier way to accommodate expansion

In the everyday world of construction, a quality-control specialist from the architects’ office walks onto a building site with a clipboard full of forms and “specs”, and leaves the site two hours later with some bad news for the contractor, whose knees were trembling in advance.

“The gauge of steel for the mezzanine support-columns is a quarter-inch it’s supposed to be three-eighths; it’s below spec and won’t hold the weight. People could be killed.”

There seems to have been a communication problem. Who pays to have the whole thing torn down? Who sues? Can these mistakes and bad-blood developments be prevented?

In the ‘60s the “turnkey contractor” was alive and well, in the namesakes of Montreal Engineering and Austin Co., among others, who were “at-risk” for delivering the promised product and the front-door key. They hired architects and engineers to join the team, and worked to a common goal. Turnkey contracting was seen typically in major public-works projects such as power plants or “third-world” resource projects.

A new ‘wave’ of turnkey builders is on the scene and growing. They’re called Design-Builders. Although individual contracts can range from $100,000 to a billion or more, the typical size is much smaller than those of turnkey builders.

For companies that are expanding, the design-build method carries benefits in timing, cost and red tape. All parties in a construction project including architects, engineers and trade contractors can reap advantages such as cost savings, enhanced efficiency and a higher-quality outcome.

In design-build, every target is the onus of a single entity: the DB contractor or partnership. That includes cost caps, quality standards, and deadlines. Miscommunication – except briefly between some individuals – becomes less common, and the project usually forges ahead as if it had been well organized.

This understanding, of total accountability, usually results in the design-build firm’s having no option but to deliver the product “to spec” and on time. In conventional projects, owners guarantee the accuracy of drawings to contractors, but here, the design-build firm guarantees accuracy to owners.

In a design-build project, total turnaround can be reduced significantly because extended bidding periods and redesigning are largely eliminated. “Fast-track” methods work better in this environment, and construction can take less time thanks to better cost controls and scheduling. The owner or lessee does not carry the burden of arbitrating between architects, engineers and contractors.

Another advantage is that accurate cost estimates, according to design-build spokesmen, are available much earlier than in non-design-build projects. This also results in go-ahead decisions taking place long before substantial funds are spent (sometimes wasted) on preliminary designs.

Separate disciplines interacting in a common goal can reduce the number of “errors and omissions” that result in extra costs. Architects become more aware of the constructability of their designs, and the DB contractor is more aware of what the architects have asked for.

The Canadian Construction Association (CCA) in 1998 organized a committee to oversee the rising wave of design-build projects. This committee, the Canadian Design-Build Institute (CDBI), with offices in Ottawa, promotes the concept and tries to educate members on “best practices” and proper design-build methods.

CDBI members are mostly architects, engineers and contractors (and some owners) who are involved in design-build projects.

The institute helped develop a standard builder/consultant contract. A task force has produced national guidelines and policies, and CDBI has published a Design Build Practice Manual. Also, CDBI speaks for its members internationally and is involved in creating a worldwide design-build organization, or discipline.

According to Tim Stanley, CDBI’s chairman, “There is still a lot more to come with new programs and initiatives to launch. Design-build has become a vital part of the construction industry and is growing rapidly.”

In a major survey conducted by the U.S. version of CDBI – well, actually, CDBI is a Canadian version of the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) – 70% of the members said their design-build projects are more profitable than traditional bid-and-build contracts.

Some of the more-experienced design-build firms expect 80% of their revenues to come from design-build contracts by 2015. Ordinary construction companies among the members estimated this percentage at 50%, which would be a major increase nonetheless.

CDBI, now seven years old, established an awards program in 2002 to recognize outstanding design-build projects. “Recipients of this award have demonstrated the highest standards of the design-build discipline,” according to Dianna Fournier of the Canadian Construction Association (CCA).

Last year at CDBI’s National Design-Build Conference, two projects were honoured for design-build awards, the winner being Montreal Convention Centre’s major expansion, and the runner-up being Ricoh Coliseum’s renovation at Exhibition Place built by PCL Constructors. The Ricoh main hall’s interior, of course, is the site of “The Lake”, an internationally unique “in-the-water” section of the Toronto International Boat Show held just last month (and since drained).

PCL Constuctors also won a 2003 design-build award from CDBI for the Infield Terminal project at Pearson International. The company now is just about Canada’s largest construction company and a major design-build entity as well. PCL’s specialty is construction management, which entails less ownership of capital equipment and minimal direct employment of construction trades.

“Projects like Pearson’s Infield Terminal,” according to CDBI chairman Randy Dhar, “show us big improvements in quality, innovation, aesthetics and functionality that result from designers and contractors performing in the same team.”

One of Canada’s oldest design-build firms is Orlando Corporation, who has been engaged in development of industrial, office and retail buildings for 70 years and currently manages about 32-million square feet of real estate.

The company likes to call it “vertically integrated real-estate development services”, which is the original turnkey technique of starting from scratch and ultimately handing over the door key. In between, the tasks involve site selection, planning, design, engineering, building, financing, leasing, and management.

Orlando, from its head office in Mississauga, has helped shape Canada’s corporate environment with the concept of business parks. It currently owns and manages 2,500 acres of them in the GTA, and especially in Brampton and Mississauga.

A current Orlando development is the 500-acre Winston Business Community, northwest of Steeles Ave. and Mississauga Rd., that ultimately will host workplaces for 10,000 in eight-million square feet of industrial and office space, including massive distribution centres and high-rise structures.

On the Winston site, Orlando is building a 430,000-square-foot Loblaws office structure, and a distribution centre of almost the same size for General Mills.

Says Douglas Garrigan, Orlando’s president: “We’ve been involved in design-build for a long time but we see a trend away from its typical format, and more into the big-box scale that offers more flexibility and expansion potential for the clients and tenants.

“Design-build can be restrictive, in that buildings are too specialized to accommodate rapid changes in markets and economies.”

Not completely by choice, Orlando lately has moved into “big-box”, speculative projects in the 200-500,000-square-foot range. “They are more convenient for tenants, in part because government and corporate approvals are taking too long on the smaller, specialized buildings where tenants or owners may feel locked in.”

Another of Canada’s largest construction companies, Ellis-Don Construction Ltd. is a familiar name around the GTA and in Brampton, where the company with its “P3 partnership” has broken ground for the city’s $460-million William Osler Health Centre.

Bob Smith, Ellis-Don’s design-build vice-president, says design-builders enjoy the advantage of all parties in the construction project getting intricately involved with each other. The team rules above the individuals.

“Everyone gets input. They speak their mind, and somebody invariably comes up with a good idea, which could easily result in an innovation.”

Two developers, Higgins Development Partners of Chicago and Mississauga, and Shipp Corporation of Mississauga, are partners in office-and-industrial projects on the 200-acre Gateway Centre in Mississauga, which has an ultimate capacity of 2.6-million square feet of floor space for distribution-and-office users.

Delis Lus, vice-president, development for Higgins, says “Design-build brings significant advantages to owners or end-users but also some serious financial risks for the design-build firm. The end-user gets his project built faster with generally fewer conflicts and at a guaranteed price. He reaps the experience of professionals without spending any major up-front money, whereas in conventional projects the owner starts by hiring consultants.

“The design-build firm, on the other hand, has to invest in the design process without knowing if the owner will buy it, and this is the competitive nature of the market right now.”

He cautions owners, however: “They may not know precisely what they’re getting, and expectations may end up being compromised due to the design-builder’s cost controls.”

A good example of design-build partnerships is Peel and York Regions’ $34-million Airport Road Reservoir and Pumping Station in Brampton that soon will be supplying about 100,000 gallons of water per day to York.

With GTA in a population explosion, reliable water sources are becoming more critical. Peel chose a fast-track, design-build solution to get the job done. Design-builder Kenaidan Contracting Ltd. of Mississauga was chosen alongside its design subcontractor, MacViro Consultants of Markham, to build the one-acre reservoir, pumping station, surge tank and fuel-storage facilities.

The Airport Road reservoir was in Peel’s Master Plan but the mains to York were not. York gets its water from Toronto and Lake Simcoe, but now has a new water-supply partner in Peel. In turn, Peel has a 50% funding partner in York, who also will pay Peel some $60-million between now and 2031 to buy the “surplus”.

Kenaidan’s design-build contract was a first for Peel Region, but one of many public works projects that have turned to the design-build framework in recent years. According to waterworks manager Anthony Parente, it didn’t take long after drafting the contract documents before construction got underway – in late 2003. He said the request for proposals did double duty as the official contract-requirements document, but Peel was able to keep its waterworks standards.

Kenaidan was able to carry out planning activities long before all drawings were finished, and work progressed with very few owner-initiated changes – “in other words, smoothly in spite of the numerous and complex equipment installations that were required,” said Kenaidan spokesman Mani Rupra.

“Having everyone at the same table for decision-making was a tremendous advantage for error-avoidance,” said Parente.

Another firm that has developed a clientele for design-build projects is Dineen Construction Ltd. of Toronto. Dineen is active on Brampton’s industrial-commercial construction scene.

Gottardo Construction of Woodbridge, Ont. is a recent convert to design-build in the GTA. Michael Mitterhuber is Gottardo’s new Design-Build vice-president with B.Tech., M.Arch. and OAA behind his name; it’s an indication of the skill sets demanded by a full-blown design-build environment.

Says Mitterhuber: “The fact that owners of new commercial and industrial building projects have no upfront costs when dealing with true design-build firms makes us very attractive. Not only that; with hardly any risks taken, the owners usually get to move in on time, or even early.

“But few of the new D-B firms are prepared to make the investment required to offer full designing, site-planning building and project-management services to a client while also guaranteeing a price. Many of our design expenditures are speculative.

“As a general contractor expanding into design-build,” he concluded, “Gottardo had to take a big look at the investments, responsibilities and risks involved.”

Cooper Construction Ltd., for decades a major contractor out of Hamilton, began its design-build focus in the ‘80s by buying up industrial land in Brampton, Mississauga, Oakville and Etobicoke and offering design-build packages for turnkey-style commissioning. In addition to commercial and industrial buildings, Cooper builds private schools, parking garages and specialized structures.

Belrock Design Build Inc. of Concord, Ont. has collected an impressive list of clients in southern Ontario for its wide range of design-build services. These clients include: Loblaws, K-Mart, Magna, Canadian Tire, Fuji Film, Sun Life and Home Depot.

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Truckers Hang on With 3% Margins

Canada’s 50-billion-dollar trucking industry, employing about 400,000 and handling about 65 percent of all trade with the U.S., is reeling from problems aggravated by sky-high fuel prices.

The “rack” price that truckers pay for diesel fuel is in lock-step with the volatile price of crude oil, which dropped to $47 by May 20th after flirting with the $60 level over the past few months. Meanwhile, trucking companies are trying to recoup losses suffered while they were teaching their customers – and themselves – to get used to the idea of fuel surcharges.

David Bradley, president of Ontario Trucking Association (OTA), has traveled North America to deliver this awareness message to trucking associations, and has discovered that Ontario truckers have plenty of company in their fuel-cost and other woes. OTA now publishes a newsletter aimed at shippers and carriers in North America.

Global petroleum consumption is approaching 90-million barrels and is rising by about 2.2 percent yearly. North America and Europe account for about 52 percent of consumption at a 10-percent-rising rate.

Lower fuel prices have kept North Americans in their fuel-hungry mode. According to Statistics Canada and Quebec’s Ministry of Transportation, Europe had more than 40 hybrid automobile models achieving at least 20 kilometers per liter before Canada saw its first showroom model.

But for Ontario truckers, average rack prices for diesel have risen from 37 cents in 2001 to 50 cents during the first half of 2005. Over the past five years there have been two major peaks, of 45 and 47 cents respectively, but the peak of 51 cents last month shows signs of turning downward.

While most operators have learned how to negotiate consistent, crude-price-based fuel surcharges with their customers, shortages of equipment and manpower have prompted some of them to barter with the surcharges by favouring customers willing to pay more.

Fuel is no small cost for transport companies: it averages 6-8 percent of total operating costs for short-haul companies but 17-25 percent for the long-haul major carriers. Simple math tells us that if fuel is a 20-percent cost factor and profit margin is only 4.0 percent, then a 25-percent fuel increase will put your company in the red.

