NORCAT, on bidding adieu.

• Author: Atkins, Michael
• Position: President's Note - Northern Centre for Advanced Technology

I met Darryl Lake around 40 years ago. He was the dean of Health Sciences and Technology at Cambrian College and I was in the early years of publishing Northern Life newspaper in Sudbury. We came together in 1978 around the idea of Sudbury 2001 along with thousands of other Sudburians who left their politics at the door and volunteered to help Sudbury insulate itself from massive layoffs and what looked like a very large economic cliff.

One of the outcrops of the spirit of "2001" was the idea of the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT).

The idea came from Mike Harris (yes, that Mike Harris) who was sitting around drinking scotch in Elliot Lake with Darryl and Jim Gordon (mayor of Sudbury, Tory MPP, etc.).

They were serving as members of the Centre for Resource Machinery Technology at the time. The premier-in-waiting thought Darryl should establish an MIT of the North; a tech centre.

It would be many years later that Darryl and Glen Crombie (then president of Cambrian College) would attend a lecture in Toronto about how Durham College was setting up a tech centre in southern Ontario.

They walked out of that meeting and decided they would do their own.

I met Don Duval 25 years later in a hermetically sealed boardroom in Toronto.

I was the chair of NORCAT at the time and we were looking for Darryl's successor as president of NORCAT.

At the time, Don was the globetrotting vice-president of Strategy and Operations for the MaRS Discovery District (marsdd.com) in Toronto.

Here's how he described his job: "Create a globally significant urban innovation hub to make Canada more competitive on the global stage through sustainable job and wealth creation in technology startups across a multitude of industries."

Interestingly, Don had done a lot of work with MIT and was on the board of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, the renamed and imagined tech centre Durham college had set up so many years ago.

I would be lying if we didn't think for a moment after meeting Don, "So why would this urban cowboy at the top of the economic development food chain consider coming to our modest little operation in Sudbury?"

We recovered quickly and questioned him about his skills and talents and why we should give him the opportunity to step up and a get a real job.

It didn't take much convincing. It's what he wanted to do.

Darryl's true love was teaching, followed by raising money for good works. To build on NORCAT's...