Tag Archives: Canadian military

COVID-19: caution and concern not panic

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There’s a lot of information being pumped out about COVID-19 and not all of it is as helpful as it might be. In fact, the sheer volume can seem overwhelming despite one’s best efforts to be calm.

Here are a few things I’ve used to help relieve some fo the pressure as numbers in Canada keep rising.

Inspiration from the Italians

I was thrilled to find Emily Rumball’s March 18 ,2020 article titled, “Italians making the most of quarantine is just what the world needs right now (VIDEOS),” on the Daily Hive website. The couple dancing on the balcony while Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are shown dancing on the wall above is my favourite.

As the Italians practice social distancing and exercise caution, they are also demonstrating that “life goes on” even while struggling as one of the countries hit hardest by COVID-19.

Investigating viruses and the 1918/19 pandemic vs. COVID-19

There has been some mention of and comparison to the 1918/19 pandemic (also known as the Spanish flu) in articles by people who don’t seem to be particularly well informed about that earlier pandemic. Susan Baxter offers a concise and scathing explanation for why the 1918/19 situation deteriorated as much as it did in her February 8, 2010 posting. As for this latest pandemic (COVID-19), she explains what a virus actually is and suggests we all calm down in her March 17, 2020 posting. BTW, she has an interdisciplinary PhD for work largely focused on health economics. She is also a lecturer in the health sciences programme at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). Full disclosure: She and I have a longstanding friendship.

Marilyn J. Roossinck, a professor of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology at Pennsylvania State University, wrote a February 20, 2020 essay for The Conversation titled, “What are viruses anyway, and why do they make us so sick? 5 questions answered,”

4. SARS was a formidable foe, and then seemed to disappear. Why?

Measures to contain SARS started early, and they were very successful. The key is to stop the chain of transmission by isolating infected individuals. SARS had a short incubation period; people generally showed symptoms in two to seven days. There were no documented cases of anyone being a source of SARS without showing symptoms.

Stopping the chain of transmission is much more difficult when the incubation time is much longer, or when some people don’t get symptoms at all. This may be the case with the virus causing CoVID-19, so stopping it may take more time.

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1918/19 pandemic vs. COVID-19

Angela Betsaida B. Laguipo, with a Bachelor of Nursing degree from the University of Baguio, Philippine is currently completing her Master’s Degree, has written a March 9, 2020 article for News Medical comparing the two pandemics,

The COVID-19 is fast spreading because traveling is an everyday necessity today, with flights from one country to another accessible to most.

Some places did manage to keep the virus at bay in 1918 with traditional and effective methods, such as closing schools, banning public gatherings, and locking down villages, which has been performed in Wuhan City, in Hubei province, China, where the coronavirus outbreak started. The same method is now being implemented in Northern Italy, where COVID-19 had killed more than 400 people.

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The 1918 Spanish flu has a higher mortality rate of an estimated 10 to 20 percent, compared to 2 to 3 percent in COVID-19. The global mortality rate of the Spanish flu is unknown since many cases were not reported back then. About 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population contracted the disease, while the number of deaths was estimated to be up to 50 million.

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During that time, public funds are mostly diverted to military efforts, and a public health system was still a budding priority in most countries. In most places, only the middle class or the wealthy could afford to visit a doctor. Hence, the virus has [sic] killed many people in poor urban areas where there are poor nutrition and sanitation. Many people during that time had underlying health conditions, and they can’t afford to receive health services.

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I recommend reading Laguipo’s article in its entirety right down to the sources she cites at the end of her article.

Ed Yong’s March 20, 2020 article for The Atlantic, “Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful; We’ve known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it’s behaving in such an extreme way,” provides more information about what is currently know about the coronavirus, SATS-CoV-2,

One of the few mercies during this crisis is that, by their nature, individual coronaviruses are easily destroyed. Each virus particle consists of a small set of genes, enclosed by a sphere of fatty lipid molecules, and because lipid shells are easily torn apart by soap, 20 seconds of thorough hand-washing can take one down. Lipid shells are also vulnerable to the elements; a recent study shows that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, survives for no more than a day on cardboard, and about two to three days on steel and plastic. These viruses don’t endure in the world. They need bodies.