The new surcharges are based on the rack price of fuel (crude-oil plus refining plus a small supplier markup), and they are becoming the norm in the transportation industry. According to Stephen Laskowski, OTA’s assistant vice-president, they have saved the industry’s rock-bottom profits from dwindling to zero.

Typical customers of transport companies enjoy 10-percent ROIs, he says, “but since 1991 our best quarterly return [for a member of OTA] was six percent before taxes. Our industry has no room to give.”

“Capital costs have soared in recent years and are still going up,” says Laskowski. “But four years ago the fuel costs made everything worse. The fuel surcharge had to come, and this message, to customers and truckers alike, took time to deliver.

“There is no standard formula for calculating fuel surcharges because every contract environment is different, but transport contracts have to recover the extra costs. Profit margins simply can’t absorb them.”

Robert Hall, a vice-president with Canada Cartage System Ltd. who tracks fuel usage, confirms that transport companies have different surcharge rates to customers and different contract stipulations, but all methods are designed to recover, or even refund, unexpected fluctuations in the cost of fuel.

Canada Cartage has bases in Mississauga, Montreal and Whitby for its fleet of nearly 900 tractors and 1,200 trailers. “We, and most of Ontario’s major carriers, have surcharge arrangements with our independent operators (jobbers) so that they aren’t stuck with cost increases, and we collect them as surcharges to our customers,” said Hall.

In Vancouver in April, a convoy of anywhere from 300 to 600 owner-operators and their semis blocked traffic in a protest against rising fuel costs which they can’t recoup because of firm contracts they hold with the carriers. This convoy, organized by the Vancouver Container Truck Association, apparently failed to attract the federal and provincial government attention they seek, in spite of looming bankruptcies and up to $1,500 per month in extra fuel costs for a typical owner-operator, according to Don McGill, a Teamster’s Union spokesman.

SALES TAXES

Ontario hosts up to 40 percent of Canada’s trucking industry, and 75 percent of Ontario’s U.S. trade is handled by Ontario trucking firms, if only because the province is a major net exporter. The U.S. accounts for 80 percent of Canada’s foreign trade, as witnessed by approximately 13-million national border crossings per year.

In spite of the numbers, says Laskowski, “U.S. trucking companies have a 31-percent competitive advantage over Ontario truckers when making capital cost investments, because our capital equipment is sales-taxed.”

He asks: What could possibly be the reason for this tax, beyond attempting to toss our transport industry into the hands of U.S. entrepreneurs?

In a recent study it was found that U.S. transport companies have a 17-percent overall advantage when costing their product, and this means their profit margins are much higher -- and more normal for typical business enterprises.

What about government lobbying?

“This association doesn’t ask for government handouts, because our industry was founded by entrepreneurs, who don’t generally beg. Perhaps we are being penalized for being in the transport business.”

Representing the provincial trucking associations including OTA, the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) made a pre-budget submission to the House of Commons finance committee last November, asking for fuel taxes to be rolled directly into the transportation infrastructure instead of being spent helter-skelter.

Not only are fuel prices higher but insurance premiums are climbing rapidly alongside the Canadian dollar. Additionally there are new customs and security barriers to doing business, and a host of new environmental regulations are threatening to bring on significant capital costs which the two governments may very well expect trucking companies to absorb.

All of this, of course, according to analysts, is in a setting of two-to-four-percent profit margins, in which members Canada-wide are operating at capacity and crying for 37,000 new drivers. If one adds to these woes the cost of downtime caused by rolling 30-wheelers on tight schedules along Ontario’s badly broken roads, one could say that the industry is in a ‘perfect storm’.

CTA’s submission to Ottawa said its members “are weathering the storm in part through fuel surcharges and additional fees, and through efforts to improve efficiencies where they can be found.” It even suggested that fuel-tax revenues be designated to a trust fund devoted to the organized development of transportation infrastructure.

Labour shortages compete well against other Ontario truckers’ woes. OTA’s president David Bradley recently sent a strong message to Ottawa and to Premier Dalton McGuinty demanding some action on negotiating an immigration policy that allows Ontario to hire immigrant drivers.

So why can’t Ontario hire foreign drivers? Well, Ontario has no immigration policy with Ottawa, so immigrants “must be skilled” to get brought in, and professional driving doesn’t qualify as a skilled job to the Immigration people.

“Ontario is facing a shortage of 15-20,000 drivers per year for the next five years,” says Bradley, “just to keep pace with economic growth forecasts. The shortage goes on worsening and pushing up salaries, fringe benefits, equipment and training costs.”

Ontario truckers want answers, such as to the question: “Why are highways in Florida and many other U.S. states so smooth, well groomed and high-tech compared to the patchwork one sees all over Ontario and the GTA?”

Ontario and Ottawa collect fuel taxes -- 14.7 cents and 10.8 cents per liter respectively -- in order to develop and maintain our transportation infrastructure. Ontarians pay about $4-billion in fuel taxes.

Floridians and Minnesotans also pay fuel taxes, although (would one guess?) they're less than the Canadian rates.

In northwestern Ontario a few years ago, Ontario’s transportation minister announced a $10-billion expenditure over ten years for provincial highways, saying he was “committed to building a balanced and seamless transportation network that supports economic prosperity in every Ontario community."

The Northwestern Ontario Associated Chambers of Commerce (NOACC) are still awaiting signs of the billion-dollar-a-year promise, which would have amounted to about 40 percent of what Ontario fuel taxes are supposed to be “in aid of”.

Federally, Ontario's portion of the Trans-Canada Highway is as poorly conditioned as many of the highways of Mexico. NOACC has more data to explain why this is true: Less than nine percent of Ottawa's $4.6-billion gasoline revenues in one recent year were spent on roads or transit.

NOACC says the government has truly demonstrated that "they're not in favour of dedicating taxes back to roads."

Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, a penny of the federal tax per gallon sold in the state is returned for snowmobile-trail development. Well, tourism is a priority. "Also, two magnificent tunnels built on Highway 61 between the Pigeon River and Duluth are the result of fuel taxes returned to Minnesotans," says NOACC.

In Florida, where Canadian tourists can traverse the leading-edge freeways under the subtropical sun, ninety percent of all fuel taxes (collected by the U.S. government in Florida) are returned to the state. The only catch -- a novel idea for Canada -- is that the funds must be spent on what the taxes were collected for.

The Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) estimated in 1989 that 40 percent of Canada's highways were sub-standard, and in 1998 they returned for another shot: "It will take $17-billion to bring the national highway system up to an acceptable standard."

In 1965, Provincial budgets devoted 20 percent of all their money to highways, and that has turned to three percent in modern times. TAC has collected data showing that roadways deemed as “acceptable” can save billions on fuel consumption, operating costs, travel time, life and limb.

Greenbelt Plan Under Scrutiny

Jim Wilson believes in two things – that is, two things related to Premier Dalton McGuinty’s greenbelt legislation: sustainable development, and trout-fishing.

As a vice-president in Royal LePage’s office leasing division, one might think, he’s simply pro-development because that’s what real-estate folks are all about. But Wilson says: “No, I’m with the (late) Bobby Kennedy school of sustainable and responsible planning. We definitely need greenbelts around the GTA because the sprawl has gone rampant and the trout streams are not what they were.”

But it’s not just the trout streams, he says. “The Credit River with its multi-million-dollar fishing industry, and many other urban waterways, are being hugely neglected. Pressures from urbanization are affecting water quality and water temperatures adversely. Trees are ruthlessly cut, residential developments are filling in the river banks, and animals have moved out of their habitats because sources have disappeared from their food chain. The whole ecosystem around Toronto and other cities has changed.”

The Credit Valley Conservation Authority is widely recognized for innovations and for policing residential development in the valley, prompting developers to design proper drainage systems and other features, “but the task is an ongoing battle,” he said.

Greenbelts discourage suburban sprawl near the frontiers of farmland, and encourage central-core development with larger buildings and higher density, which people will have to get used to. Because farmlands have disappeared rapidly due to poor planning, greenbelts have become an increasing priority, and this may explain the speed of Mr. McGuinty’s Bill 135 to convert 720,000 hectares of land to greenbelt status. Ontario has had different forms of land-use planning, but sprawl has taken over and the province is poised for a turnabout phase.

Ontario’s Bill 135 now being pushed through legislature will slow urban sprawl and boost city cores. It will change property values in a huge swath from Niagara to Peterborough. This legislation will affect outlying towns that were planning residential and industrial development. It will hurt farmers and landowners who’ve invested heavily, and it will put dampers on suburban homebuilders.

Jim Wilson thinks the bill and its purpose are well-intentioned, but misguided and “far too much, too fast and too simple”. He’s thinking that Mr. McGuinty’s move must entail political expediency and pressure from interest groups. In a nutshell, he thinks it’s all about money. But even the opposition to greenbelt legislation is about money, because landowners who had hoped to cash in on development land, and possibly retire early, are witnessing early stages of the roof caving in.

“Some form of the legislation was bound to come if only because urbanization is eating up agricultural land,” says Wilson. “and the battle ground is being expanded far beyond the GTA.

“But money is not the right motivator when you’re dealing with the environment. I see land values being severely compromised by legislation, I see people in handcuffs holding large mortgages and tax bills, but I don’t see any professional planning for infrastructure and the ecosystem.”

Wilson is on the national board of Trout Unlimited Canada, who are active participants in the conservation of water resources in many parts of Canada. An ardent fly-fisher, he owns Toronto’s only fly-fishing store (Wilson’s) on Front Street East, and he knows, first-hand, “that if you don’t take care of your natural resources you lose ‘em.”

An example of losing resources he likes to quote is the Yorkdale Mall parking lot on Dufferin Street, a low-lying expanse of pavement that heats up, collects rainwater during summer storms, and sends the hot water through storm sewers to the Don River where it kills all aquatic life on its way to the lake.

“The Yorkdale developers followed Code in the ‘70s, but no one thought of the oil, chemicals and garbage that are scooped up and sent to the Don every time it rains,” said Wilson. “In Europe, cities use interlocking brick to let the water seep into the ground where it gets natural filtering on its way to the natural water table.”

Wilson is promoting sustainable development principles and “green” design in an association with the world’s largest architectural firm, HOK, and Canada’s best-known design-build firm, Giffels Associates. Green design is the essence of the LEED system, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, reported in previous issues of Business Times.

Is Ontario’s government using sustainable development principles? “They’ve mentioned it,” says Wilson, “but because it was unexpected, I think Bill 135 is an unstudied, knee-jerk response to financial interest groups such as developers or landowners.

“In Mississauga, Mayor Hazel McCallion has announced her support for greenbelt legislation but, since most of the city’s future developments are already spoken for, few arguments are likely.”

Meanwhile, he says, one of the Premier’s ministers at a recent Mississauga Board of Trade meeting commented that the government is about to introduce ‘phantom taxes from various tax sources’ to pay for programs not connected with the budgets the taxes were supposed to collect for. “Is this a sample of how Ontario is to be governed in the near future, and what other drastic acts like Bill 135 are in the works?” he asks.

Gordon Miller quite possibly is Ontario’s most important critic of environmental acts and events including the greenbelt legislation. He is Ontario’s independent Environmental Commissioner, and some say that his criticism of Bill 135 will be sharp and critical, but it’s part of his “annual report” not to be released before Fall.

Miller is one of six independent provincial watchdogs. The other five are the provincial auditor, the information and privacy commissioner, the integrity commissioner, the chief electoral officer and the ombudsman. These ‘magnificent six” work for the 103 members of the legislative assembly, independently of the government or the ruling party.

Says Miller: “The greenbelt legislation, for me and my staff of 15 to 20 professionals, is part of an ongoing file that contains reviews of every major decision and legislation having to do with the environment, and it’s too early to comment.” The staff include planners, lawyers and biologists.

But he acknowledges that there has been serious concern about the final dispensation of lands in the Golden Triangle. “It’s always been assumed that there’s plenty of land for development – so, bombs away – but during the last few years the demands have been so complex that people are realizing the finite nature of the resource.

“Decisions about where to put agriculture, where to put urban growth, have to be made now. The greenbelt legislation, if you like, is one of a family of planning and infrastructure initiatives that have to made for southern Ontario and that my office has to review. The era of permissive planning policies that didn’t look to the future appears to be coming to an end.”

