While there will be no gravestone planted anywhere on the site’s 370 acres, an obituary is clearly in order. No longer will engineers in corduroy pants and patched sweaters waste away the days chatting about photonics and frequencies – the civil servants from downtown are moving to the suburbs.
Way back when, the Carling Campus, as it was known, was packed full of geniuses whose inventions were revolutionizing phone networks and clearing the way for the introduction of the Internet. Long before Research In Motion asserted its global dominance, Nortel was the country’s technological heavyweight – and it stacked up well against any challenger.
There was no hint of the ridiculously enormous catastrophe to come – that its shares would drop from $1,231 in the 2000s as crushing debt and changing markets forced the company to seek the shelter of bankruptcy courts. The good times were great, and you could hardly walk down the street without meeting someone who had just been hired by the world’s greatest telecom company.
Nortel at its peak was more than just a company, it was a catalyst for the city’s burgeoning technology community. It spun off dozens of high-tech companies and thousands of high-paying jobs, transforming the city into a technology hotbed.
Civic leaders were able to refer to the region as Silicon Valley North with straight faces, and when a monthly newspaper launched using that name, everyone agreed it was a brilliant idea. City officials even flirted with adopting a new slogan, which they all agreed to never speak about ever again after everyone came to their senses – Technically Beautiful.
“Nortel allowed the city to have some swagger and we all dreamed that we were replacing the old guard with a new generation of technology entrepreneurs,” said Martin Vandewouw, who worked at the campus in the 1980s and is now the president of KRP Development Group in Kanata. “It was all about technology, innovation and risk. It was everything that government was not, in the middle of a government town.”
The seeds for the campus were planted in 1961, when 46 engineers agreed to commute to the western edge of town at a company that was then called Northern Electric. The company was working along the fringes, developing technology that would eventually allow phone companies to connect calls from house-to-house without operators frantically plugging in wires.
The company’s engineers also wanted to prove that information could be transmitted over glass fibres, a suggestion that was outlandish at the time but is now the basis of the world’s high-speed telecom networks.
Their work had the potential to transform Ottawa from a sleepy government town to a burgeoning centre of innovation. Within five years, 800 workers were toiling away in what would eventually be the research and development headquarters for Nortel Networks.
The city would spend the next few decades telling itself over and over that it was indeed Silicon Valley North, just like its marketing materials said. There was reason for its swagger – the little research facility morphed over time into the globally respected Carling Campus, a world-class research hub creatively named after the street it faces (they were engineers, not poets), with 11 buildings and up to 10,000 super-geniuses working at any one time on any number of complicated and unlikely technologies.
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Published Sunday, Oct. 24, 2010 10:00PM EDTLast updated Monday, Oct. 25, 2010 7:30AM EDT57 comments 
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