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But why do some people with COVID-19 get incredibly sick, while others escape with mild or nonexistent symptoms? Age is a factor. Elderly people are at risk of more severe infections possibly because their immune system can’t mount an effective initial defense, while children are less affected because their immune system is less likely to progress to a cytokine storm. But other factors—a person’s genes, the vagaries of their immune system, the amount of virus they’re exposed to, the other microbes in their bodies—might play a role too. In general, “it’s a mystery why some people have mild disease, even within the same age group,” Iwasaki [Akiko Iwasaki of the Yale School of Medicine] says.

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We still have a lot to learn about this.

Going nuts and finding balance with numbers

Generally speaking,. I find numbers help me to put this situation into perspective. It seems I’m not alone; Dr. Daniel Gillis’ (Guelph University in Ontario, Canada) March 18, 2020 blog post is titled, Statistics In A Time of Crisis.

Hearkening back in history, the Wikipedia entry for Spanish flu offers a low of 17M deaths in a 2018 estimate to a high of !00M deaths in a 2005 estimate. At this writing (Friday, March 20, 2020 at 3 pm PT), the number of coronovirus cases worldwide is 272,820 with 11, 313 deaths.

Articles like Michael Schulman’s March 16, 2020 article for the New Yorker might not be as helpful as one hope (Note: Links have been removed),

Last Wednesday night [March 11, 2020], not long after President Trump’s Oval Office address, I called my mother to check in about the, you know, unprecedented global health crisis [emphasis mine] that’s happening. She told me that she and my father were in a cab on the way home from a fun dinner at the Polo Bar, in midtown Manhattan, with another couple who were old friends.

“You went to a restaurant?!” I shrieked. This was several days after she had told me, through sniffles, that she was recovering from a cold but didn’t see any reason that she shouldn’t go to the school where she works. Also, she was still hoping to make a trip to Florida at the end of the month. My dad, a lawyer, was planning to go into the office on Thursday, but thought that he might work from home on Friday, if he could figure out how to link up his personal computer. …

… I’m thirty-eight, and my mother and father are sixty-eight and seventy-four, respectively. Neither is retired, and both are in good shape. But people sixty-five and older—more than half of the baby-boomer population—are more susceptible to COVID-19 and have a higher mortality rate, and my parents’ blithe behavior was as unsettling as the frantic warnings coming from hospitals in Italy.

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Clearly, Schulman is concerned about his parents’ health and well being but the tone of near hysteria is a bit off-putting. We’re not in a crisis (exception: the Italians and, possibly, the Spanish and the French)—yet.

Tyler Dawson’s March 20, 2020 article in The Province newspaper (in Vancouver, British Columbia) offers dire consequences from COVID-19 before pivoting,

COVID-19 will leave no Canadian untouched.

Travel plans halted. First dates postponed. School semesters interrupted. Jobs lost. Retirement savings decimated. Some of us will know someone who has gotten sick, or tragically, died from the virus.

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By now we know the terminology: social distancing, flatten the curve. Across the country, each province is taking measures to prepare, to plan for care, and the federal government has introduced financial measures amounting to more than three per cent of the country’s GDP to float the economy onward.

The response, says Steven Taylor, a University of British Columbia psychiatry professor and author of The Psychology of Pandemics, is a “balancing act.” [emphasis mine] Keep people alert, but neither panicked nor tuned out.

“You need to generate some degree of anxiety that gets people’s attention,” says Taylor. “If you overstate the message it could backfire.”

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Prepare for uncertainty

In the same way experts still cannot come up with a definitive death rate for the 1918/19 pandemic, they are having trouble with this one too although, now, they’re trying to model the future rather than trying to establish what happened in the past. David Adam’s March 12, 2020 article forThe Scientist, provides some insight into the difficulties (Note: Links have been removed)

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Like any other models, the projections of how the outbreak will unfold, how many people will become infected, and how many will die, are only as reliable as the scientific information they rest on. And most modelers’ efforts so far have focused on improving these data, rather than making premature predictions.