The first of these forward-thinking planning policies for the “new era” was for Oak Ridge Moraine three years ago, if one accepts that the Niagara Escarpment greenbelt was from an earlier era. The GTA greenbelt, says Miller, is a higher-level planning regime, and bolder, but he asserts that he’s not an advisor for this scheme – he can’t make time for correspondence and interaction – because his role is as monitor, analyst and finally, critic. His staff tracks everything including consultation efforts and how well the government meets objectives.

Another group of professionals and environmental specialists is already convinced the greenbelt legislation is too hasty, ill-conceived and therefore doomed like white elephants. The Greenbelt Coalition Advisory Committee (GCAC), its members having strong development credentials, was formed recently to fight Bill 135’s present format.

According to GCAC’s executive director Ralph Capocci, a poll conducted by GCAC proves that 94% of Ontarians want the government to show its rationale for Bill 135 and “the whys” of lands being excluded and included.

“Only 14% of Ontarians trust Mr. McGuinty’s greenbelt legislation and its capability of controlling urban sprawl,” he said. “Nearly 60% of those polled believe the government doesn’t understand all of the consequences of the Greenbelt Act, and 91% want studies released to the public.

“Furthermore, the Coalition wants to work with the government to ensure that a greenbelt plan takes into account growth management, infrastructure, housing prices, transportation, municipal tax implications, economic growth and jobs. Future generations want to see a Greenbelt that is done right.”

GCAC’s body includes Chairperson Frank Clayton, a well-known real-estate advisor to governments, developers, lenders, investors and the building industry. One of its aims is, in Wilson’s terms, “all about money”; it recommends that the legislation leave current official plans in place for seven municipalities that are within the proposed greenbelt, and that more time be given for the necessary scientific studies.

Another lobby group, Environmental Defence Canada, criticizes GCAC for following a “double standard” by seeming to support the greenbelt but acting against it. EDC says “the Greenbelt Coalition is an Urban Sprawl Coalition, a well-funded exercise in spin created to make itself seem independent in the debates.

A “brawl” is expected between environmentalists and developers, the former who know that it’s long overdue and the latter who claim that housing shortages and price hikes will ensue unless the greenbelt legislation is stopped or postponed.

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Are Workplaces Safe?

Four key workplace-safety associations have broken ground for a 150,000-square-foot, leased Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (COHS) now under construction in north-end Mississauga.

The COHS, at Creekbank Drive and Tech Avenue, will be completed in a year’s time for the Industrial Accident Prevention Association (IAPA), Electrical and Utilities Safety Association (EUSA), Ontario Service Safety Alliance (OSSA) and Transportation Health and Safety Association of Ontario (THSAO).

The sprawling complex, next to a Marriott hotel and five industrial-distribution buildings, will consist of offices, common areas, a 160-seat presentation theatre, a dozen rooms for training and meetings, a library, a visitors’ resource center, a retail store with COHS-branded (and other) products, a food court, a wellness center, and a separate, 23,000-square-foot building for warehousing, printing and distribution.

It will be a “focal point for innovation and applied learning in the prevention and elimination of workplace injuries and illness,” according to a joint news release. It will offer space for other safety groups who want to partner with the original four, who now are planning to brand a line of health and safety products, which will help finance education programs and research.

A champion of the vision to bring the four "cultures" into a shared space and a common goal is IAPA's president, Maureen Shaw. The four associations realized, in meetings with each other, that a single centre of operations would be bolder, more visible and helpful to the working public.

"As four bodies we will be stronger, with huge benefits such as partnering in research, making more use of better and larger video-conferencing facilities, developing standardized and enhanced health and safety techniques, and being able to invite world-class experts into our sphere."

It took more than a few meetings to bring the separate belief systems together, even before any discussions about physical space took place. The leasing agreements were inked last August.

The ultimate result, Shaw hopes, will be more breakthroughs for the current generation of industrial workers, if only because "we now can look at the workplace in its entirety rather than a niche at a time."

IAPA is widely known for its Young Workers Awareness Program (YWAP), in which corporate health and safety experts make presentations in school classrooms to youth who will be entering the workplace.

The program is carried out by both IAPA and the Workers' Health and Safety Centre, and requires the input of volunteer safety personnel from industry. "Some of the best of these are retirees," says Ms. Shaw, "because they've had a lot of experience to prove the lessons they teach, and they find it rewarding."

All of this, of course, is saving incalculable life and limb, and YWAP already is reaching about 80% of the young-worker market in Ontario with safety-in-the-workplace information.

Just launched, and spearheaded by Ms. Shaw as the chief executive of IAPA, is a program called the First Four Weeks, since that is the critical period when many students suffer injuries in a learning curve that typically begins with zealous (or placid) confidence.

First Four Weeks has begun training workplace supervisors who supervise young workers, and is available on IAPA’s web site. The safety standards, of course, are part of the Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) legislation, but the IAPA course makes it more likely for supervisors to keep on top of safe practices, particularly involving novice workers.

“Anything we teach our youth about safety in the workplace would be virtually meaningless without job supervisors following suit,” said Ms. Shaw, “and what we teach is basically the sum-total of everything we know that works.”

The OH&S legislation is fairly limited, in that it spells out workers’ rights, the types of physical protection required, and some specific examples of safe practices. “It is a reflection of our society’s values and beliefs,” says Ms. Shaw.

Accident prevention as a science has evolved over the past 100 years or more. Its progression is rich in history, leading from the old, “too bad, he’s dead” coal-miner’s accident to a modern environment full of workers’ rights, corporate rules and regulations, union rules and government legislation.

But even in modern times, accidents do happen, and some of them are embarrassing to all parties when the truth about workplace conditions is revealed if not believed. There were accidents that should have been investigated but never were. The biggest embarrassments resulted in legislation.

Ontario suffered 378 workplace deaths in 2003, this being . Fatalities nationally are rising at almost 2.5 percent per year, which is in line with industrial growth if not a sign of improvement.

Ontario is another story. Following a fairly good safety record in 1999, the province’s 378 workplace deaths in 2003 were a 26 percent increase over the last four years and about five percent higher than the extrapolated national rate.

Figures for 2004 are not in yet, but 2003 closed with about 93,200 lost-time injuries in Ontario, of which 22,000 involved WSIB compensation, and these rates were lower than the national average but still estimated to drain $12-billion from the economy of the province (productivity, retraining, rehiring, insurance claims, insurance expenses) and perhaps $40-billion for Canada as a whole.

In accident statistics, a noticeable difference between Ontario and the rest of Canada is the number of lost-time injuries. Ontario was a better performer in 2000 with only 11% of the national total, but over the four-year period, Canada outside of Ontario drastically reduced its lost-time accident rate by 69 percent compared with Ontario’s 11-percent reduction.

IAPA’s message to young people entering the workplace: “It’s critical that you know about your right to refuse a task on safety grounds. Ten dollars per hour doesn’t compare with the value of your trauma, or your life.”

According to the Ministry of Labour, eight youth (aged 15 to 24) died in Ontario workplace accidents in 2002, and in 2001 more than 50,000 young workers filed injury claims with WSIB. Young workers apparently are 24 percent more likely to suffer lost-time injuries.

Youth accidents cost employers about $900-million in 2001, according to a study by WSIB and the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. An average accident costs nearly $60,000 in direct and indirect charges.

Unemployment rates for Ontario youth have dropped to about 12.5 percent or less, and 40 percent (of about 900,000) work for small companies. Many of the jobs are temporary and/or part-time, and the youth change jobs more than three times as often as the 25-and-older group.

Labour Minister Brad Clark told visitors to IAPA's annual conference and trade show recently: "There is no longer any valid reason for any injury or death to occur in a workplace."

Five years in the running, IAPA, as sponsor, is making waves with its LINK interactive stage show put on by high-school students.

In fact, drama students in high schools now are creating their own versions of LINK, which must deliver at least seven key messages involving workers' rights, hazard identifying, and tragedy staging, among other themes.

The shows are judged like Canadian Idol contestants, and often contain a mixture of dance, music, poetry, humour and song.

The Ontario government has a new web site, www.WorkSmartOntario.gov.on.ca, that's aimed at young workers and provides detailed information on workplace safety and employment standards.

General Motors Corporation, one of Canada's largest companies, has won awards by achieving an outstanding, 90-percent accident-reduction rate over a 10-year period at its Canadian automotive plants.

GM also has an accelerated environmental-improvement program involving fuel efficiency, alternative fuels, exhaust and manufacturing emissions, hybrid vehicles, fuel cells, lightweight materials, the use of hydrogen, and clean working environments. A winner of many awards, GM Canada is broadly networked in university-related research and development programs.

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Anyone interested in how fortunes might change with a corporate relocation from neighbouring cities to Mississauga might like to look at Indal Technologies Inc., a company that has grown with Mississauga for 30 of the city's first 30 years.

From its beginnings in Etobicoke in 1951 as DAF -- Dominion Aluminum Fabricating Ltd. -- Indal has evolved into a major defence contractor (and sometimes subcontractor) specializing in engineered systems for aircraft-armed navies and coast-guard vessels.

The end products are mainly onboard aircraft-handling systems, underwater sensor environments, and "specialized structures".

More than 200 navy ships around the world, including those of Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Spain, Taiwan and U.S., are equipped with Indal's recovery-assist-secure-traverse (RAST) system for small-ship helicopter operations -- that is, deployment, takeoffs, landings and hangaring.

An enhancement known as ASIST adds an electro-optical tracking system for quick pull-downs to ships' decks. Other adjuncts include Indal's horizon reference system for rough weather on the high seas, deck lighting aids, and quick-install, lightweight landing tracks.

Also in the navy department, the company has attracted kudos for its underwater towing systems that operate at speeds of up to 40 knots, depths of more than 20,000 ft. and tensions of more than 500,000 lbs.

Another Indal product, which encompasses most of the company's specialized skills, is aircraft boarding bridges. These highly complex passenger conveniences, formerly called "walkways", are automatically docked in place and retracted at the push of one button, offering lower fuel and crew costs, higher gate utilization and shorter waiting times at airports.

Indal demonstrated its fully automated boarding bridges to Air Canada for potentially massive contracts at Pearson International's Terminal One, but the local airline opted in favour of the joystick variety from Thyssen.

Unscathed, the company is stretching its airport-ramp venue further by designing aircraft-loading systems for cargo and catering vehicles.

In the "specialized structures" category, the company has sold at least 400 helicopter-hangar doors -- including the world's largest -- and 200 telescoping hangars to the navies and coast guards of the world. This includes sectional-panel doors for DND's Halifax-class frigates.

The company's engineering activities focus mostly on hydraulics, hydrodynamics, hydroacoustics, electric and electronic systems, electro-optics, control software, and the use of leading-edge CAD systems.

With a staff of approximately 200 in Indal's 200,000-sq.-ft. facility on Hawkestone Road, computers are key to nearly all aspects of managing multi-million-dollar defence projects. According to Indal's President and CEO, Vincent Lacey, the Mississauga location gives the company quick access to North American and international markets.

The manufacturing division uses computer systems intensively for scheduling, accounting, project management, materials planning, cost-reporting and accounting. It's called Computer Integrated Manufacturing and is part of the reason Indal was the first non-U.S. company to receive validation under the Defence Department's 5000.2 standards.

In support of quality control and system reliability, the plant has full-scale flight-test platforms to simulate the aft decks of navy vessels. There also are a load-analysis facility, and a cable-handling rig for dry runs on underwater towing systems.

DAF was founded in 1951 by Murray Maynard as an aluminim-products fabricator, and recorded its first milestone in 1958 with receipt of a Canadian Coast Guard contract for shipborne helicopter hangars, at about the time sales revenues reached $5-million.

In 1963, as a division of Indal Ltd., the company began serious work on specialized naval systems, breaking ground in 1974 for its current Mississauga plant, and receiving in 1981 its first U.S. Navy contracts for helicopter-handling systems.

A few years later the company's name was changed to Indal Technologies Inc., and development of integrated, aircraft-ship systems began in earnest.

Relationships since then have involved partnerships or contracts with entities such as Canadair, Fathom Oceanology, Australian Marine Engineering, Tampa Shipyard, Avondale Industries, a dozen navies including Royal Navy and USN, Hyundai, DCN/DGA, Messier-Dowty, Kytex Engineering, Fincantieri, Marconi Astute, and Honeywell.

A $40-million contract for aircraft-handling systems was received from Singapore's navy in 1996, and others in the $15-to-20-million range followed. Typically, a contract for U.S. Navy onboard installations runs five years and is worth $60-million or more.

