Great…. so what about more money for Tradeskills.. 2 million could help a lot of young people get a start towards a trade which you will get lots of tax money from.. a great investment in BCs future.. To bad you are so short sighted.

$2.1 Million for start up funding, after that where does the money come from to keep it going???

I sense the possibility of a little vote buying going on…
and the two cheshire cats are getting their photo ops.

if it wasn’t being held in the WIDC, would have the money still have been so readily available?

1. We are in a federal election, not provincial

2. The start-up is for the capital cost of equipment and furniture as well as hiring costs and program design costs. It may also include some or all of the tenant improvements.

3. The operating cost post September 2016 will come out of program funding likely based on a normal FTE count + some room in the initial years because it will take a couple of years for people to learn about whatever the program of studies will be.

It might be a post graduate program which may actually include some graduate industrial engineers from BC and, if the program will be successful, from across the country and international. That would be a long way off, by which time a successful program may actually kick other tenants out of the building, or MoF and others will stay and the educational program moves to the main campus where it belongs.

I just love the continuing positive attitude about the posters. :-J

These people are going to be the ones who will provide the designs and processes which will give some of the trades the work they need. Typically machinists were imported from Europe because Canada had zero to none to speak of. I think we are doing better now. However, if we are going to try to do value added and compete on the world market with industrial design and process design and the manufacture of the products, we will need to look at whether they will be manufactured in Canada, in BC instead of in Quebec and Ontario, or overseas.

This program has been known about for some time. The delay in implementing it was likely caused by being at the endo of the line and then a convenient excuse for putting this off since the Winter Games was using part of the space.

The world does not revolve around trades alone. It revolves around a whole team of workers, all experts in their own field who can hopefully work better together than the crew that has posted so far on this topic.

I love that last paragraph gopg2015. Bravo!

gopg2015, you seem to know it all, answer my question.

yeah, that is what I thought….

It was more along the lines of what can we stuff into the WIDC and make it seem like it is useful. Just like moving the Ministry of Forestry and the BC Counter into the building. Neither of them were planned tenants in the building and after it sitting empty so long the government needed to make it look like the building is needed.

Less than 5% of the classes for the Wood Innovation courses require a specialized space. This all could have been done at the main University campus for a fraction of the cost and to the betterment of the students by being part of the overall student population.

Without tradespeople to work in industry there would be no industry so where would the artsy crowd get their funding?

Here is your question:

“if it wasn’t being held in the WIDC, would have the money still have been so readily available?”

I think you are forgetting how the WIDC came about.

It goes something like this as far as I have observed and it goes as far back as when the site for the UNBC was chosen, so close to 30 years.

There was a faction that wanted to see UNBC in the bowl and one of the sites which was considered was the industrial section east of Queensway. The other one not immediately adjacent to the downtown was Carey Jane Grey Park. In other words there were those who thought UNBC was to serve the downtown rather than being independent of the many constraints that such a location would have added to its challenges. That makes for an interesting debate.

To keep things short, that thought never went away and the WIDC building and its two primary purposes have become a continuation of bringing UNBC downtown to help to populate the downtown. It was a “gift” which I am sure past presidents did not really want to be part of, but they likely will be.

The money was not readily available. It took close to a decade to get to where we are now. There have been long time moves to getting an engineering school here which the initial stages may actually involve a post graduate program integrated with the Emily Carr program. So WIDC may actually be part of that as well.

In my mind, in recent history, those programs came first, then the WIDC. Its structural system and design reflects the nature of the post grad engineering program and even the Emily Carr program which will be housed in it. They all evolved together.

BCR, think more positive thoughts and you might stay much closer to reality on occasions.

Without creative thinkers to generate industry there would be no industry so where would the tradespeople get their work?

As I said, some of you obviously do not understand an integrated workforce and the notion of teamwork.

LunarcomPG wrote: “Less than 5% of the classes for the Wood Innovation courses require a specialized space.”

I agree with you that the program should have been at the campus. It is far too early in the history of UNBC to begin to spread spaces all over the city. It is a very costly endeavour, both financially and qualitatively.

I do not know what you know about industrial engineering. First year classes require the facilities that UNBC has on campus. Many of them are labs, certainly more than 5%. In upper years the spaces become even more specialized. Shake tables for earthquake design, wind tunnels, rain simulation labs, not to mention chemical, electrical and other engineering disciplines. Sure, they can be simulated on computers, but that is exactly what they are, computer simulations based on algorithms based on whose observations of the real thing? And who is going to teach the difference between the two without the real thing as well as the specialized computer lab which these days will include 3d printers and various imaging tools.

Today’s specialized rooms may be different than they were 50 and 100 years ago, but they are still very specialized.

In fact, it is because building such specialized spaces is virtually impossible in the WIDC building that the building will be useless for such a program.

Take a walk around Emily Carr on Granville Island and try to figure out how on earth one is going to get anymore more than a computer lab, a lecture hall and some seminar rooms into the WIDC. It will not be able to handle many of the things which can be done at the Vancouver campus.

Engineers design pulpmills, sawmills, refineries etc.. Not some artsy person.. Some of you don’t realize how much of an impact tradespeople have on everyday life… Call an artist to fix your furnace and let me know how that works out for you :)

“Take a walk around Emily Carr on Granville Island and try to figure out how on earth one is going to get anymore more than a computer lab, a lecture hall and some seminar rooms into the WIDC”

If you’re going to take that walk, you’d better do it soon. Emily Carr is leaving Granville Island to a new state-of-the-art location at False Creek Flats. Opens July 2017.

Haha p Val a person can not be an artist and a trades person hey!!! I must be an anomaly!! A trade means a job art more of a personal expression! I actually think being an artist makes be better at my trade!