“Most of the work that modelers have done recently or in the first part of the epidemic hasn’t really been coming up with models and predictions, which is I think how most people think of it,” says John Edmunds, who works in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Most of the work has really been around characterizing the epidemiology, trying to estimate key parameters. I don’t really class that as modeling but it tends to be the modelers that do it.”

These variables include key numbers such as the disease incubation period, how quickly the virus spreads through the population, and, perhaps most contentiously, the case-fatality ratio. This sounds simple: it’s the proportion of infected people who die. But working it out is much trickier than it looks. “The non-specialists do this all the time and they always get it wrong,” Edmunds says. “If you just divide the total numbers of deaths by the total numbers of cases, you’re going to get the wrong answer.”

Earlier this month, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, dismayed disease modelers when he said COVID-19 (the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus) had killed 3.4 percent of reported cases, and that this was more severe than seasonal flu, which has a death rate of around 0.1 percent. Such a simple calculation does not account for the two to three weeks it usually takes someone who catches the virus to die, for example. And it assumes that reported cases are an accurate reflection of how many people are infected, when the true number will be much higher and the true mortality rate much lower.

Edmunds calls this kind of work “outbreak analytics” rather than true modeling, and he says the results of various specialist groups around the world are starting to converge on COVID-19’s true case-fatality ratio, which seems to be about 1 percent.[emphasis mine]

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The 1% estimate in Adam’s article accords with Jeremy Samuel Faust’s (an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, faculty in its division of health policy and public health, and an instructor at Harvard Medical School) estimates in a March 4, 2020 article (COVID-19 Isn’t As Deadly As We Think featured in my March 9, 2020 posting).

In a March 17, 2020 article by Steven Lewis (a health policy consultant formerly based in Saskatchewan, Canada; now living in Australia) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news online website, he covers some of the same ground and offers a somewhat higher projected death rate while refusing to commit,

Imagine you’re a chief public health officer and you’re asked the question on everyone’s mind: how deadly is the COVID-19 outbreak?

With the number of cases worldwide approaching 200,000, and 1,000 or more cases in 15 countries, you’d think there would be an answer. But the more data we see, the tougher it is to come up with a hard number.

Overall, the death rate is around four per cent — of reported cases. That’s also the death rate in China, which to date accounts for just under half the total number of global cases.

China is the only country where a) the outcome of almost all cases is known (85 per cent have recovered), and b) the spread has been stopped (numbers plateaued about a month ago). 

A four per cent death rate is pretty high — about 40 times more deadly than seasonal flu — but no experts believe that is the death rate. The latest estimate is that it is around 1.5 per cent. [emphasis mine] Other models suggest that it may be somewhat lower. 

The true rate can be known only if every case is known and confirmed by testing — including the asymptomatic or relatively benign cases, which comprise 80 per cent or more of the total — and all cases have run their course (people have either recovered or died). Aside from those in China, almost all cases identified are still active. 

Unless a jurisdiction systematically tests a large random sample of its population, we may never know the true rate of infection or the real death rate. 

Yet for all this unavoidable uncertainty, it is still odd that the rates vary so widely by country.

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His description of the situation in Europe is quite interesting and worthwhile if you have the time to read it.

In the last article I’m including here, Murray Brewster offers some encouraging words in his March 20, 2020 piece about the preparations being made by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF),

The Canadian military is preparing to respond to multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic which could stretch out over a year or more, the country’s top military commander said in his latest planning directive.

Gen. Jonathan Vance, chief of the defence staff, warned in a memo issued Thursday that requests for assistance can be expected “from all echelons of government and the private sector and they will likely come to the Department [of National Defence] through multiple points of entry.”

The directive notes the federal government has not yet directed the military to move into response mode, but if or when it does, a single government panel — likely a deputy-minister level inter-departmental task force — will “triage requests and co-ordinate federal responses.”

It also warns that members of the military will contract the novel coronavirus, “potentially threatening the integrity” of some units.

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The notion that the virus caseload could recede and then return is a feature of federal government planning.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has put out a notice looking for people to staff its Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response during the crisis and the secondment is expected to last between 12 and 24 months.

