Researching Alberta

Welcome to the final episode of Alberta's Past: A New Lens. I'm Frits Pannekoek, your guide on this final journey. In earlier episodes of this series, we explored Alberta innovation from several angles. Each time we've asked not only what was innovative, but how it impacted Alberta as a whole. In this final chapter, we explore where innovation touches people very directly: medicine and information technology. Hospitals, medical schools, research labs, telephone lines and computer networks are not just technical achievements. They are the outcome of complex choices and developments. The results were highly innovative and resulted in the province exercising leadership in areas that most of us are not aware of. In exploring this further, we draw on the reflections of Alberta's foremost medical historian, Dr. Lampard, who has traced Alberta's hospitals and research foundations. And in leading technology thinker, we have got a number of different types of research. Dr. Lampard, who has not only watched the province's digital infrastructure and software industries emerge, but has been an active innovator himself. Their reflections give us much to think about. Why was Alberta a leader in so many areas of medicine, even before the province was created? Why was Alberta a leader in digital technologies? Was SuperNet an anomaly? How important are minds like Dr. Keenan's? What in the province's DNA created the innovative spirits? Are we like animals? Is innovation a thread that can help us understand this province better? *music* *music* Medicine and information technology are two areas where Alberta's innovation pattern is particularly evident. To explore them, we'll hear from two experts: Dr. Robert Lampard, one of Alberta's foremost medical historians, and Dr. Tom Keenan, a University of Calgary professor who has been a public commentator on tech innovation for over 40 years. We begin with the first generation of physicians who ventured west before Alberta was a province. The first

Physicians that came to Alberta were explorers, Rae and Hector. Medicine was almost a sidelight to both of them, but they're two very significant contributors. The Hudson Bay Company, based on the work of Jenner and the fact that the vaccine from cows could prevent smallpox, you know, they realized that if smallpox was let loose, they would lose their source of fur supply. So they were very mindful of it and went out of their way to just even teach factors how to create a vaccine, however effective it was. But in the absence of any physicians, and certainly none who stayed, the Hudson Bay Company did hire Dr. William McKay in 1867, and then assigned him to the Northwest Territories, and they would call on him if there was an epidemic.

Lampard's account of early physicians reminds us that Alberta's medical history is not a clean, linear success story. It is often told as a straightforward rise of institutions, but a closer examination reveals a development repeatedly punctuated by shocks. The infrastructure of care was fragile, shaped by chronic funding limits and the sudden vacuum of expertise created by wartime enlistment. Alberta

Had the highest position enlistment rate in both war wars. The Canadians realized that there were going to be a significant number of disabled soldiers coming back to Canada. And foreseeing this, the Canadian government decided they need to be better prepared. And interestingly, at that time, Borden could appoint somebody from the Senate into the Cabinet. And so they appointed James Lougheed as the minister responsible for the wartime hospitals. And he eventually, arbitrarily and almost single-handedly, went across the country securing, acquiring hospitals. And eventually he had not as many beds under his control as there were in the system. He did it. He did it dramatically and almost single-handedly. You know, in Red Deer, for instance, he took over the provincial training school. It had been a college for training girls. And it had gone bankrupt and sold to the government during the war, but not filled. So he just took it over and he took over the Strathcona Hospital, which became the University Hospital in Edmonton. Calgary ended up on the short stick for many years. And in World War II, of course, the same thing happened again. They built the Mewburn Pavilion in Edmonton. But then what happened as the war was ending and there were arguments about pensions and settlement and resettlement, the government changed the hospital system that he was running into the rehabilitation system. Same hospital, same people, but trying to rehabilitate them, get them back to work. And that went on for quite a number of years, you know, well into the 20s. The

Great War and the 1918 pandemic drove new models of organizing care. While the narrative of universal health care is often centered on Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, the architectural blueprints and the political will to implement them have a distinct, earlier genealogy within Alberta. The

Roots of it go back to 1905 when the Alberta Medical Association was formed. And at one of their first meetings, they passed a motion saying there shall be no contract medicine in Alberta. And that meant a doctor had a salary. Although there were coal companies and lumber companies that did hire positions, beyond that there was great resistance to underwriting contracts. And that becomes a very central issue. The medical concern about salaried doctors, together with the UFA government's interest in providing better care, particularly in the rural areas. The relationship between the profession and the government, certainly in the earlier half century of this province, was a very strong one. And the government very much listened to the leaders out of the medical profession. It was that combination that led to Medicare in Canada, with the government establishing a commission to look at health insurance and the role of government. And the leader that comes to mind is Irene Parleby, who, as early as 1919, was saying, "Health care is a right." It's a phrase you may still be hearing in the United States. She articulated it then. She wasn't loved particularly by the medical profession, because she thought every doctor coming back from the war should be retrained, because they've been away too long. But she was the minister without portfolio in the first UFA government, and she stayed in that position for almost 15 years. When George Hoadley became the Minister of Health and Agriculture in '21 come '23, he quite liked that, and also saw it as a way of reaching farmers to improve rural health care. And initially inherited the concept that there should be municipal hospitals and municipal funds raised from property, particularly farmers, to support rural hospitals. And that initiative comes out of Lloydminster in 1918 to help prepare hospitals for the returning injured veterans. And that concept spread throughout the British Empire. It also spread relatively equally from Lloydminster to Alberta and Saskatchewan. And although the Saskatchewan story is well written, the Alberta one isn't. But the Alberta story is actually in some ways larger, although it was focused for so many years, primarily in rural areas. But Hoadley came in and he said, "I won't allow more than six beds per thousand." And he held that figure for the 15 years the subsequent governments held to it as well. The irony of that number is that in the early 1940s, when Tommy Douglas became premier, he was under six beds a thousand. And so he introduced the first universal tax to catch the Saskatchewan bed levels, which are 10% below Alberta, up to the Alberta level, even though Saskatchewan had 10% more people. And that's where the first tax that eventually leads to what I call part two of Medicare in Canada, which is the funding of it. But part one, which is the concept, comes out of Alberta. As we move

