Two long-serving members of CCIL’s Board of Directors are stepping down at the AGM in April. Please join us in wishing them all the best, and in honouring them for their many contributions to advancing the interests of our industry. They will both be missed.
Herewith, a brief (and sometimes humorous) account of their personal and professional lives.
Michael Maher, Ph.D., P. Eng.
Golder Associates Ltd.
Michael is a Specialist Materials and Forensic Engineer with Golder Associates. He has served on the CCIL Board for over 25 years, was President from 2000 to 2002, and most recently was Director of the Geotechnical/Construction Materials Division.
Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, Michael’s fascination with engineering came early on thanks to a family-owned construction business called Maher & Murphy, started by his grandfather. This family business inspired him to pursue an engineering degree at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, where he also excelled on the college rowing team.
Upon completing the 4-year degree, Michael signed up for a lab-based research Ph.D. program on airfield pavement design. To help pay his way, Michael performed lab testing for some of his professor’s commercial clients, one of whom was Golder Associates Ltd. in the UK.
After being offered a summer job in one of Golder’s Canadian offices. Michael jumped at the chance and arrived on Canada Day, July 1, 1978, boarded a bus to London, Ontario, and began working the very next day.
Michael Maher
“I soon realized that my best way to further advancement was to get to supervise a drilling investigation, but I had neither a car nor a driver’s license,” he recalls. “So here I was, an engineer-in-training, arriving at the drilling site on a bicycle, with hardhat, water-level finder and clipboard on the carrier. The driller and helper doubled over laughing. It took a while for me to establish any credibility, but by the end of the day, they put my bike on the back of the truck and dropped me and my samples at the lab.”
Michael continued his duties as a geotechnical engineer in London for three years before being transferred to St. John’s, Newfoundland. During his nine-year tenure out east, he found time to pursue his love of rowing by serving as the Newfoundland & Labrador Provincial Rowing Coach for two Canada Games in the 1980s.
In the mid-90s, Michael volunteered to set up and manage a project office in Doha, Qatar providing geotechnical and materials engineering services in Qatar and Kuwait. During his year there, Michael initiated occupational health and safety instruction for lab staff after an incident in which he had requested trichlorethylene (TCE) for asphalt testing and, to his dismay, the technician offered gasoline instead. Michael remained committed to the reduction and elimination of hazardous chemicals, and under his leadership, CCIL hired an Occupational Health & Safety consultant to work with members in developing best practices for the protection of air quality in labs.
In 2005, Michael was asked to move back to Ireland to help with the integration of a small local consulting company Golder had acquired. It was a marvelous opportunity as not only was this during the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom, but Michael’s mother was still alive at the time and his sisters and brother lived locally. Michael spent the next five years in Ireland.
Today, he and his wife Marilyn live in Whitby, Ontario, and spend summers at their cottage in Honey Harbour. Michael’s hobbies include woodworking, gardening and stamp collecting. Michael is a Level 3 Certified Rowing Coach and helped start the Durham Rowing Club in Port Perry, Ontario where he is also a Past-President of the club. He has also coached competitive rowing to people with disabilities and developed a Guide for Adaptive Rowing.
Jeffrey Pike ALS Canada Ltd.
Jeffrey Pike is closing the book on almost 45 years of working in environmental testing laboratories. His farewell ends a memorable career improving the quality of analytical services provided to the public and to consulting engineers across Canada.
Born and educated in London, Ontario, Jeff can’t pinpoint exactly when he decided to pursue a career in the environmental field, but it likely began in his youth, before environmental activism took root across North America. The quality of air and water was not like it is today –black smoke would spew from stacks and there was minimal treatment of industrial and municipal wastewater.
Jeffrey Pike
Upon completing high school, Jeff enrolled in the fledgling Environmental Technology program at Fanshawe College in London. As part of the program, he worked for two co-op terms at Environment Canada’s Wastewater Technology Centre (WTC) in Burlington where he was employed after graduation.
Jeff then joined a start-up consulting laboratory that was eventually acquired by a large, privately owned engineering firm called CH2M Hill. There he managed the field and laboratory services group and later progressed to laboratory management. When CH2M Hill eventually split their Canadian and U.S. operations, Jeff held the position of President and General Manager for the Canadian arm, CANVIRO.