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The Canadian military, unlike those in some other nations, has high-readiness units available. Vance said they are already set to reach out into communities to help when called.

Planners are also looking in more detail at possible missions — such as aiding remote communities in the Arctic where an outbreak could cripple critical infrastructure.

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Defence analyst Dave Perry said this kind of military planning exercise is enormously challenging and complicated in normal times, let alone when most of the federal civil service has been sent home.

“The idea that they’re planning to be at this for year is absolutely bang on,” said Perry, a vice-president at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

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In other words, concern and caution are called for not panic. I realize this post has a strongly Canada-centric focus but I’m hopeful others elsewhere will find this helpful.

Graphene and smart textiles

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Here’s one of the more recent efforts to create fibres that are electronic and capable of being woven into a smart textile. (Details about a previous effort can be found at the end of this post.) Now for this one, from a Dec. 3, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily,

The quest to create affordable, durable and mass-produced ‘smart textiles’ has been given fresh impetus through the use of the wonder material Graphene.

An international team of scientists, led by Professor Monica Craciun from the University of Exeter Engineering department, has pioneered a new technique to create fully electronic fibres that can be incorporated into the production of everyday clothing.

A Dec. 3, 2018 University of Exeter press release (also on EurekAlert), provides more detail about the problems associated with wearable electronics and the solution being offered (Note: A link has been removed),

Currently, wearable electronics are achieved by essentially gluing devices to fabrics, which can mean they are too rigid and susceptible to malfunctioning.

The new research instead integrates the electronic devices into the fabric of the material, by coating electronic fibres with light-weight, durable components that will allow images to be shown directly on the fabric.

The research team believe that the discovery could revolutionise the creation of wearable electronic devices for use in a range of every day applications, as well as health monitoring, such as heart rates and blood pressure, and medical diagnostics.

The international collaborative research, which includes experts from the Centre for Graphene Science at the University of Exeter, the Universities of Aveiro and Lisbon in Portugal, and CenTexBel in Belgium, is published in the scientific journal Flexible Electronics.

Professor Craciun, co-author of the research said: “For truly wearable electronic devices to be achieved, it is vital that the components are able to be incorporated within the material, and not simply added to it.

Dr Elias Torres Alonso, Research Scientist at Graphenea and former PhD student in Professor Craciun’s team at Exeter added “This new research opens up the gateway for smart textiles to play a pivotal role in so many fields in the not-too-distant future.  By weaving the graphene fibres into the fabric, we have created a new technique to all the full integration of electronics into textiles. The only limits from now are really within our own imagination.”

At just one atom thick, graphene is the thinnest substance capable of conducting electricity. It is very flexible and is one of the strongest known materials. The race has been on for scientists and engineers to adapt graphene for the use in wearable electronic devices in recent years.

This new research used existing polypropylene fibres – typically used in a host of commercial applications in the textile industry – to attach the new, graphene-based electronic fibres to create touch-sensor and light-emitting devices.

The new technique means that the fabrics can incorporate truly wearable displays without the need for electrodes, wires of additional materials.

Professor Saverio Russo, co-author and from the University of Exeter Physics department, added: “The incorporation of electronic devices on fabrics is something that scientists have tried to produce for a number of years, and is a truly game-changing advancement for modern technology.”

Dr Ana Neves, co-author and also from Exeter’s Engineering department added “The key to this new technique is that the textile fibres are flexible, comfortable and light, while being durable enough to cope with the demands of modern life.”

In 2015, an international team of scientists, including Professor Craciun, Professor Russo and Dr Ana Neves from the University of Exeter, have pioneered a new technique to embed transparent, flexible graphene electrodes into fibres commonly associated with the textile industry.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Graphene electronic fibres with touch-sensing and light-emitting functionalities for smart textiles by Elias Torres Alonso, Daniela P. Rodrigues, Mukond Khetani, Dong-Wook Shin, Adolfo De Sanctis, Hugo Joulie, Isabel de Schrijver, Anna Baldycheva, Helena Alves, Ana I. S. Neves, Saverio Russo & Monica F. Craciun. Flexible Electronicsvolume 2, Article number: 25 (2018) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41528-018-0040-2 Published 25 September 2018

This paper is open access.

