Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Failures

October 16, 2024

(Draft)

Lately I have been sharing too much with people I barely know, including snippets of my favourite video, that of my late wife’s fiftieth birthday. While pointing her out to my friendly waitress, I mentioned that one of the last things she said to me was that I was the smartest man she had ever met. What a pretentious jerk I imagined her thinking as I left Abby’s Wine Bar. There was no time to provide context, so I will try to do so here.

Three failed career choices is not a sign of a smart person, but a delusional one. The reason I survived my failures was that they did not stop her from believing in me. She knew that after she was gone, there would be no one to encourage me to persevere, and she wanted me to persevere.

My first failure was the result of ignoring the advice of Sophocles who, in Antigone, warned us: “None love the messenger who brings bad news” and informed my superiors, at the then of Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs (Global Affairs), about my discovery of a multi-million dollar fraud on the Canadian taxpayers first confirmed by our Tokyo embassy and inadvertently revealed by our numbers man in Brussels duping a visit to Ottawa.

My unearthing of this massive fraud would lead to my receiving what I refer to as the Appraisal from Hell, and being fired on a bogus charge of insubordination with a hapless former Prime Minister making it possible for them to get away with it.

The Right Honourable Chief Justice Brian Dickson

The Honourable Mr. Justice William McIntyre

The Honourable Mr. Justice Antonio Lamer

Robert Cousineau, Q.C., counsel for HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN IN RIGHT OF CANADA and Treasury Board.

John E. McCormick, Esq., counsel for the Public Service Staff Relations Board

Bernard Payeur representing himself

During the two years it took to appeal my firing all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, using leading edge Canadian software I built a computer application that I would use as my calling card to find work despite the Appraisal from Hell.

It was not quite ready when my appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was dismissed, not on its merit, but because, in the words of The Right Honourable Chief Justice Brian Dickson, it was “not a question of national interest.”

A few days after The Right Honourable Chief Justice Brian Dickson said those discouraging words and invited me to leave his courtroom I received word that someone wanted to offer me a job.

André’s small Montréal-based computer consulting firm had won an impressive contract to provide user support to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and he was looking for someone to manage the young people he would be sending to Ottawa. I took the job.

Sharing a drink at a bar during one of his visit to Ottawa I told André that I had inadvertently found out who he bribed at CIDA and at the then Department of Supply and Services to obtain the contract. He was candid about it.

He knew whoever he hired to manage his operation at CIDA would eventually find out and that is why he hired me. Knowing my history, he was confident that after what they did to me for telling on my bosses I would not make that same mistake again, and he was right. And that is how corruption becomes endemic.

We parted on good terms; after all, he had saved my marriage and possibly my life when he offered me a job.

The Boreal Shell was now ready for prime time.

I started my own consulting firm, Boreal Consulting and used the shell to get clients. My first client was the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC).

Denis was a man with a big problem on his hands. He was the civil engineer in charge of a computer project to catalogue all assets for which the Federal Government was responsible in the more than 800 First Nation communities, i.e., reserves, across Canada, and that included everything from roads to fire halls and firefighting equipment, water treatment plants, schools, etc.

His first attempt at creating a database had taken more than a year and was an abject failure; the highly touted American DBMS (Database Management System), PowerBuilder, proved inadequate for the task. Indian Affairs would be the first to adopt the Boreal Shell.

Government departments are notoriously shy about trying unproven Canadian technology like the Boreal Shell, and to make matters worse, it was based on a Canadian DBMS with the unfortunate name of ZIM; a name which completely obscured the powerhouse that was the ZIM DBMS and the ZIM fourth-generation language, leading edge technology from Bell Northern Research, the precursor to Nortel.

I made Denis a promise that normally would have been considered reckless. I promised him that, using ZIM and the Boreal Shell, and starting from scratch, I could have the thing done in four months. Not only that, but it would include a user-friendly interface and a feature that no other database product on the planet offered at that time: the ability to respond to the user in the language of his or her choice, in this case English or French, and produce reports on the fly in either language. If I did not deliver what I promised within the agreed-upon timeframe, he did not have to pay me.

He was impressed enough that he gave ZIM and the Boreal Shell a chance, and he never looked back. The system, which became known as CAIS for Capital Asset Inventory System, was built within the time allowed and implemented within all the Indian and Northern Affairs (INAC) regional offices across Canada.

With the success of CAIS, I was asked to build the more complicated companion system, ACRS (Asset Condition Reporting System, pronounced acres). Every year, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs must estimate and allocate the amount of money it will need to maintain First Nations’ community assets in good working conditions and to track projects related to the maintenance of these assets. This was the role of ACRS. ACRS won the Deputy Minister's award for excellence, coming in on time, under budget, and exceeding requirements and user expectations.

The next few years were good years, then the government declared ZIM’s super-efficient way of retrieving information not compliant with an old standard developed by IBM 30 years earlier called SQL (pronounced sequel) which it adopted as a government-wide standard (see Chapter “The Butterfly Effect,” Shooting the Messenger, Boreal Books). This not only made it next impossible to get new government clients, but existing ZIM clients started abandoning the DBMS (Database Management System) in favour of inferior American products.

One of my clients, the Ontario First Nations Technical Service Corporation based in Toronto stayed with ZIM and the Boreal Shell. In doing, so with the assistance of Michael Cowpland of Corel fame who had recently acquired the ZIM Corporation they would have succeeded in saving this cutting-edge Canadian gem until the rest of the industry caught up, had it not been for the perfidy of INAC.

Around the time I was building CAIS, and later ACRS, the Government of Canada announced a policy whereby First Nation communities were going to be given the resources, training and technology to manage their communities. As part of this policy of devolution, there was to be a transfer of computer-based management information technology to the First Nations, and part of that transfer included CAIS and ACRS.