This takes Indal to its 50th anniversary in 2001 as a $50-million manufacturer, but since then the company has enjoyed accelerated contract business in the world of navy ships and helicopters.

A late-2003 award came from submarine builder BAE Systems for development and delivery of towed, sonar-array handling systems for the Royal Navy's Astute submarines. "It's an important accomplishment for us," according to Lacey, "because it's our first major win in the U.K., the home of our parent company."

Astute submarines are the RN's new, nuclear-driven attack boats that will be replacing the Swiftsures and Trafalgars. The sonar arrays in Indal's design will be deployable from the subs and recoverable without causing internal or external damage. A unique water-flushing system is used to pay out the array until natural drag supplies the pull. The contract probably wouldn't have come without Indal's three decades of experience with naval handling systems.

The U.S. Coast Guard is using Indal to supply a USN version of its Recovery-Assist Secure-and-Traverse system (RAST) for the new chopper-carrying National Security Cutters. The integrated, automated, shipborne system is designed to launch both helicopters and chopper-drones as part of a Northrop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin general contract. Aircraft will be landed and secured without crew on deck regardless of ship speed.

Aircraft-handling systems are a new venue for the Coast Guard in response to 9/11 and new U.S. National Security policies, but Indal has supplied many similar systems for U.S. Navy vessels. The new generation of Coast Guard helicopters will match the heavier USN variety (up to 10,000 kg), and the new generation of aircraft-handling systems is tougher and more rapidly deployed.

Life is fast and tough on the high seas and, says Indal's Andrew Brand, "plagued in recent times by reduced manpower and increased complexity." To respond to the trends, Indal recently made major investments into acquiring and developing unique, in-house computer-simulation systems to carry out 'rigorous' testing of its designs.

This past summer, Indal started a seven-year-long, Canadian government contract for major upgrading of hauldown and securing devices for the new Maritime helicopters. The contract also involves new, tail-guide winch systems for the nosewheel version of the Maritime helicopter. For the firm's design-and-build teams, computer simulations have called for a redesigned system now known as the Canadian Low Profile Rapid Securing Device.

Indal Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of U.K.-based Novar plc, a $3-billion manufacturer of building, industrial and printed products with 13,000 employees worldwide, which in turn is part of Rio-Tinto's international mining-and-processing empire.

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Mike Wolfs Takes on Athens

It was an epic voyage for Mike Wolfs, culminating in the Silver medal in Star-class sailing at the 2004 Olympics. As with many of the Canadian athletes in Athens last month, much of the way was 'pay-your-own-way'.

Most Canadians are embarrassed at the small number of medals (12) won by Canadians in Athens, if not by the small number of entrants (268). Only 6% of our entrants won medals in Athens, compared to 11% in Sydney, 15% in Atlanta and 12% in Barcelona.

The 15% "productivity" factor for Canadians in Atlanta probably is directly proportional to what it costs to get to Atlanta. This budget factor, in turn, is directly related to the difficulty of obtaining funding or sponsorships for international sports competitions. They're on their own.

Enter: Mike Wolfs, a native of Port Credit and a world-class sailor of quite some fame at the P.C. Yacht Club, who wins accolades everywhere he sails, even in boats he never sailed before.

"We just didn't get the media coverage in sailing," said Mike. "I saw myself just once in all that TV footage, and it was a picture of me returning home.

"In Europe, it's very different. Not only single athletes, but teams get sponsorships, with sponsors making the investment for the long haul, rooting for their teams to win. In England there are national lotteries that support Olympic hopefuls."

The lead-up to the Olympics for Mike, 39, started last winter when Ross Macdonald, 34, asked him aboard as teammate for his 2004 Star-class sailing circuit. Mike had never sailed Stars, but Ross was world-class in the Stars and a four-time Olympian, having taken a Bronze in Barcelona in '92. The Star is the Olympics' only fixed-keel class.

Mike said Yes. He and Ross bonded quickly into a winning team. With Ross as skipper and mainsail man and Mike as jib man and tactician, they raced and won against the world's best Star sailors in the January Miami Winter Circuit, and practised in Biscayne Bay for about two months.

Home for a quick holiday, coordinating and possible funding activities, off they went -- with their Star safely aboard a freighter -- to Europe for the Spring Circuit of the Worlds competitions. They won races consistently in the Worlds meets, qualifying officially for Olympic Star sailing in April in Italy. During and after the Worlds competitions in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain, the duo sailed in the Mediterranean until mid-July to tune themselves for an August 21st appointment in Athens.

The reality of paying for hotels, meals and other expenses set in: they needed to concentrate on fund-raising. After all, Oscar Wilde did say that "It's better to have a steady income than to be fascinating."

"But unless you're in an 'elite' (i.e., popularized) sport or you're already a solid Gold winner, sponsorships are virtually a fantasy in Canada and financial support is very difficult," says Mike. Also, funding is illogical before passing the Olympic qualifiers, which they did in Italy in April.

"The cost of our sailing season, which could safely be called a non-revenue endeavour, was about $150,000," said Mike.

The duo returned home for the money: Ross to Vancouver and the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, and Mike to the local Port Credit Yacht Club where he is a familiar face, and a 200-pound-plus, bleach-blond hero among small-boat sailors. Some monetary support had already been accepted, but a major effort was organized by PCYC and RVYC by way of their monthly mailings to members. At PCYC, where Mike is well-known for his superskill in the J24 class, about $40,000 was raised over a two-week period.

Vancouver's club drew from a larger member base. Between the two yacht clubs the Macdonald-Wolfs team raised about two-thirds of the total cost of their 2004 Stars season, most of which had already been spent by mid-July. Donations also emanated from unrelated donors such as two law firms and an insurance company.

With his official Olympics and Star-class experience, Ross's contacts in Vancouver came up with more than half of the money, and he did it in much the same way: through family, friends, well-wishers and especially the members of RVYC. A number of generous backers including the business community donated up to $7,000 apiece, but there were no corporate sponsors.

When the gun for Stars went off on August 21st, the Brazilians Torben Grael and Marcelo Ferreira were the team to beat. Ross and Mike had outsailed them consistently in the Worlds competitions at Miami and all over Europe, but the Brazilians were dead-serious about Athens. They have sailed the Stars together for 20 years, and Torben had not only grabbed four Olympic medals but sailed in America's Cups as the tactician for Italy's Team Prada.

The Canadians had decent positions throughout the 11-race series, winning a first, second, third and fourth; that was enough for the Silver, in view of the large field and the inconsistency of the other crews. "We hung on," said Mike, "knowing that we pretty much had to stay in the top six to win a prize."

Two kinds of winds prevail in the eastern Med, says Mike: "Stronger, fresher winds out of the North, and softer, warmer seabreezes out of the South. But the Star is a powerful boat. She was designed for the Boston area, which has very light winds in summer. In seven or eight knots of breeze you can hike out and sail on your ear, but you have to hang onto the power on windward legs." Most of the breezes in Athens were light.

Ross and Mike held second-overall most of the time. Torben and Marcelo were Golded after nine races, with Torben now boasting five Olympic medals.

For Ross, the Silver meant 12 years between medals ('92 and '04) -- the longest span in history for Canadian Olympians. He might make it 16.

"There was so little visible fanfare along the way," says Mike, "that I was wondering if my brother would pick me up at Pearson airport, so I was totally surprised at the huge welcoming party that greeted me at the Arrivals gate, and then at the Brogue Inn in Port Credit. It made it all worthwhile."

For Mike, it's back to J24s and other sailing gigs such as skippering and coaching. Last year he captured Second in the J24 Worlds competitions in Holland, which was sponsored by ING Direct. In 2002 he was the first non-US sailor to win in the US Nationals in J24s. His own club has a fleet of 22. Mike has crewed on yachts in the Atlantic but definitely prefers the exhilaration of racing. . .in smaller boats.

When he settles down to concentrate on the steady income recommended by Oscar Wilde, it's at Quantum Sails, a well-known sail-making loft on Etobicoke's lakeshore.

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For Mississauga Business Times

Announcements from the Ontario government are expected this month on expansions to the province’s aging power grid.

In a long-overdue effort to phase out coal-burning generators in favour of cleaner electric power, projects for at least 2,500 and perhaps up to 4,000 MW of private-sector power will come into existence in response to the McGuinty government’s request for proposals.

Although news releases from Queen’s Park have not stipulated it, natural gas will be the norm, and power companies anxiously awaited the opportunity to fill the need. Residents of many communities are (less anxiously) awaiting word on 33 proposals that were received for a grand total of 8,300 MW of proposed new power capacity.

(Concurrently with its RFPs for gas plants, the government called for 300 MW of renewal-energy proposals but got a “bumper crop” of 4,000 MW in offers.)

Three of the gas-power proposals, totalling 1,800 MW of electric power, are for Mississauga but not all of them will be part of the 2,500-MW target. They are: Sithe Energies for a 945-MW plant on Winston Churchill south of Royal Windsor, TransCanada Pipelines for a 550-MW plant in Meadowvale, and Epcor Power for a 300-MW plant on Haines Road north of Queensway.

Along with the planned, April 30 shutdown of GTA’s biggest polluter – the coal-fired Lakeview Generating Station – the decision was made to restart Pickering’s Number One reactor to prevent brownouts and guarantee a reliable flow of power in Ontario.

“Well, that’s just great,” says Ontario Clean Air Alliance group (OCAA), “The sad performance of nuclear reactors was what caused a 120% surge in coal power between 1995 and 2003.”

Ontario’s power capacity right now is about 35% nuclear, 25% hydroelectric, 25% coal and 8% natural gas.

Two weeks ago, residents of Applewood Acres in Mississauga’s Dixie South sector went 500-strong into a public meeting to vent their concerns about the small-to-middling Epcor generating plant proposed for Haines Road.

The meeting was attended by Tim Peterson (MPP-Mississauga South), who said residents “were vocal and forceful” in their concerns that the Epcor proposal was moving ahead without enough notice, that pollution would be a major problem, and that their property values would drop by 10% or more.

Epcor is a 102-year-old company with $4.3-billion in assets, an old pro at power generation and water treatment in Western Canada.

According to the Applewood Acres Homeowners’ Association, “The newsletters announcing Epcor’s Public Open House were mandated in the government’s RFPs, but missing from the doorsteps of many, if not most of the residents within the stipulated radius.”

Another ground rule for the RFPs was: “No interviews or related contacts with the media”, leaving the press rudely barred from news of major importance to the community. Some residents pleaded: “Build the power plants outside of our urban neighbourhoods, because they’re not clean.” Or are they?

“Natural gas is estimated to be 75-90% less polluting than coal,” said Mr. Peterson. “The pollution factor of new gas plants will be more than offset by the shutdown of Lakeview which, it could be argued, might actually increase property values in Applewood rather than depress them.”

Or would they?

Lakeview’s shutdown may just end a legacy of extensive smog clouds reaching downtown Toronto and across the waters to Rochester and upstate New York, where per-capita consumption is 37% less than in Ontario.

Coal’s smoke and particulates have done much damage to lungs and OHIP billings in Mississauga and GTA. But it’s not as simple as that. As an adjunct to its stated intentions of developing cleaner energy sources, McGuinty’s government announced it would keep certain coal plants on standby just in case. Location matters little, because nearly all electric power output goes into the massive Ontario grid.

Meanwhile, OCAA states that the shutdown should just be a beginning. It recommends reducing Ontario’s peak demand by 1,350 MW through a kind of “demand response program”, boosting private-sector development from 2,500 to 4,000 MW, converting Lambton Station to natural gas, promoting small-town (10 MW or less) projects, and installing a 16% surplus of clean power capacity within three years.

According to the Ontario Medical Association, pollution kills about 2,000 people in Ontario and costs the province about $10-billion. Lakeview alone spilled 20,000 tonnes of pollutants into the air in 2002, sorry about that.

Fraser Institute, calling itself “an independent public policy organization”, and enlisting the help of dubious consultants from the U.S. who serve their individual interests, have told our government ministries that pollution is not a problem in this province (hence, no smog), coal-burning is not a major contributor (hence, no smog), and we should focus more on adapting to climate changes than on reducing pollution sources.