I have an earlier post about an effort to weave electronics into textiles for soldiers, from an April 5, 2012 posting,

I gather that today’s soldier (aka, warfighter)  is carrying as many batteries as weapons. Apparently, the average soldier carries a couple of kilos worth of batteries and cables to keep their various pieces of equipment operational. The UK’s Centre for Defence Enterprise (part of the Ministry of Defence) has announced that this situation is about to change as a consequence of a recently funded research project with a company called Intelligent Textiles. From Bob Yirka’s April 3, 2012 news item for physorg.com,

To get rid of the cables, a company called Intelligent Textiles has come up with a type of yarn that can conduct electricity, which can be woven directly into the fabric of the uniform. And because they allow the uniform itself to become one large conductive unit, the need for multiple batteries can be eliminated as well.

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I dug down to find more information about this UK initiative and the Intelligent Textiles company but the trail seems to end in 2015. Still, I did find a Canadian connection (for those who don’t know I’m a Canuck) and more about Intelligent Textile’s work with the British military in this Sept. 21, 2015 article by Barry Collins for alphr.com (Note: Links have been removed),

A two-person firm operating from a small workshop in Staines-upon-Thames, Intelligent Textiles has recently landed a multimillion-pound deal with the US Department of Defense, and is working with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to bring its potentially life-saving technology to British soldiers. Not bad for a company that only a few years ago was selling novelty cushions.

Intelligent Textiles was born in 2002, almost by accident. Asha Peta Thompson, an arts student at Central Saint Martins, had been using textiles to teach children with special needs. That work led to a research grant from Brunel University, where she was part of a team tasked with creating a “talking jacket” for the disabled. The garment was designed to help cerebral palsy sufferers to communicate, by pressing a button on the jacket to say “my name is Peter”, for example, instead of having a Stephen Hawking-like communicator in front of them.

Another member of that Brunel team was engineering lecturer Dr Stan Swallow, who was providing the electronics expertise for the project. Pretty soon, the pair realised the prototype waistcoat they were working on wasn’t going to work: it was cumbersome, stuffed with wires, and difficult to manufacture. “That’s when we had the idea that we could weave tiny mechanical switches into the surface of the fabric,” said Thompson.

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The conductive weave had several advantages over packing electronics into garments. “It reduces the amount of cables,” said Thompson. “It can be worn and it’s also washable, so it’s more durable. It doesn’t break; it can be worn next to the skin; it’s soft. It has all the qualities of a piece of fabric, so it’s a way of repackaging the electronics in a way that’s more user-friendly and more comfortable.” The key to Intelligent Textiles’ product isn’t so much the nature of the raw materials used, but the way they’re woven together. “All our patents are in how we weave the fabric,” Thompson explained. “We weave two conductive yarns to make a tiny mechanical switch that is perfectly separated or perfectly connected. We can weave an electronic circuit board into the fabric itself.”

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Intelligent Textiles’ big break into the military market came when they met a British textiles firm that was supplying camouflage gear to the Canadian armed forces. [emphasis mine] The firm was attending an exhibition in Canada and invited the Intelligent Textiles duo to join them. “We showed a heated glove and an iPod controller,” said Thompson. “The Canadians said ‘that’s really fantastic, but all we need is power. Do you think you could weave a piece of fabric that distributes power?’ We said, ‘we’re already doing it’.”Before long it wasn’t only power that the Canadians wanted transmitted through the fabric, but data.

“The problem a soldier faces at the moment is that he’s carrying 60 AA batteries [to power all the equipment he carries],” said Thompson. “He doesn’t know what state of charge those batteries are at, and they’re incredibly heavy. He also has wires and cables running around the system. He has snag hazards – when he’s going into a firefight, he can get caught on door handles and branches, so cables are a real no-no.”