Working in both field testing and laboratory management, Jeff has always been a keen advocate for safety, quality, and productivity. In the early 1980s, there were no full-service accreditation services available in Canada, so he became actively involved with the not-for-profit Canadian Association for Environmental Analytical Laboratories (now the Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation) where he was elected President in 1999.
At the same time, he was also starting a full-service environmental laboratory called Sentinel Laboratories with his wife, Glenna. The lab grew from ten employees in 1999 and four years later, Sentinel was sold to a larger laboratory network called Envirotest. In 2006, Envirotest sold its network of laboratories to ALS Canada, where Jeff continued to run the Eastern Canada operations.
Jeff joined CCIL’s Board of Directors in 2009 and served as President from 2013 to 2015. He is proud of the improvements he has seen in terms of both the quality of analytical services and the improvement in the environment in which we live.
Jeff looks forward to spending time at his family cottage near Bracebridge. He loves the outdoors, visiting with his children and grandchildren, and pursuing his interests that include wine making, gardening, furniture building and wood turning.
Tony Araujo Completes Two Years as President
After serving as President of CCIL for the past two years, Tony Araujo is leaving the post, but will remain an active and committed member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Conformity Assessment Division. A new President will be named at the AGM in April.
Tony Araujo
Tony worked tirelessly during his term on advocacy issues, and most notably on issues involving unfair competition from tax-subsidized laboratories. He led efforts to protect members from this growing threat by: opposing provincial funding measures that would encourage colleges and universities to seek alternative revenue by offering routine testing services; lobbying various government agencies such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) as well as post-secondary institutions to adopt clear policies of non-competition; and championing the privatization of provincial research services that are already commercially available. Tony was always mechanically inclined. He grew up reading Popular Mechanics and Scientific American and taking apart old radios and TV sets. He remembers “learning the hard way” how capacitors store electrical energy. He studied mechanical engineering technology at Seneca College where he led the college’s entry in the Shell Fuelathon. The college had arranged for the Toronto Star to attend the event where the Seneca team would show off its purpose-built vehicle in the parking lot. “We were surprised when the Dean showed up and asked if he could take it for a spin,” he recalls. “Vehicles for this competition were designed for fuel efficiency, not speed. We were horrified when the Dean set off racing around the lot. We had visions of the wheels collapsing and the disaster splashed all over the front page of The Star. Fortunately, our design stood up. We went on to finish second in Canada, beating out many better funded Canadian universities in the process.” Tony went to work for a local laboratory that specialized in materials and product testing for automotive parts manufacturers. In 1990 he partnered with a couple of other employees to purchase the laboratory, and they ran it successfully for a decade. It was during this time that he first experienced the insidious nature of tax-favoured competition, in this case from the Ontario government-owned ORTECH Corporation. “Due in part to my efforts highlighting the unfair business model of ORTECH, the province privatized the facility in 1995.” In 2001, Tony took a sabbatical to pursue a lifelong dream. He and his wife Maria sailed their 32-foot yacht to the Bahamas. “But two years of the idyllic lifestyle was all that I could take.” He returned to partner in a start-up mechanical testing laboratory called Paragon Systems in Concord, Ontario. Tony joined CCIL in 2015, was named to the Board and re-established and became chairman of the Conformity Assessment Division in 2016, and was elected President in 2019. He will continue his duties as Board member and Division head, and plans on pushing CCIL’s advocacy agenda on many fronts. Advocacy Update InnoTech Alberta In February, ahead of the Alberta budget, CCIL issued a news release urging the provincial government to stop funding InnoTech Alberta (IA) for providing services that are already commercially available. CCIL President, Tony Araujo, spoke with CBC News on the issue, explaining that IA is using its tax-favoured position to compete unfairly with private-sector laboratories. You can read the article here. CCIL has also discussed this issue with officials representing IA and the Minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation, and produced a detailed report on the subject. An executive summary is posted on the CCIL website (click here). We are now pleased to report that the province has announced a government-wide review of its Technology, Research and Innovation (TRI) system to determine what it needs to do differently to increase its national and international competitiveness. The review will include identifying actions to reduce duplication and increase coordination across innovation agencies and organizations.
A Win-Win! Support Students and Get a Tax Credit/Wage Subsidy In the past few newsletters, we’ve provided information about our collaboration with Fleming College and our support for their co-op programs. There are a number of tax credit and wage subsidy programs available that make hiring a student a smart move for employers. Check these out, but act fast as some deadlines are approaching.