Fraser Institute lies further by saying that air quality is much improved since the ‘70s. They probably mean that the Air Quality Index is higher because there was no AQI back then. The Environment ministry now shows a 20% increase in ozone since 1980, and 35 “smog days” in 2004, many of which extended right into cottage country and northern Ontario.

Fraser Institute says coal-fired plants play a small pollution role. Wow, they lied again, but we’re capable of figuring out that the smog output of our coal plants matches that of 6.2-million automobiles and includes 67% of the province’s chromium, 39% of its airborne mercury, 27% of its SO2, 27% of its arsenic, 20% of its CO2 and 14% of its nitrogen oxides. Is that small?

Freeze! Urban sprawl in the GTA has to stop. It's gobbling up good farmland and filling the landscape with fake mansions, ugly towers and poke-ups, gaudy franchise plazas, parking lots and fields of weeds. Now this topic isn't new, but it's been raised again by -- guess who -- the provincial government.

An idyllic community of 30,000, perhaps somewhere in the Halton Hills, would have 15 condominium towers, a great view all around, a giant underground shopping-parking complex, several community buildings maybe including a coliseum and amphitheatre, a bustling market square, a large school, an office tower and a multi-level, light-manufacturing building.

Extreme quality of life in such a high-density town would become, environmentally and undoubtedly, the norm. A casual entry into the countryside loved even by urbanites would take about two minutes. In all likelihood, the farmers and "city-slickers" would get along purdy fine. Total space for this intensively developed community: 25 acres. Total space for a typical urban sprawl as currently configured for 30,000: 2,500 acres.

From the farmers' point of view: "They only needed a lousy 25 acres. Look what happened to the other 2,475 we could have used for crops."

Some suburbs on the fringes of GTA, and Ontario's Premier, Dalty McGuinty, are thinking along those lines. While some of the townfolk will always have 'developing' minds, many of the happy, semi-rural residents appear to be quite vocal about halting the urban sprawl and have even vowed to separate from infamous Regions where sprawlers threaten invasion.

What the Premier offers this time around, as part of a larger scheme that is a good match for "Earth, Water, Wind and Fire", is to:

"protect sensitive land in the Golden Horseshoe through a permanent greenbelt",

protect endangered species and prevent invasive ones,

divert 60% of today's garbage output into recycled output, and

intensify environmental assessment for air and water quality.

For Brampton, the Earth part E-W-W-F would result in intensified development rather than a halt to it. It's good news for developers, but they'd have to stick to the rules: concentrate on high-density developments in the city core and built-up areas, put single-family detached-home subdivisions on hold, take the pressure off undeveloped lands north of the city, and sell off some of their long-held empty fields back to farmers.

Sheldon Leiba, general manager of the Brampton Board of Trade, welcomes this type of development because it enhances downtown cores to make cities look more like cities.

"Mr. McGuinty's plan has identified Brampton as an urban area where development should be intensified in order to attract attention away from what now are called valuable farmlands," says Mr. Sheldon. The urban developers, of course, still see these lands as valuable 'parcels'.

Mississauga and Richmond Hill, also, have been identified for intensified urban development. One proposal soon to reach Mississauga's City Hall calls for 5,300 residential units in towers and blocks covering only 28 acres of City Centre lands.

The government of Dalton McGuinty wants to preserve agricultural lands and greenfields "for the GTA" and they may, at some future time when urbanites learn more about agriculture, receive the title of "food belts" rather than "green belts".

As introduced by Municipal Affairs Minister John Gerretsen, the greenbelt legislation will halt urban sprawl "permanently" in large expanses of the Golden Horseshoe from Niagara Falls past Hamilton, through Halton and through the northern bands of Peel, York and Durham regions. Waterways will benefit, as will many regions now designated for recreation.

Biodiversity will also be protected from the urban hordes and development pressures, according to Mr. McGuinty. The Premier and Ontario environmental groups are particularly concerned about invasive species that cause damage estimated at $7.5-billion annually to crops and forests in Canada.

And the farmers, who supply our Ontario lamb, Ontario pork and Ontario chicken for a "fair" price that sometimes meets their costs, will be happy to hear from Mr. McGuinty at Queen's Park, that: "The permanent loss of viable agricultural land affects the availability of a continuing commercial source of food and also employment. The agricultural sector is (key) to many of Ontario's regional economies."

Ontario's government bemoans the rapid depletion of the province's natural resources. Consumption is too high. Therefore, says Mr. McGuinty, "Our stewardship and endangered species programs (have resulted in) 9.5-million hectares of protected lands or nine per cent of the land area. (We) are protecting our land resources through environmental protection legislation and an extensive parks system."

The new legislation debuts with a new commission (unnamed) that will oversee Ontario's green belt, and with "the development of a new strategy to address the threat of invasive species," Mr. McGuinty added.

"Ontario now diverts only a quarter of its waste," he said. "We (want to) meet the goal of keeping 60 per cent of Ontario's waste out of landfills." Ontarians sent about 10-million tonnes of garbage to disposal in 2002, and the average Canadian household produces about 30 litres of hazardous waste annually. People who have been observing for quite some time say that it takes a million years for a glass bottle to break down natually.

Ontario's government placed a temporary freeze on much of the proposed green belt a year ago, since which time it says it has consulted with developers, planners, communities and jurisdictions to derive a permanent strategy.

According to Mr. Gerretsen, "There is still enough developable land for five to ten years of moderate growth."

David Caplan, Minister of Infrastructure for Ontario, assures developers that provincial funds will be made available for roads to encourage urban construction in certain areas outside the green belt, particularly in serviced areas and particularly for high-density housing.

"Our Liberal government is attempting to attract developers and home-owners to higher-density housing options and will spend money on more transportation links to support them."

In Caledon, which is separated from Brampton by Mayfield Rd., residents and the local Chamber of Commerce are relieved about the new master plan for the green belt, because last year's temporary development freeze included much more of the town than the final version, which begins quite far north of Mayfield Rd.

According to CoC's executive director, Kelly Darnley, "Green-belting so much of Caledon would have resulted in major reductions in land values and assessments and future diversification. Like any business, farmers need to balance assessments with revenues. Being surrounded by green belt would have restricted the abilities of owners to intensify, diversify, create jobs, and even to obtain building permits for upgrades."

Caledon CoC's only remaining concern about green belt legislation is whether Ontario Municipal Board will still be available and effective for appeals and challenges.

Meanwhile, The Toronto Star reported conversations with the Greater Toronto Home Builders on a poll the association says it took recently: "People (still) prefer single, detached suburban homes and will resist attempts to increase housing density."

Home-builders expect prices to rise with a decline in large, detached suburban homes, although prices in downtown Toronto are rising more rapidly than in the suburbs. One thing is for sure, according to GTHBA's president, Mark Parsons: "Reducing the supply of developable land will boost prices, and it's happening right now."

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Where No Fellows Have Gone Before

At the same time, a $1-million gift was announced for Hamilton's McMaster University to set up a graduate school called Xerox Centre for Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation (XCEEI). The plan is to teach at least 100 students per year to convert research breakthroughs into products that reach the marketplace. Fully one-third of Xerox Canada's staff studied at McMaster.

The XCEEI opens in January or, if approvals are delayed, next September. It will be part of the School of Engineering Practice at McMaster, and this school is also setting up courses for Public Policy as well as Engineering Design, according to Andrew Hrymak, professor and chair of McMaster's Chemical Engineering department.

Doug Lord, president and CEO of Xerox Canada, himself a McMaster graduate, says there is plenty of "fertile ground" between it and other southwestern Ontario universities that will make the new schools well partnered and productive.

Xerox, of course, is "The Document Company". More than that, it's an innovator in imaging and electronics as seen (or not actually seen) in products used in offices and workplaces around the world.

Short of becoming the chief executive of the company, the highest honour achievable at Xerox is that of Research Fellow. There are twenty Xerox Fellows worldwide, and at any given time there may be four or five of them working on projects at the Mississauga centre. Their resemblance to ordinary people is uncanny.

Here, the leader of the pack is one Rafik Loutfy, vice-president of Xerox Canada, holder of 27 patents and a UofT and Western Ontario alumnist. Now manager of the centre, he oversees long-term research and technology strategy for the gamut of innovations that include organic electronics and digital document media such as "electronic paper".

"It's fascinating," says Loutfy, "how one can take business concepts and apply them to science." And we always thought it was the other way around. For instance, how would you like your yesterday's 50-cent newspaper to be re-imaged with today's news merely by passing it over a magic glass panel?

This company does not sit back and gloat at profits. By the time the latest invention reaches the market, never-satisfied engineers are already inventing something more revolutionary -- such as a copier that will match the cost and speed of colour imaging with that of black-and-white, and not by raising the price of black-and-white!

Enter: Beng Ong, a Research Fellow educated at McGill and Harvard, holder of no fewer than 115 U.S. patents and a cheerful, 26-year veteran at the Mississauga centre. No ordinary Fellow, he's in charge of the Printed Organic Electronics (POE) Group and he modestly says: "It's a good feeling when you make a discovery that may contribute to future innovations and benefit mankind."

Xerox is excited about Ong-and-staff's efforts to introduce "the silicon alternative" -- a POE prototype that blows away conventional, silicon-based LCDs with their complexity and high cost. The application aims at the large and small, flat-panel display venue which now is rich in silicon circuitry. The key to the innovation is making the POE liquids printable by common means such as printing presses and injet printers. The first end-uses likely will be seen in large, flexible TV and computer screens, electronic papers, and smart cards.

Another key invention that's hot at the Xerox centre is Zoran Popovic's organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). With 45 U.S. patents and 30 Xerox years behind him, Popovic says this concept shows high promise for displays in mobile phones, digital cameras, computers and TV screens. They will be cheaper, faster and easier to view than backlit LCD panels.

Other innovations have made major, high-tech inroads at Xerox during the past few years, both inside and outside in the marketplace.

Counterfeiting has been around for a long time, but in today's world of state-of-the-art imaging and reproduction, it's even worse. Xerox, perhaps apologetically, is a leader in anticounterfeiting technology particularly for U.S. currency. New ideas and solutions spring from the labs on a daily basis.

Other products you will soon see with the Xerox trademark on them are: electronic paper with temporary and rewritable images based on liquid-crystal materials; emulsion-aggregate (EA) black and colour toners vastly superior to their predecessors; revolutionary electronic-document organization software; and a new type of JPEG compression format that interacts much more flexibly with common graphics software.

And the work goes on. . .

Malton: The Last 182 Years

Two-hundred years ago, the northeast corner of Toronto Township was seldom seen except by passers-by on horses and coaches, and Malton was just the name of a town in England.

A not-too-famous chap by the name of Samuel Moore settled there in 1823, and before long it became a hamlet. Richard Halliday, arriving in 1840 to ply his trade as blacksmith and innkeeper, suggested the name of Malton and it stuck.

Within a couple of decades Malton's environs became an agricultural bread-basket, and the Grand Trunk Railway was built in 1854 to service Toronto marketplaces with farmers' produce. Malton evolved into an important hub for grain shipments, enjoying great prosperity from its agriculture base.

Whizzing forward about 75 years, commercial air travel was receiving a lot of attention in Canada, and the pressure for airport facilities was mounting, especially at Toronto Island where seaplanes could be harboured.

It wasn't until 1935 that the Toronto Harbour Commission (THC) was pressed into building Toronto Island Airport, including a tunnel from Stadium Road. Alas, the Liberals took power and stopped the project after excavations had begun.

Two years later, Toronto City Council finally announced that the island airport would go ahead and Malton area would become an all-weather airport, both under THC's management.

That year, 1937, politicians and entrepreneurs bought 13 farms in Malton and forged the beginnings of an international airport with industrial developments around it.

It was a complicated endeavour, according to historians, because airport engineering required leading-edge technologies and rare skills for that era. THC acquired and developed these resources and became renowned for them.

Opened in 1939, Malton Airport expanded rapidly along with the boom in air travel, and aircraft industries sprang up everywhere. It was the site of several wartime flight-training schools under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

Prosperity was highly visible, both during the War and after, with Malton performing a big role in Toronto's economy.

An up-and-coming firm at Malton was A.V. Roe Aircraft Co. During the War, "Avro" built Ansons, Lysanders and Lancaster Bombers for the RAF and RCAF in Malton under its Victory Aircraft banner.

