With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/813780
MAY 2017 BCBUSINESS 35 BCBUSINESS.CA 1988: One of the wealthiest men in Asia, Li Ka-shing, pays $320 million for the site of Vancouver's 1986 World's Fair. The purchase of the Expo lands is widely considered the deal (or steal) of the century, with Concord Pacific Developments Inc. generating billions from the ensuing construc- tion. Combined with the British handover of Hong Kong in 1997, Concord Place (as it becomes known) helps usher in a new era of Asian investment in B.C. 1988: Think Pac-Man, but for utilities: Inland Natural Gas buys the Lower Mainland gas division of BC Hydro and changes its name to BC Gas. After becoming the province's dom- inant distributor of natural gas and gobbling up rivals, BC Gas rebrands itself as Terasen Gas; Texas titan Kinder Morgan purchases Terasen in 2005, then sells it to Fortis Inc. two years later. It's FortisBC Energy Inc.–for now. 1989: Forbes magazine la- bels the Vancouver Stock Exchange the "scam capital of the world." While lo- cal lights defend the VSE as an important source of seed money, the international spotlight on its less savoury aspects–money laundering, shady promoters–proves fatal. Ten years later, the VSE disappears, rolled into the Toronto Stock Exchange. gists, who may be located at another clinical site, technicians can make the images instantly avail- able to be viewed by specialists on any computer or mobile device via cloud-based storage. The platform also allows specialists to collaborate and make case notes on a file. "Our technology is already very akin to what they're accustomed to doing, especially for the clini- cian driving the microscope," says Lo, who has an MASc in industrial, biomedical and computer engi- neering from the University of Toronto and a BASc in systems engineering from SFU. "It's not some foreign piece of equipment. They control everything—how they digitize it, what they see. Rather than replacing the microscope, we are embracing the microscope." Lo says ViewsIQ has about 30 clients in North America, Europe and Asia, including Vancouver General Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Dr. David Curtis Wilbur, director of the clinical imaging service at MGH, says Panoptiq could become "the desk accessory of the future" because it captures the complexity of specimens better than conventional slide scanners. The software records video of the sample, so afterward the clinician can scroll through multiple planes of focus onscreen as if looking into a microscope. ViewsIQ recently sold Panoptiq to the health department of the Federated States of Micronesia, where no pathologist resides. The system can help doctors in remote areas to receive faster diagnoses, but the challenge for Lo is to convince health ser- vice providers to adopt the change. "Many pathol- ogists appreciate the beauty of technology and what goodness it brings to their lives, because they don't appreciate driving hours to this lab [or a hospital] just for one case," he says, explaining that a pathologist must often be present at a surgery to diagnose a sample. "It's a matter of slowly accepting the practice." —M.G. Tanks for Dinner Raising fish in containers on land is eco-friendly. The next step is growing vegetables in the same water s salmon raised on land the future of sea- food?" asked National Geographic in a story about Kuterra LP, a farm established in 2013 by the 'Namgis First Nation in Port Hardy on Vancouver Island to raise Atlantic salmon in tanks. West Creek Aquaculture in Fort Langley has produced tank-raised rainbow trout for 20 years and began selling coho and sockeye salmon in 2013. Yet West Creek owner Don Read says land-based aquaculture is a still an immature industry. "Politi- cians and activists suggest it is the alterna- tive to ocean-based salmon, but it is nowhere near a stage to be an alter- native to ocean-grown salmon," he explains. The fish from B.C.'s handful of land-based a q u a c u l t u r e farms are con- sidered sustainable, with Ocean Wise certification from the Vancouver Aquarium. The farms use no antibiotics, hormones or chemicals, and they compost the fish waste. Instead of composting the waste, West Creek has experimented with aquaponics, growing vegetables in the same water as the fish so the effluent nourishes the plants, which in turn clean the water. Although plant yield increased, Read found that he couldn't compete with traditional vegetable growers. He's still looking for a way to monetize fish effluent as plant fertilizer, but he thinks aquaponics is best suited for farmers in the business of plant, not fish, production.