Peggy Revell
Former Fort Frances resident Lorne Morrow has taken the helm of the newly-launched Centre for Research and Innovation in the Bio-Economy—a $25-million investment first announced by the provincial government back in May, 2008.
“I didn’t sleep very well for a while—still, that’s a good sign,” Morrow said about stepping into the CEO position and working to help the not-for-profit corporation take flight.
“It’s different, it’s a very different industry,” he added.
Based out of Confederation College in Thunder Bay, CRIBE will be focused primarily on “bringing practical ‘green’ forest biomass, bioeconomy-type products to the marketplace,” Morrow explained.
Along with developing new products from research to market, Morrow said a “big part” of CRIBE’s mandate is assisting existing industries in added value and “moving everything up the value chain as quickly as we can.”
“For example, in the pulp mills now, can we look at the pulp mill stream or the pulp mill process and not just make pulp?” he asked. “Can we take lignan out, can we take methanol out? Can we take methane out?
“Can we take higher value products from that normal pulp stream that we just make pulp and paper from?”
Morrow said they want to bring some research capacity in and around Thunder Bay.
“So you’ll see us working directly with the bio-refinery institute at Lakehead, you’ll see us working with Con College, you’ll see us working with the industry trying to actually bring that bioeconomy research capacity here,” he remarked
With just a few weeks under his belt, Morrow currently is working on CRIBE’s strategic plan, outlining “what we anticipate, when the investments will happen, what type of benchmarks we will have to achieve—and very clear benchmarks because we’re funded by the Ministry of Research and Innovation.”
“Once I put the CRIBE sign up, we will entertain proposals, which people will send in to us, up to a million dollars per proposal,” Morrow said.
“CRIBE will put in up to 50 percent of the cost, and we would work in partnership with those individual players,” he explained, adding that a “mixture of everything” from businesses to researchers can send in proposals.
While the exact criteria for proposals still is being set up, Morrow anticipated CRIBE will be looking at some by the end of January.
“The [$25-million] funding for CRIBE is four years—it’s 2009 to 2013—which we’re trying to leverage more,” he explained about long-term funding.
“So if we put in some and the industry puts in some, and the government puts in some, we hope that may grow to three or four times that.”
Morrow credited his background as a “practical field guy” as one of the reasons why he was selected as the CEO of the centre.
He was raised in Fort Frances, where his first job was as a paper boy for the Fort Frances Times earning 72 cents a day for 72 customers.
After graduating from Fort Frances High School, he headed east to the University of New Brunswick, where he earned an undergraduate degree in forestry.
Morrow then returned to Northwestern Ontario, where he became the first Masters of Forestry student at Lakehead University. Following graduation, he briefly worked for the Ontario government.
He then joined Domtar Forest Products in Red Rock, starting out on the regeneration side of the business (such as tree planting) before progressing on to chief forester, logging superintendent, and wood manager.
From there, he went into the mill at Red Rock, starting on shift, then moving on to assistant manager and from there mill manager before the mill closed in 2006.
While his wife and family reside in Red Rock, Morrow is a self-described “old Fort Frances boy,” noting his mother, Dorothy, and sister, Diane Ross, still live her.
Since the closure of the mill in Red Rock, Morrow has worked with the Co-op SFL file with the Ministry of Natural Resources, converting single-entity licences (such as the one held by AbitibiBowater in Fort Frances) so these can have more than one company and business.
“I think because in my former job—with the co-oping SFL—I’ve probably been in every town,” Morrow noted.
“I’ve worked in so many facets of forestry and the industry, I know a lot of people, so it allows CRIBE to get on the ground running and move quickly.”
The possibility of taking on the position of CEO for CRIBE first arose in June when he was attending a conference in Fort Frances.
“At first I was a little lukewarm on it because I’m not a bureaucratic type of person and I didn’t want to be in a bureaucratic role,” Morrow recalled.
“Yet once I realized who was on the board of CRIBE, I was quite keen on accepting the job,” he added, citing former Tembec CEO Frank Dottori, Don Campbell, AbitibiBowater mill manager in Thunder Bay, and Mike Willick from Fort Frances, former assistant deputy minister of natural resources.
“So there’s a good cross-section of operational people and then there’s representatives from the research academic side, so it’s a nicely-balanced board,” Morrow said.
Networking with other centres also will be key to CRIBE, he explained, such working with the bio-auto council based out of Guelph and Chemistry group in Sarnia, looking to use forest biomass to build car parts.
“Because it’s not just jobs up here in the north, it’s what can we do to support the auto industry,” he stressed.
“And those projects are going now, so we’ll be linking with those other groups.”
Morrow said Thunder Bay was the central location for CRIBE since the city has the forest infrastructure, transportation networks, and research groups through Lakehead University and Confederation College.
“Don’t get tied [up] that I am based in Thunder Bay—we will entertain projects from the Kenora border right down to Thunder Bay,” he stressed, anticipating that CRIBE will be working with the mill here down the road.
The Fort Frances mill is “probably the highest quartile mill in Ontario” when it comes to ranking mills on efficiency, Morrow noted, adding “the future for Fort Frances looks very bright.”
With the possibility of Fort Frances taking advantage of the centre, Morrow said he would be glad to come to Fort Frances to meet with the Chamber of Commerce and businesses to explained what exactly the role of CRIBE is.
He also encouraged those who have questions, or are looking for more information about CRIBE, to contact him via e-mail at cribe@confederationc.on.ca or by calling 1-807-474-2028.