In post-war peacetime, in the days when the DC3 was the hot performer among passenger liners, Avro was aggressive in its hunt for new projects. Along came Trans Canada Airlines in 1946, requesting a 36-seat passenger plane that would cruise at 425 mph for 1,200 miles with maximum legs of 500 miles.

Avro struck it in 1949, with the development and first tests of North America's first successful passenger jet, called "the jetliner". It climbed to 40,000 feet and exceeded the magic target of 500 mph in flight, breaking most aviation records.

After several trips to New York and other cities, and a year or two of tweaking the design, its unveiling in 1951 was just 13 days behind DeHavilland's Comet but far ahead of Boeing's 707.

The revolutionary, prototype jetliner was ready for production and it was all the rage, with ticker-tape parades and Avro being hailed as heroes and pioneers.

Howard Hughes wanted to build it in his Convair plant and use it for TWA flights. National Airlines signed a contract for about ten. TWA tried to order 30 after Hughes's Convair plant was given the "no" sign. Even the USAF budgeted for 20 of them for pilot-training.

"Halt," said Ottawa a year later. Avro's plant was needed for the CF-100 fighters (designed and built by Avro) required in Korea. Jetliner production facilities would have to be moved out. To make things worse, in 1956 Avro was ordered to destroy the project altogether.

With prodding from politicians and entrepreneurs south of the border, the Jetliner died, and U.S. aviation giants such as Boeing, Douglas and Lougheed reaped the benefits.

Malton in 1957, just 12 years after World War II and 20 years after the first farms disappeared, continued to enjoy its international reputation for aviation design and manufacturing along with its local reputation for industrial prowess.

At that time, the Federal Government acquired Malton Airport from THC in exchange for installing improvements and new technologies at Toronto Island.

Meanwhile, another Avro attempt at excelling in aeronautics was to fulfill the Canadian government's need for a new-wave jet fighter to replace the CF-100s. In the space of a few years the CF-105 Avro Arrow supersonic jetfighter came alive.

If the Cold War turned hot, CF-105s would be scrambled with ordnance, catapulted to Mach 3 and reach their targets within minutes to attack the approaching Russians over Canadian soil.

Rollout of the Arrow was October 4th, 1957, the very day of Moscow's launch of Sputnik. Five planes flew for 70 hours, and a sixth was being fitted with Iroquois turbines built by Avro's subsidiary Orenda. Thirty more Arrows were already under way in the plant.

Acclaimed as the most advanced fighter the world had ever seen, the Arrow was shockingly scrapped and ordered destroyed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker with prodding from that Eisenhower fellow south of the border -- to the utter disdain of your average Canadian.

For Avro, so far as government cooperation was concerned, Canada was just not the place to be, even though its aeronautical engineers were leading-edge.

Malton, meanwhile, became synonomous with the word "airport".

In 1960 it was renamed -- because it had earned the distinction -- Toronto International Airport. In 1984 it was redubbed Lester B. Pearson International to honour one of Canada's finest citizens, the Prime Minister, and later the airport's name became Toronto Pearson International, with operations turned over to the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) in 1996.

Lately, the equivalent of just about the entire population of Canada is passing through Pearson yearly and it now is the world's 29th-busiest airport. And it's more modern, too, since $4.5-billion were put into a new runway, giant passenger terminal, freight terminals, parking structure and a massive network of roads and bridges. It's not finished yet, because the second phase of the expansion is under way.

Malton now is more nostalgia and history than an actual place; you'd have to tear down large industrial buildings to find its original boundaries. It's in the northeastern quadrant of Mississauga, a city of 650,000 dwarfed by a city of 2.5-million -- a city whose future would never have been the same had the thirteen farmers of Malton not sold out.

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ASI Tech Catalogs Infrastructure

Combined with major deficits in the upkeep of infrastructure in Ontario municipalities over the past 15 years or so, information on infrastructure needs is either missing or inadequate.

Roads, bridges and public buildings are hard assets for three levels of government but there is no province-wide system for accurate and up-to-date cataloguing, or least there hasn't been since Ontario's government lost interest during the sparse economic times of the '90s.

The Ontario Good Roads Association (OGRA) and a Brampton firm, ASI Technologies Inc., intend to fix the problem.

Developed by ASI's president and co-founder, Steven Desrocher, the “big fix” will be an online database network and toolbox that may revolutionize the task of asset management for municipalities and government agencies in Ontario.

Desrocher recognized the problem while employed with MTO and OGRA. For about four years he thought about it and worked with software ideas that could carry it out. Seven months ago he got the go-ahead and last month, under contract with OGRA, he launched the database pilot for the system.

In fact, there is no better overseer of a project like this than OGRA, an association whose core membership is 400 municipal public-works and other officials.

"There has been no new information about the extent and condition of roads in Ontario for the last ten years, says Sheila Richardson, executive director of OGRA.

"Last year, while we were analyzing the problem, MTO released subsidies for collecting data. We started into it, then realized we simply didn't have the resources and that the municipalities themselves would have to catalogue and manage their own assets, if only to collect the essential government subsidies."

The pilot released last month was connected to computers in Wellington, Bruce, Durham, Whitby, Otonobee and South Monaghan, as well as in MTO offices. The Municipal Affairs and Housing (MAH) and Public Infrastructure Renewal (PIR) ministries also participated, and the OGRA-ASI partnership is receiving feedback from the municipalities.

Ultimately, once the system is tweaked to the preferences of officials in the pilot towns and cities, it will be placed online (on OGRA's site, where it already resides), initially for 30 or 40 municipalities. From there, it grows and becomes an important tool for all municipalities to chart and monitor (and modify) their infrastructure status on a regular basis.

"It's in the realm of state-of-the-art IT," says Desrocher, who has been building what some users are calling the "perfect solution" to public-asset management.

"Municipal officials will need this system, especially now that billions of dollars are being offered for infrastructure development. The time is right for launching a system that inventories what they've got and what they need, and in a transparent environment."

The pilot has a focus on roads and bridges, but future versions will cover water and waste-water sites and other facilities. Once infrastructure data and inventory have been fed in and the database standards are proven to be in workable form, ASI will append the software tools for asset management and decision-making.

Says Richardson of OGRA: "We are hoping, with all the new announcements about massive infrastructure spending, that this project will not only demonstrate that the money can be spent efficiently but that asset-management will work."

Richardson is certain that governments will be looking for proof of proper asset management to justify outlays. And what better than a centralized system that backs up infrastructure management with a province-wide database that's up-to-date and open-standard?

The principles of ASI's asset-management tool are similar to commercial techniques, "because public assets, at the end of the day, are really quite similar to profit-oriented ones," says Richardson. Tax bills, she says, indicate how well municipalities can control their spending but not what condition the infrastructure is in."

Municipal DataWorks is expected not only to develop into the definitive infrastructure cataloguing tool, but will include two asset-management tools built into the online software: (a) a Capital Investment Plan module, and (b) an Asset Valuation Tool. Both of these utilities will help meet Ontario Government requirements for municipalities to prepare new infrastructure "balance sheets" by 2007.

In this PP3-type partnership between OGRA and ASI, Municipal DataWorks will be available to municipalities as an OGRA member service.

Property Tax System "Chaotic"

Ontario's fractured property-assessment system is still fractured. Historically it was run uniquely by each municipality. Today, it's government-run and heir to a mess of inequalities.

Gerry Divaris of Divaris Alexander Corporation, a GTA property-tax consulting firm, says "The mess could have been cleaned up once and for all in 1969 when the Municipal Affairs ministry decided to consolidate everything."

The idea was for the province to take responsibility for real-estate assessment based on market value, with municipalities having the option to back-date to a base year for "market value".

Over the years, the base year ranged by an average of 17 years, but went as far back as 1940, or 1954 in Toronto's case.

There were aborted attempts at Queen's Park to fix the chaos. David Peterson launched the Blair Commission which supported market-value assessment. But NDP Premier Bob Rae lost the courage to face the prospect of taxpayers hitting the roof. Reform didn’t happen.

Three decades later, in 1998 or midway into his first term as Premier, Mike Harris instituted the current-value regime calling for regular annual assessments, making this genre of province-wide, market-value assessment a part of his Common Sense Revolution. It came in the form of the Fair Municipal Finance Act.

A problem voiced by many municipalities was having to face annual assessments compared to the discretionary (mostly four-year) cycles they were accustomed to. Toronto had tried twice in the '80s to phase in market-value assessments but couldn't gain brownie points with taxpayers.

In 1998 the phase-in was written into law, calling for current-value assessments by 2003, based either on buyer-seller agreements or on area classes. The phasing called for major annual assessments across the province: a '98-'00 cycle using '96 values, a '01-'02 cycle using '99 values, a '03 cycle using '01 values, and then a '04-'05 cycle using '03 values.

This would have brought us to the 2006 annual assessment based on '05 values, which would have caught up to par and would have been a solid revenue base for municipalities but troubling for many taxpayers.

"A problem loomed in the form of major shifts of property taxes between classes of real estate, " says Divaris. Ontario taxpayers became unhappy -- assuming they weren't in the past.

Mississauga and other municipalities acknowledged these "dramatic tax shifts" brought on by the current-value assessment system, and the government followed with the Fairness to Property Taxpayers Act. This capped property tax increases at 10 percent the first year and five percent annually after that.

It also required all municipalities except Toronto to recalculate their 1998 tax bills.

Smaller businesses, especially in Toronto, were the biggest victims of the shifts, Divaris said. "There were demonstrations in the streets, including marching councillors, and people in Markham were burning their assessment notices.

"Premier Ernie Eves, panicking at the heat from property owners in the 905 region due to reassessments and tax increases, nullified the increases by announcing a tax freeze at 97 market levels.

The cap on taxes was really a response to rapid property appreciation, but the trauma remains in the form of a messed-up property-tax system worsened by the government’s decision to allow municipalities to "claw back", at will, up to 100 percent of the tax reductions and court-won appeals.

"This afterthought has effectively muted the provincial assessment system for the past four years to the point where few people can claim to understand how taxes are calculated. There are many discrepancies, many inequalities, caps mixed with clawbacks," says Divaris.

Errors with mill rates in municipal tax departments can be significant. The MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation) provincial agency responsible for assessments hasn't been able to carry out its task to the best level of equality.

In fact, the enormous tax-assessment "machine" for Ontario's four-million properties is just that: a computer that makes automated decisions for each address.

Taxpayers report wildly fluctuating mill rates that they can't make sense of. "It's not odd that this system ends up making people upset," says Divaris.

A study prepared by Altus Derbyshire for the Real Property Association of Canada (RealPac)confirms what some say is the biggest source of complaints when taxe bills are received. In 20 major cities of Canada, commercial and industrial taxpayers are paying substantially more than residential rates.

In Toronto the ratio is 5 to 1, backed up by the lowest residential rate of all cities surveyed. The spread between 905 and 416 areas is also substantial, with non-residential-to-residential ratios averaging 2.5 to 1 in Mississauga, Pickering, Burlington and Markham.

Toronto Council is primed to reduce the 5-to-1 ratio to 2.5 over the next 15 years, but not only is this seen as a slow process; it would involve raising residential tax rates by an average of 62 percent.

In Mississauga, residential is 75 percent of total assessments but only 54 percent of total tax levies; a shift to equality here would require raising residential tax rates by 37 percent.

Mississauga had $30-million worth of "budget pressures" last year that would have required a 12-percent property-tax increase this year, but the Finance Department has just reduced the increase to 5.9 percent thanks to revenue increases and streamlining.

As development slows naturally in Mississauga, future budgets will be challenging, according to City Treasurer Brenda Breault. Life cycles of many assets such as buses, equipment, buildings and roads are reaching their limits.

Out of a Mississauga homeowner's tax bill, 26 percent goes to the city and 74 percent goes to Peel and the Province of Ontario. The city's 2006 budget allots $238-million for operating costs and $183-million for capital outlays.

According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), differential tax rates are not based on any fairness concept or ability to pay, or quantity of local services."

They exist, says CFIB, "solely because of historical property-value distortions that crept into the system perhaps forty years ago" and haven't been changed.

CFIB's position is that commercial-industrial property taxes are too high in spite of minor tax-deductability, in spite of companies' low profitability or even red-line losses, and in spite of assurances that value-based tax assessment would be a fix for all class-to-class differentials that would arise. In other words, market demand determines perceived value, which establishes revenues for tax departments.