The Canadians invited the pair to speak at a NATO conference, where they were approached by military brass with more familiar accents. “It was there that we were spotted by the British MoD, who said ‘wow, this is a British technology but you’re being funded by Canada’,” said Thompson. That led to £235,000 of funding from the Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) – the money they needed to develop a fabric wiring system that runs all the way through the soldier’s vest, helmet and backpack.

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There are more details about the 2015 state of affairs, textiles-wise, in a March 11, 2015 article by Richard Trenholm for CNET.com (Note: A link has been removed),

Speaking at the Wearable Technology Show here, Swallow describes IT [Intelligent Textiles]L as a textile company that “pretends to be a military company…it’s funny how you slip into these domains.”

One domain where this high-tech fabric has seen frontline action is in the Canadian military’s IAV Stryker armoured personnel carrier. ITL developed a full QWERTY keyboard in a single piece of fabric for use in the Stryker, replacing a traditional hardware keyboard that involved 100 components. Multiple components allow for repair, but ITL knits in redundancy so the fabric can “degrade gracefully”. The keyboard works the same as the traditional hardware, with the bonus that it’s less likely to fall on a soldier’s head, and with just one glaring downside: troops can no longer use it as a step for getting in and out of the vehicle.

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An armoured car with knitted controls is one thing, but where the technology comes into its own is when used about the person. ITL has worked on vests like the JTAC, a system “for the guys who call down airstrikes” and need “extra computing oomph.” Then there’s SWIPES, a part of the US military’s Nett Warrior system — which uses a chest-mounted Samsung Galaxy Note 2 smartphone — and British military company BAE’s Broadsword system.

ITL is currently working on Spirit, a “truly wearable system” for the US Army and United States Marine Corps. It’s designed to be modular, scalable, intuitive and invisible.

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While this isn’t an ITL product, this video about Broadsword technology from BAE does give you some idea of what wearable technology for soldiers is like,

baesystemsinc

Uploaded on Jul 8, 2014

Broadsword™ delivers groundbreaking technology to the 21st Century warfighter through interconnecting components that inductively transfer power and data via The Spine™, a revolutionary e-textile that can be inserted into any garment. This next-generation soldier system offers enhanced situational awareness when used with the BAE Systems’ Q-Warrior® see-through display.

If anyone should have the latest news about Intelligent Textile’s efforts, please do share in the comments section.

I do have one other posting about textiles and the military, which is dated May 9, 2012, but while it does reference US efforts it is not directly related to weaving electronics into solder’s (warfighter’s) gear.

You can find CenTexBel (Belgian Textile Rsearch Centre) here and Graphenea here. Both are mentioned in the University of Exeter press release.

2014 Canadian Science Policy Conference extends early bird registration until Sept. 30, 2014

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If you register before Oct. 1, 2014 (tomorrow), you will be eligible to receive an ‘early bird’ discount for the 6th annual (2014) Canadian Science Policy Conference being held in Halifax, Nova Scotia from Oct. 15 – 17, 2014.

The revolving/looping banner on the conference website, on Monday, Sept. 29, 2014 featured an all male, all white set of speakers intended to lure participants. An unusual choice in this day and age. In any event, the revolving banner seems to have disappeared.

The agenda for the 2014 conference was previously included in a Sept. 3, 2014 posting about it and a super-saver registrationdiscount available to Sept. 9. As I noted at the time, the organizers needed at least one or two names that would attract registrants and I imagine that having the federal Canadian government Minister of State responsible for Science and Technology, Ed Holder, and, the province of Nova Scotia’s Minister of Economic and Rural Development and Tourism, Minister of Acadian Affairs and the Minister responsible for Nova Scotia Business Inc., and the Innovation Corporation Act – Cape Breton-Richmond, Michael P. Samson, have helped to fill that bill.

The two co-chairs for the 2014 version of this Canadian Science Policy Conference reflect the increasing concern about science, economics, and monetary advancement. Frank McKenna, a former premier of the province of New Brunswick, and a former Canadian ambassador to Washington, DC, is currently, according to his Wikipedia entry,

… Deputy Chair, TD Bank Financial Group effective May 1, 2006.[8] McKenna is responsible for helping to build long-term business relationships that support TD’s growth strategy in Canada and the United States.