I went to work for the Ontario First Nations Technical Services Corporation (OFNTSC) to make it happen. On its website, OFNTSC describes its mission as a “technical advisory service for 133 First Nations and 16 Tribal Councils in Ontario.”

Under the visionary leadership of Chief and Executive Director Irvin George and the project management skills of Elmer Lickers, an Iroquois from Six Nations the Grand River, OFNTSC had the potential to become the provider of custom-made, leading edge computer applications for First Nation communities across Canada and beyond. 

We merged CAIS and ACRS and added a housing database and call the new integrated system CAMS for Community Asset Management System. Housing on reserves is the responsibility of the Federal Government. As landlord to the First Nations, it had not been able to solve what seemed to be an intractable problem: getting timely information on housing conditions in Native communities, especially in the North. OFNTSC was looking to remedy that situation by adding a housing component initially called CAHD for Conditional Assessment of Housing Database. 

Teams were sent out to collect what should have been destined to become a digital life-cycle record of every house in every community, including information about the sex and age of occupants and sleeping accommodations so as to identify overcrowding that might invite sexual interference. We incorporated within the housing component the complete Canadian Building Code. This allowed for quick verification when a request for payment was received for repairs done, along with a digital photo of the work done, it was done according to code.

In less than a year, thanks to the Boreal Shell as both an interface and development platform and people who knew what they were doing, we had a working application. Communities were accepting of the CAMS not only because of its ease of use but also because it was presented as a First Nation achievement, which it was (and also a Métis achievement: Dewey Smith, a Métis, was the expert in the voluminous Canadian Building Code incorporated into the system as a set of pop regulations), and they would be made custodians of the information collected about conditions in their communities.

CAHD catalogued perhaps a thousand homes—mainly in poor Northern Ontario communities such the house pictured here—when the dream came to an end.

OFNTSC had a vision of being a management software provider to First Nations across Canada, and to that end, Elmer and I went to B.C. to demonstrate our application to the B.C. INAC regional office.

They were more than impressed and wanted to start using CAMS immediately. Next came Alberta, to whom we sent a prototype. They all wanted it. There was only one catch: we estimated that to make CAMS available to all 800+ First Nations communities would require at least a million dollars.

The housing component was OFNTSC’s ideas but its development was funded by the Federal Government. INAC said the money for the development was a contribution, as opposed to a grant, therefore, as the one and only contributor—as if sweat equity and devolution did not matter—they owned it and would now take over the CAMS.

OFNTSC refused to hand over the application and the source code that made it run. To try to convince INAC to let OFNTSC handle the deployment of CAMS, I got Michael Cowpland, who had recently purchased ZIM, to partner with OFNTSC and make a joint presentation to departments. Michael even agreed to throw in $250,000 of free ZIM software to keep our first year’s estimated deployment costs at or below a million dollars. 

A small group—consisting of Irvin George, Bill Taggart, OFNTSC’s general counsel, Elmer Lickers, a Ms. Batson from ZIM Technologies, and myself—met with an assistant to Minister Nault to make our case.

Bill Taggart actually made the most compelling argument. Holding a CAMS installation CD in one hand, he waved it in front of the bemused assistant, telling him, “You have here an easy-to-use, elegant, inexpensive solution tailored to First Nations peoples’ needs; what more could you want?” An ugly request put an end to any substantial discussion about an “easy-to-use, elegant, inexpensive solution” to a pressing problem.

Another argument was that CAMS, especially in northern communities, could be the difference between life and death. The aide's response was to ask us to produce for the Minister a cost benefit analysis, which at this point should not have been necessary. In that analysis—I kid you not—he wanted us to include an estimate on how much the life of an aboriginal was worth.

 Michael Cowpland, when he heard about this preposterous demand, correctly concluded that they were wasting our time and wanted nothing more to do with INAC. Unbeknownst to any of us at the time, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada had probably already signed a  $20,000,000+ contract with Accenture, the large American software integrator, to build Internet-based CAMS with ORACLE as the DBMS. Their wanting ownership of the community-based CAMS, instead of letting a First Nations organisation proceed with its implementation across Canada was to kill it in favour of Accenture.

We asked for a million dollars for a proven system that had found favour among those it was meant to help. Accenture wanted—and got—20+ million dollars to build a system that the First Nations could never trust having their participation relegated to that of data entry clerks.

I got the opportunity to ask a consultant with Accenture about the initial 20 million dollars, an amount I found excessive, knowing the problem to be solved. “Because we don’t know what we’re doing,” was his reply. A Freudian slip, or was he simply being facetious? Considering that they never managed to duplicate the CAMS, I would opt for the former.

In the fall of 2019, I got a call from Elmer who was in town on business. Did I have time to meet him for a game of pool? He had some news. After almost twenty years and a slew of costly failures, INAC had finally relented and was ready to adopt the community-based solution we had proposed way back when. They had given OFNTSC the money to build a new CAMS using a mainstream DBMS and language, ZIM having withered on the vine.

In all those intervening years, Elmer had kept a working copy on an out-of-the way computer. When he met with the developers to show them what he wanted, he simply fired up the old machine and gave them a demonstration of our CAMS. He said they were absolutely blown away. They could not believe that what he was showing them was twenty years old. They even admitted, he said, that they could not easily duplicate some of the features even today.

He thought I would be happy to hear that. I was and I wasn’t. That is the way with what-might-have-beens. 

My last client for the Boreal Shell was Bell Canada Enterprises. With the help of the smartest manager I have ever worked with, we beat Google to Google only to have new management abandon the project days before going live.

It was post 9/11, after I had returned from Montréal for good, when I picked up a copy of the Koran in the hope of understanding what happened that fateful day and decided to write about it. It is a failure in progress.