"Business-tax rates also should be made sensitive to profitability," says CFIB, who recommends that the government publish property and business tax statistics for all municipalities and change its assessment focus from one of hypothetical best-use to one of actual use.

"Clawbacks have become an opiate for the cities and towns of Ontario," says Gerry Divaris.

"While they were expected to reduce clawbacks according to a schedule, cities foraging for operating funds now are in the mode of thumbing their noses at Queen's Park by passing bylaws for clawbacks as high as 94 percent in Brampton, 89 percent in Markham and 93 percent in Toronto. Average clawbacks in individual municipalities fluctuate wildly."

Within Ontario's property-assessment system, something got thrown out the window a few years ago, and it was the ability to make and win a tax appeal and have it stick.

"Commercial and industrial citizens like myself are stuck in the mud at the legislative level," says Divaris. "We can use the courts, but unfortunately, winning a tax appeal doesn't mean the municipality won't claw it back. Legislation is the culprit; even though Harris's government fully anticipated the circumstance six years ago when they stepped face-forward into the arena.

"It was a bold step for a government that has a history of backing away from a fight with either the taxpayer or the municipality. They don't want to make the commitment that's needed to fix the system and make it law."

Meanwhile, most property-taxing jurisdictions in North America use the straightforward, market-value system that lets municipalities set mill rates and send out tax bills along with the machinery to appeal them without facing clawback clauses. Simple, isn't it?

"I believe in the Canadian Dream,” says Divaris, “but this Common Chaos Revolution helps to trample it."

. . .They Built Another Avro Arrow

by Rich Letkeman

About a year and a half before the Avro Arrow and its exuberant, 15,000-man workforce were cancelled, Canada's Defence minister George Pearkes announced, chin high, that a new age in Canadian aviation had begun.

He was dead wrong. But the RCAF, and any Canadians huddling around Malton Airport to watch the new Arrows in test flights, were happy to see symbols of Canada's glorious industrial and military potential in matters state-of-the-art. No one, it seemed, could fathom its brutal termination.

This background is why 14 people, mostly volunteers, convened eight years ago to build an Arrow replica for the Toronto Aerospace Museum (TAM) at Downsview Park. It rolled out last month -- all 85.5 feet of her -- as a shell without muscle.

Stan Porter, 72, a design engineer who went to Avro in the '50s, posed in front of the gleaming, red-and-white replica he helped to build. On view to the public at TAM in Downsview Park, it was massive to behold compared with a CF-18 or MiG-29.

"At Avro in the '50s, I was a young engineer in my second year of real work, hoping to stay in that environment forever."

Avro Canada, recalled by ex-employees over the years, was a very well organized, passionate and progressive company to be a part of. Originally a division of Britain's Hawker-Siddeley Aircraft Company, Avro at the end of WWII bought the Canadian government's Victory Aircraft plant at a bargain; it reportedly had not been setting any records in its production of Lancaster bombers.

"Avro was more production-savvy," says Claude Sherwood, another young Avro engineer at the time, who is CEO at the TAM. "Upon taking over Victory, Avro inherited the Lancaster program and began converting them into Lancastrian passenger planes. But it's the CF-100 Canuck that made Avro hugely famous, for designing and building a military jet that stayed in service for 30 years."

The RCAF in 1946 needed a high-performance (for its time) interceptor for North American air defence (NORAD), was not satisfied with the shorter-range foreign designs and -- together with the federal government and its Munitions minister C.D. Howe -- wanted it to be built in Canada. Avro was their "man". The first CF-100 flew in January of 1950 just five months after the world's almost-first jetliner, the Avro Jetliner.

The top speed of the final CF-100s was Mach 1-plus, 45,000-foot ceiling, 690-mile range. A total of 692 of the interceptors were built at a cost of $750-million over an eight-year period. Avro's acquired Orenda Engines company built the 1,400 jet engines for this plane, about 1,800 later for the Canadian-built Sabre Jet, plus 600 more for other aircraft.

"The CF-100s served NATO all over Europe, and fifty-three of them were sold to Belgium. Avro was a huge impetus for Malton and Canada's aviation industry, but it was the RCAF who spurred it, and it was a great push for independence from U.S. and foreign products and suppliers," says Sherwood.

Three years after CF-100 production halted in 1958, McDonnell Aircraft finally delivered a Canadian order for sixty-six CF-101 Voodoo interceptors designed to carry missiles against the Soviet threat, even though the RCAF had rejected the design eight years earlier, and even though Prime Minister Diefenbaker was soon to cancel the missiles which would render not only the Voodoos useless but hundreds of millions worth of other weapons systems.

In 1946, concurrently with ordering development of the CF-100, the Jetliner was the first of Avro's coups that became a hard knock. Designed for the government's well-entrenched Trans Canada Airlines, it would have competed well against world airlines who were awaiting the début of the next phase of air-transport technology. It would have been a huge government contract leading likely to worldwide sales for Avro.

The Jetliner was Avro's first big design task, and it entertained the boldness of leaders in Canada who wanted an independent aviation industry. TCA brought in the specifications. Confident and capable Avro responded: "Okay, nothing is impossible."

Says Sherwood: "Three years later (in 1949) the first Jetliner flew, but it would have been the world's first flight of a passenger jet -- which was achieved by Britain's Comet thirteen days later -- had Malton's runway not been under repairs. This project demonstrated Avro's capabilities, under the design leadership of that great individual we knew as James Floyd, Avro's engineering vice-president."

The Jetliner's claims to fame were numerous, including a record-breaking flight from Toronto to New York to deliver mail. There was intense interest from Howard Hughes and his Trans World Airlines, but in spite of the fanfare, none was sold before C.D. Howe, at the onset of the Korean War, ordered a halt to the program so that Avro could concentrate on building CF-100s for the Cold War threat.

"What were they thinking?" asks Sherwood. "It made no business sense to cancel the Jetliner. It was obviously competitive, fast and long-range, a boon to air transport compared to the DC3 puddle-jumper. But here's TCA actually deciding, after a very successful design program and after flying milestones around the Western World -- that they perhaps didn't really need it."

Dreams died with Jetliner I, and some people ask: "Who were they, really, that incessantly halted Avro and Canada's aviation industry?"

"Okay," said Stan Porter: "What RCAF really wanted at this time (1953), to beat what the Russian bad guys had, was a supersonic interceptor because the Soviets might be thinking of streaking across the Polar regions with warheads. They drew up some basic specs., looked around the world, and couldn't find anything close."

"So they came to Avro," said Sherwood. "Build us a two-place interceptor with an operating speed of Mach 2, fuel range of 1,200 miles, flight altitude of 50,000 feet, landing roll within 6,000 feet."

James Floyd, now 92, recently stated: "If you compare current military aircraft available today, none would meet the specs. of the Arrows that did their test flights in Malton in 1958. All five prototypes met or exceeded RCAF's specs., which were far more demanding than what USAF required for the fighters they were developing."

The RCAF specs. had a lot to do with the interceptor's mission (long range, possibly through Arctic regions) and Canadian flying conditions involving a diversity of nasty weather and unforgiving wilderness.

'The whole aircraft was designed in 23 months, and production of the first-off took another 28 months," said Sherwood. "That's 51 months in total, which I believe would be very difficult today. But the company and our department chiefs were so well grounded, and the whole effort around us was optimistic and highly motivated."

Aeronautical engineers were brought in from Britain and other countries, and there was a steady flow of graduates from Canadian universities "thanks to Canada-wide want-ad campaigns," said Stan Porter, who graduated UBC in 1953. (After a year at Avro he was sent to England to get his engineer's diploma at Cranfield.)

The designers came up with fantastic, original ideas, he said, then told the story about taking his bubble-canopy idea to the drafting table to try enhancing pilot visibility. "It looked good on paper and would have added four inches of headroom, but the chief design engineer, Bob Lindley, intercepted me before I could make my presentation. He said 'What the hell is that? A bubble canopy? Do you realize we spent fifteen-million convincing RCAF that the clamshell was the way to go?' With that, he crunched up my drawing, and tossed out what today would be considered intellectual property."

On flight tests, the pilots returned with superlatives for the flight characteristics of the delta-wing Arrow, whose top speed in the Mark II version was coming up to Mach 2.5 -- even while designers were already developing the stronger Mark III version.

The $3-million price tag for a hundred Arrows converts to 25-million of today's dollars. Arrow ex-engineers say there is no way that a 70,000-pound, Mach 2.5 long-range interceptor could be built today for $25-million. Anyone trying to tell you it was too expensive in the '50s, in a country that was ripe and ready with lots of resources, probably is anti-air-defense.

Avro's plant was concentrated around Malton Airport, in the Derry Road and Airport Road quadrant, all geared up to produce 100 or more F105s at $3-million apiece.

With a workforce of 15,000 in the late '50s, Avro was one of Canada's biggest employers, equivalent to Bombardier North America which now is the world's third-largest aerospace company. In addition, there was a major network of parts-making suppliers not only in Malton but across Canada, who counted their own numbers at about 14,000.

"The Arrow was cancelled on February 20th, 1959. What an unbelievable letdown. We were all told to go home and find new jobs," says Stan Porter. "Even after 30 years at Atomic Energy of Canada, some years of retirement after that, plus my time on the Arrow replica, I still have the feeling of unfinished business hanging over my head. The void of divorce -- from the incredibly inspired team that designed and built the world's best military yet -- was sort of terrible."

"The cancellation decimated Malton and the aviation industry physically and psychologically, and touched many families across Canada," said Claude Sherwood. "It took four decades to get back to where [the aviation industry] is now."

The Absolute Takes "Shape"

by Rich Letkeman

The landmark condominium tower that was the brainchild of Mississauga's Planning and Building commissioner Ed Sajecki will soon be filling in the last empty parcel in the Hurontario-Burnhamthorpe sector of City Centre.

Little did Ed Sajecki realize, when he suggested the concept to Mayor Hazel McCallion and developers, how popular his idea would become by generating an international design competition that picked a 50-storey, curvaceous tower that newspapers around North America have been referring to as 'The Marilyn Monroe'. Some local cartoonists are calling it "The Hazel".

The competition drew attention globally, because architects were given virtually unrestricted scope which resulted in innovative and funky designs ranging from 50 to 60 storeys.

The calypso-like, effeminate contours of the winning design will be achieved merely by wrapping curved balcony slabs around an oval core at gradually changing angles, making the building seem to "rotate" when you pan your eyes upward.

Winning entrant Yansong Ma, the Chinese-born and Yale-educated architect who runs MAD Offices in Michigan and Beijing, is a promoter of the 'organic' style of architecture that attempts (Some say it's more than just an attempt.) to break from the staid industrial-box look toward something closer to Mother Nature's eclectic style of architecture.

It appears to have been Globe and Mail writer John Mays who first likened the structure to "a tight dress with Marilyn Monroe inside". Architect Ma's rationale is that high-rise towers are strong symbols of modern culture, which is complex, and landmark buildings therefore should look more complex and be more flexible.

"People are tired of square boxes," said Sam Cirgnano, president of Cityzen Development Group, who is developing 1,800 residential units including five condominium towers on the site with partner Fernbrook Homes.

The design competition lured 93 entries from 70 countries. It was organized by a group of architects, town planners and developers but wasn't taken very seriously until folks realized that it would become reality. Some say that Sajecki and the Mayor generally mean business when they plan something.

At the development site (the old Shipp Corporation property), Cityzen-Fernbrook took no time at all erecting a 20-foot-high poster featuring the new, $125-million tower, at the northeast corner of Burnhamthorpe and Hurontario.

Now the developers' architect, Roy (Rosario) Varacalli of Burka Varacalli, will be taking on the responsibility for local protocol and the appointment of engineering firms to give the project its mandatory Canadian content. Structural engineers right now are analyzing the design, and next year should see a start on excavation and footings.

The design team is trying to live up to the developers' stated goals: enhance City Centre's "urban vision" while establishing a "strong residential neighbourhood". The blue-and-green tower's base structure will consist of 30 or 40 townhomes, in keeping with the style of the four other towers. (The architect's rendering wrongly depicts a glass-walled base structure.)

So fars as "strong residential neighbourhoods" are concerned, critics have stated that too many high-rise communities in the area lack amenities and "atmosphere". There is no retail zoning in the development area.

Developers around Square One mall, the retail hub of City Centre, are hoping that plans for "neighbourizing" the huge parking lots on Square One property will soon come to fruition. This involves moving all parking underground and substituting pedestrian streets, retail shops and restaurants.