McKenna is responsible for supporting the company in its customer acquisition strategy, particularly in the areas of wholesale and commercial banking. In addition, he is responsible for representing TD as it works to expand its North American presence as one of the continent’s ten largest banks, as measured by market capitalization.

As for John Risley, there’s this from a Dec. 19, 2013 article by Stephen Kimber for Canadian publication, Atlantic Business,

Billionaire seafood baron insists that business, not government, must lead Atlantic Canada out of its economic malaise

“The problem with doing profiles…” John Risley begins, and I realize I’ve already lost control of this particular interview before I even ask my first question. “I mean, look,” he continues, kindly enough, “this is your editorial licence, not mine.”

It had all seemed simple enough back in July 2013 during an editorial meeting in St. John’s [Newfoundland and Labrador]. In 2014, Atlantic Business Magazine would celebrate its 25th anniversary – no mean feat in the publishing business anywhere these days – and editor Dawn Chafe and I were trying to figure out an appropriate editorial way to mark that milestone. I’m not sure which of us came up with the idea to profile a series of key Atlantic Canadian business makers and economy shakers, but we quickly agreed John Risley had to be one of them.

Risley, after all, is a member in good standing in Canadian Business magazine’s Top 100 Wealthiest Canadians, the billionaire co-founder of Clearwater Seafoods Inc., “one of North America’s largest vertically integrated seafood companies and the largest holder of shellfish licences and quotas in Canada;” the driving force behind the evolution of Ocean Nutrition, the 16-year-old Nova Scotiabased company that had become the world’s largest producer of Omega-3 fatty acids by the time Risley sold it last year to Dutch-based Royal DSM for $540 million; and a major investor in Columbus Communications, a 10-year-old Barbados-based company providing cable TV‚ digital video, high speed internet access‚ digital telephones and corporate data services in 42 countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

These days, Risley lives with his wife Judy in a 32,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion on a 300-acre sweet spot of ocean-fronted land near idyllic Chester, N.S., that once belonged to the founder of Sunoco, the American petrochemical giant. When he needs to go somewhere, or just get away from it all, he can hop aboard one of his small fleet of corporate aircraft or sail away in a luxurious 240-foot super-yacht “equipped with a helipad and a grand ‘country-house’- style interior.”

It’s not immediately apparent what these two individuals bring to a meeting on Canadian science policy but given the increasing insistence on the commercialization of science, perhaps they don’t really need to know anything about science but can simply share their business insights.

The first plenary session as you might expect from co-chairs whose interests seem to be primarily financial is titled: Procurement and Industrial Technological Benefits (ITB) and Value Propositions on the conference agenda webpage,

The Inside Story: Procurement, Value Propositions, and Industrial and Technological Benefits

Canada’s procurement policy and its associated value proposition and Industrial and Technological Benefit (ITB) policies have the potential to create powerful strategic opportunities for Canadian industry and R&D. These opportunities include increasing demand-side pull instead of the more common supply-side push. In addition, ITBs and value propositions can provide new opportunities for Canadian companies to enter and move up sophisticated global supply chains.

On the other hand, these policies might potentially further complicate an already complicated procurement process and mitigate the primary objective of equipping the Canadian Forces in a timely way. To achieve the significant potential economic development benefits, ITBs and value propositions must be designed and negotiated strategically. This will therefore require priority attention from the responsible departments of government.

An authoritative panel will bring a variety of perspectives to the policy issues. The panel will include members from: a Canadian company with a contract for naval vessel construction; a federal regional development program; a federal ministry responsible for the operation of the policies; a provincial government; and a retired military officer. The panel is chaired by Peter Nicholson who has had extensive experience in science and innovation policy, including its relationship with defense procurement.

An interesting way to kick off the conference: business and military procurement. Happily, there are some more ‘sciencish’ panels but the business theme threatens to dominate the 2014 conference in such a way as to preclude other sorts of conversations and to turn even the more classically ‘science’ panels to business discussions.

While my perspective may seem a little dour, David Bruggeman in his Sept. 26, 2014 posting on the Pasco Phronesis blog offers a more upbeat perspective.