The Student Work Placement Program (SWPP) This summer, eligible employers will receive between 50% to 70% in wage subsidies (a maximum of between $5,000 to $7,000) for each new student placement. So if you hire a student to work 35 hours a week at $18 per hour for 16 weeks, normally the wage cost would be $10,080. But with SWPP, that amount would be reduced to $3,080! https://swpp.magnet.today/
Ontario Co-operative Education Tax Credit The Co-operative Education Tax Credit is available to Ontario employers who hire students enrolled in a co-operative education program at an Ontario university or college. Corporations can claim 25% of eligible expenditures (30% for small businesses). The maximum credit for each work placement is $3,000. Most work placements are for a minimum employment period of 10 weeks up to a maximum of four months. http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/credit/cetc/. Fleming College will automatically issue a Letter of Certification at the end of the year in order to support the tax credit claim.
Canada Summer Jobs Canada Summer Jobs provides funding to not-for-profit organizations, public-sector employers and small businesses with 50 or fewer employees to create summer job opportunities for young people aged 15 to 30 years who are full-time students intending to return to their studies in the next school year. Employers receive funding for up to 50% of the provincial or territorial adult minimum hourly wage. http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/epb/yi/yep/programs/scpp.shtml
ECO Canada Co-op Student Placement funding for up to 50% of a student’s wages to a maximum of $5,000 to hire students working in an environmental field. https://www.eco.ca/employment-programs/student-placement/ Dr. Dickson Memorial Scholarship Award As part of our commitment to supporting STEM students, CCIL provides a number of scholarships across Canada. We are proud to be assisting these future engineers, scientists and technicians. This year's winner of the Dr. Dickson Memorial Scholarship is Braelyn Charbonneau. Braelyn is the second recipient of this annual bursary which provides $2,500 to a deserving student at the University of Ottawa who is pursuing a BASc in either the Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering Option program, or in the Civil Engineering program. The scholarship was created in honour of the late Dr. Dickson who, as CCIL's Certification Program Manager, was instrumental in the development of the successful National program that certifies asphalt, aggregate and concrete testing laboratories in Canada.
Braelyn Charbonneau
"Thank you so much CCIL for your generosity and investing my future," says third-year student, Braelyn. "I envision a future career as a chemical engineer and this bursary will allow me to achieve my academic and professional goals." She will graduate in 2022 and is interested in the pharmaceutical field. "I want to have an impact on the future of the pharmaceutical sector by using the knowledge and skills that will be acquired during my studies at the University of Ottawa. This bursary brings me one step closer to that goal."
Calling on our B.C. Members
If you’d like to get more actively involved, CCIL is looking for additional members to serve on our B.C. Geotechnical/Construction Materials Regional Committee. The committee has been typically meeting every quarter and holds most of its meetings virtually. This is a good forum for you to stay abreast of industry issues and contribute to changes in standards. Current members include Golder Associates, Intertek, Metro Testing and Engineering, and WSP. If you would like more information, please contact CCIL’s Executive Director, Muktha Tumkur, at mtumkur@ccil.com.
Our New Research Intern
Join us in welcoming Sumeya Abdulmalik Yahya, our new research intern. Sumeya is currently in her last year of a four-year honours B.A program at the University of Waterloo, majoring in political science and minoring in legal studies and communications. She has worked for the Ontario Treasury Board Secretariat in Toronto and the Department of National Defence in Ottawa.
She has a passion for policy research and development and is interested in the protection of human rights and global governance. She hopes someday to work in the federal public service.
Sumeya Abdulmalik Yahya
We Want To Hear From You
CCIL wants to stress that we are listening to you. We have been proactive and are achieving advocacy wins because of members who alerted us with their concerns. If there is something that is affecting the testing industry or your business, let us know. Also, if there’s something we can be doing better, or you wish to pass along a comment or an idea, please contact:
Muktha Tumkur
CCIL Executive Director
905-805-1170 mtumkur@ccil.com
LabWatch is a quarterly newsletter produced by the Canadian Council of Independent Laboratories. By opening this ‘window’ on our sector, we hope to engage government, industry and other stakeholders in an informed discussion of the issues.