In its present form, the Cityzen-Fernbrook site is bounded by a park on the east, the Mississauga Executive Centre on the north, Square One on the West and residential structures on the south.

The site will have a 30,000-square-foot recreation centre called the Absolute Club housing two pools, squash and basketball courts, exercise rooms, spas, five guest suites that can be booked by tenants, plus a theatre, party room and juice bar.

Sam Crignano is excited about building Mississauga's key landmark at the vibrant City Centre: "The design is iconic, and will be memorable for people who cast their eyes on the building; it probably will be Mississauga's most important landmark for some time to come.

"Of all the designs submitted, this is the one that attracted most interest from the public."

Contrary to what many people might think, neither the walls of the building nor its support columns will be twisted like the late Marilyn's torso. The structure, whose current name is "The Absolute", will be an oval-cylindrical, shear-wall building with a main corridor circling the core. The exterior will be steel and glass, and balconies with curved-glass railings will span all suites.

Suites will be the luxury variety, says Crignano, "costing us about $250 per square foot [for a 500,000-square-foot structure], which isn't unusual these days." There will be eight per floor, averaging about 900 square feet each.

Apartments will be appointed with wood floors, ceramic kitchens, stainless appliances, granite countertops and marbled bathrooms.

Canadarm a Right Robot for Outer Space

By Rich Letkeman

MDA is a world leader in space robotics. In fact, Canada is the leader.

It started as Spar Aerospace in the 1960s, before the wild idea of a Space Shuttle was running through the minds of the best thinkers in and around NASA. And many of the thinkers at NASA just happened to be Canadian engineers in their career primes who had come from Avro in Malton about 10 to 15 years earlier.

MDASM is a leading supplier of satellite missions, payload systems and you-name-it. How did it all start, and end up, in the industrial community known as Brampton?

We asked Jim Middleton, MDA's vice-president, Business Development, a McGill graduate of 1964 who worked on the ISIS satellite and NASA's Apollo missions in his job with RCA in Montreal. His specialties were communications, computer systems and business administration. He joined Spar Aerospace in Toronto in 1977, four years before the first Canadarm was launched into space.

Middleton: "Well, it's the 25th anniversary of that launching. Spar's Canadarm operation in those days was on Ormont Drive in Weston, and the company had aviation divisions across Canada."

Middleton: "Canada had been invited to participate in the Space Shuttle program in the early phases of the idea, in the early '70s. One of our people attending meetings at NASA found out about the robotic arm which NASA was discussing. Back at the office, staff engineers started commenting, 'Hey, that's a robotics thing, and it's what we've been doing for the past ten years.' It was right up our alley."

Middleton: "One of them was an extendable antenna, a mechanical structure that resembled NASA's sketches for the Shuttle robotic crane. Anyway, what they did was take the idea to National Research Council (NRC) to get advocacy."

Middleton: ”They accepted it. They backed it and funded it right up to the launch in 1981 and they still fund it to this day. It was typical of the deals our government made in those days: NRC would pay for R&D and production of the Canadarm, and hand it over to NASA, free of charge. At Spar we were the mechanical interface between NRC and NASA, who agreed in principle to buy three additional Canadarms if their stringent requirements were met.

"The biggest problem we had was testing the robot on the ground, because it couldn't lift its own weight and we could only do simulations, but our calculations turned out to be perfect in terms of what the tests predicted. CAE Systems of Montreal was our subcontractor who developed the algorithms for simulation.

"NASA were concerned about the robotic arm being clumsy, banging into the Shuttle's hull, etcetera, but the Shuttle crew can use it with long extension booms to make close inspections of the orbiter's tiles, or the joystick can be used to insert a pin into a one-sixteenth-inch hole if need be.

Middleton: "More than! Getting the arm to move and wiggle in space for the first time was a real thrill. As you know, all eyes and especially NASA's were on the Canadarm on November 13th, 1981, up in space on the second Shuttle flight. It was a time for celebration and awe.

[It was a malfunction in one of the Shuttle's fuel cells that made the Canadarm even more heroic, because it completed about 95 percent of its scheduled tasks in spite of the 'no-go' from Houston. The arm has a total of six joints in its shoulder, elbow and wrist, and it's capable of lifting 586,000 pounds in space but less than its own weight -- 1050 pounds -- on Earth's surface.]

"People at NASA were thrilled, and many of them were beyond belief. The kinds of tasks performed by the Canadarm over the years were remarkable, and much of what they do with it now was just not on the program. This clearly demonstrates NASA's faith in Canadian expertise and technology, and explains why the arm has played such a pivotal role in the development of the International Space Station."

Middleton: "No. Automotive and manufacturers' robots are pick-and-place machines, but our space robots are driven by autonomous vision systems, if you know what I mean. They require very complex software for decision-making processes, and this requires force-field systems which sense and feel [while giving visual feedback to the operator on the joystick]."

Middleton: "Robotics wasn't an industry in the '70s. And there were no man-made objects in space to speak of. But when the opportunity came up, with the Shuttle and later in a big way with the Space Station, Canadians met the challenge and here we are.

"Aside from leading to bigger things, the Canadarm was a great deal for Canada. In fact, ten to one in terms of money payback from NRC's original investment. The project cost about a $30-million in 1980 dollars, but over the years has made more than a billion.

Middleton: "NASA, NASA. But we work for the Japanese, European and obviously the Canada Space Agencies as well. We're working on many projects for many missions involving equipment, communications, systems for Precarn, artificial intelligence, vision and force-field systems, software, computer technology and nano-technology. We also work with many subcontractors, as we have over the years.

"Spar Aerospace launched its Special Products division in 1963, went public in '67, bought RCA-Montreal to take over its electronic and electromechanical operations, and purchased Astro Aerospace in California in the '70s for their space-assembly systems.

"Larry Clarke was the founder of Spar in the '60s, and after he retired, Spar unloaded a few of its divisions on the basis of creating value for shareholders. Astro was sold off in California, RCA was bought by L-3 Communications in the U.S., the Canadarm operation was sold to MDA in 1999, and another unit went to the ASD division of L-3.

"But MDA made the decision to reconstitute all of the previous units under one umbrella by purchasing them, one by one, and finishing a year ago with the acquisition of the old RCA division from L-3. It's back to where we were in the early '80s as a successful aerospace company."

Jim Middleton, a key executive for nearly 30 years on Spar's and MDA's space robotics business, now is vice-president in charge of Strategic Development. His role in helping the Space Shuttle make history has also been key.

In addition to work on space robotics, MDA is developing the next generation of satellites known as Radarsat-2 and the Radarsat Constellation Mission. Its expertise and involvement extend into antennas, digital microwave systems, power equipment for transceivers, and Earth observation equipment. The company also designs and builds robotics for engineering projects in the more 'down to Earth' transportation and manufacturing fields, and has developed medical robots, instant scene modelers, spectral cameras and "autonomous" vehicles for special applications.

MDASM runs information programs in Canadian schools, one known as Canadian National Marsville which invites students from across Canada to participate in a popular fantasy: creating colonies on Mars. The kids are asked to develop research projects for communication, support systems, and solutions to unique problems in space. Their "mentors" in this case are MDA engineers who make presentations in the classrooms.

For thirteen years, teaching staff at Chinquacousy Secondary School have partnered with MDA in efforts to encourage skill development in high-schoolers and familiarize them with modern workplaces. Nationally, MDA hosts an annual FIRST robotics awards program in which engineers form teams with students for intense problem-solving competitions. The result is an increase in the number of students seeking careers in science, engineering and technology.

At Marc Garneau Collegiate, Discovery Channel and MDA hosted a project in which students built a scale model of the Canadarm2 that's attached to the International Space Station. This project taught the kids quite a bit of technology, according to MDASM, as well as leadership skills and workplace experience.

by Rich Letkeman

Obviously, no VFR flying "over the top" is allowed in Canadian airspace; but this may change if TSB's proposals are adopted.

VFR "on top" is allowed in the U.S., but unfortunately no one knows how many accidents have been avoided due to pilots thus being able to fly by visual references. But TSB is convinced that Canadian pilots need more options when they encounter bad weather, and there­fore advocates VFR on top. Pilots then could climb in VFR conditions, fly on top, and descend to an airport predicted to have VFR status at the ETA.

Night flights make up only 10% of all flights but accounted for 30% of the VFR-into-IMC accidents. TSB recognized three problems: night VFR minima are too relaxed, night endorsements are too easy, and weather briefings were too scarce.

With clouds and weather more diffi­cult to see at night, encounters with cloud can happen without warning. The possibility of occurrence must be re­duced, says TSB. Many flights begin in legal weather, but it deteriorates quickly.

TSB has therefore asked for an increase in VFR weather minima for night flight, to reduce the occurrences of inadvertent flight into cloud. The board also recommends a night-endorsement flight test, plus periodic proficiency tests. And for commercial operations, the board has asked DoT to require weather briefings for VFR night flights.

Identifying cross-country inexperience as a major cause of the accidents, TSB recommends more training than the eight hours now required for the private pi­lot's licence. In the U.S., 13 hours of the 40-hour minimum must be cross-country. DoT, says TSB, should consider amending the private licence privileges to require additional licence endorse­ments specifically for carrying passen­gers on cross-country flights.

Another endorsement supported by TSB is one which permits VFR cross-­country night flight only in ILS-equipped aircraft.

Since weather is the problem being discussed here, another recommendation is that minimum levels of knowledge in meteorology be verified periodically to keep the private licence current. There is no proficiency test right now for private pilots, in spite of statistics that showed accident reductions in the U.S. following their retest policy since 1974.

It's more difficult to obtain an instrument rating in Canada than in the U.S., and it is thought that if more Canadian pilots were so rated, more of them would file IFR flight plans when faced with poor weather.

Margins of safety and SOPs in use by major carriers generally don't exist with small operators.

While accurate comparisons were difficult due to differences in operating envi­ronments, TSB strongly recommends that instrument ratings be made easier to get.

Among the aircraft involved in Cana­dian VFR-into-IMC accidents, 50% were private, 35% were commercial and 15% were business. The industry - particularly insurance companies - uses total flying hours and hours on type to assess risk in hiring and insuring. IFR experi­ence is generally considered only when IFR flights are required.

Analyzing this, TSB states that IFR pilots were a much lower risk in the VFR-into-IMC accidents and this fact should be considered when hiring or insuring pilots. There should be incentive programs such as salary bonuses, etc. to encourage increased use of IFR-qualified pilots in commercial VFR operations, says the board.

Among 33 helicopter accidents, only one of the pilots had an instrument rating. TSB recommends that DoT require instrument-proficiency testing as part of a commercial helicopter pilot's annual re-ride.

The disproportionately high commercial-sector involvement in the studied accidents was not blamed on lack of pilot experience but more on economic pressure and geography. The job at hand - getting clientele to their remote desti­nations - is considered essential, re­gardless of adverse weather in harsh terrain. The U.S. experience with char­ter operations in Alaska led to the con­cept of risk management. DoT has at­tempted to address this phenomenon, but poor decisions continue to be made by small operators working in remote regions.

TSB believes that a major evaluation of the conduct of high-risk operations needs to be made by government, insurance companies, financial institutions, commercial operators and their employees.

Margins of safety and SOPS in use by major carriers generally don't exist with small operators. To pick up the slack in commercial operations. TSB suggests the hiring of IFR pilots, employment of more airborne communications hardware, better flight-planning facilities, better company safety programs, and better use of pre-flight information.

But the board, considering the high rate of commercial accidents over the past five years, feels that these enhancements should be backed up by tougher air regulations and tougher safety standards for commercial operations. Regular users of charter services have demanded tougher standards, such as veri­fied passenger briefings, extra survival equipment, grounding of aircraft with faulty radios, better maintenance facili­ties, better pilot training levels, pilot­proficiency testing, and facility auditing.

Some other changes recommended by TSB:

- legislated safety promotion pro­grams for the private-business category;

- regular evaluation of air-carrier pi­lots' decision-making skills;

- automated weather stations in dan­gerous mountain regions;

- upgraded weather-briefing facili­ties for remotely located commercial operators;

- popularization of TWBs (which are too seldom unused).

The message - not all that well hidden in TSB's report -- is that some Canadian aviation-safety standards have not advanced with the times, and that things should not be left as they are.