To southern Alberta, we see how these ideas were also germinating at the community level. One of

The additional stimuli was between the community of Cardston and George Hoadley. And the community of Cardston, I think they call it the Mutual Improvement Association, which was a subsidiary or a trust entity of the Mormon church in Cardston, always trying to improve their community. They introduced a debate and speech program at the church in Cardston. And one of the early debates was on the role of government in health care and providing and making it universal. And coming out of that was the newspaper editor's position that maybe there's a broader interest in establishing a health and medical insurance program to go along with the hospital insurance program they already had. So he set up a competition in his newspaper, said if there's 100 families who will join at $25 a year, then the MIA will guarantee it, provide the trustees and so on. And it was oversubscribed. And that's literally two months before Hoadley introduces his commission. So there's a stimulus there that is very denominationally based. This

Intersection of community ambition and political will brings us to the question of leadership. Consider the photograph of the medical sciences building at the University of Alberta in 1921. It stands almost in isolation, a massive structure that signaled ambition. At the time, the province had a population of fewer than 600,000 people. Yet the scale of this infrastructure was shaped by long-term expectations rather than immediate demographic reality. This projection was driven by Henry Marshall Tory, the university's founding president. He championed research as a structural necessity for a developing province. Tory, in my

View, is significantly under-recognized for his role in Canada because he was involved in evolving four universities, which is a major one, the University of Alberta. But he was brought here to start the university and was its first president for over a decade. But as I look back on his impact on medicine, he was either intuitively brilliant, the steps he made all led to growth, to maturation of healthcare in the province, particularly in the field of medical education. I have great respect for his contributions, particularly in the period before the Faculty of Medicine was actually started and had a dean, and that went on for seven years. But Ebner at the time only had a population of about 25,000. Strathcona, where the hospital was located, was really a municipal or local hospital. They did manage to get $25,000 from Lord Strathcona to help build it. I think it cost around $200,000, but what happened is that Tory gave them the land. So they actually moved it from where it was originally thought to be located to the university. A brilliant move. Then he put his hands on another problem. When Saskatchewan and Alberta divided, there was a lab for both. It was in Regina. So he didn't have a lab, or Alberta didn't. So he offered to provide it and moved it onto the campus in 1911. And that was another brilliant move because it meant the pathology part of it, particularly the autopsies and so on, and the public health component to it, would attract better people than just your average physician. And as a result, he brought one, and then after the war, a second physician to Alberta to run that lab. And they did until 1950. And they also provided the first two deanships to 1950 of the University of Alberta. Another Tory-based decision. So I give him a lot of credit for starting it. His primary concern was the faculty and, quite frankly, until after World War II, there really wasn't money for faculty research until they got their hands on the Rockefeller grant from the university itself and then used the interest to start research at U of A.

Tory's legacy lay not just in his academic vision, but in his ability to navigate the corporate and philanthropic networks of the era. The groundwork for Alberta's early cultural and scientific institutions was heavily underwritten by the Carnegie and Rockefeller endowments. These were not local resources. They were global capital secured by adept university leadership, which demonstrates that the province's innovation was dependent on the ability of leaders to marshal external dollar resources to fuel local ambitions. Of

Course, he had the challenges of creating a faculty of medicine. And when, fortuitously, the Rockefeller Foundation offered with a lot of help from a chapman named Mackenzie King, who at one time was Rockefeller's lawyer, managed to get five million from the foundation as they were setting it up. And they sent a committee across the country to decide how to distribute it. And while the committee wanted the money to go to the University of BC, it was a Tory who stuck up his hand, put in the proposal, and eventually got a half a million dollars. And that fund still exists. It's the only one of the, I think, about six schools that received money. And it has been seminal. That is the interest. Those are basic decisions that he was intimately involved in and was very successful in acquiring. Once he had the money, then he turned the two-year school into a full four-year graduating one. And it is the only medical school in Canada that was created between 1883 in Matitoba, Winnipeg, and 1950 in BC. It's the only one for a period of 67 years. We owe Dr. Tory a significant thank you for his contributions, particularly in the field of medicine and in the medical people that he first brought to the faculty.

Tory insisted that unless scholars worked within Alberta, they could not effectively service its people. His philosophy yielded results in the study of diabetes and laid the foundation for a century of excellence in cardiac care. JB Collip, a co-discoverer of insulin, exemplifies his early capacity, a figure whose pivotal contributions proved that world-class science was possible in Alberta.

The isolation of insulin, that occurred actually because of the Rockefeller grant. They didn't immediately get the half a million dollar grant. They asked the Rockefeller Foundation for the interest on the grant to upgrade their faculty. And they got it. And the most prominent recipient of that was JB Collip. And when the Batting and Best attempt at isolating a solution from the pancreas failed in the pancreatectomized dog, putting them into a depression, they went back to the lab leader and said, "Can we have Collip?" Within a month Collip had isolated insulin. He had not only taken glucose levels in rabbits and reduced them to normal, he reduced them to subnormal, created a convulsion, and then reversed it by giving his own extract back. Unfortunately, then he forgot the formula. That becomes another story.

Individuals like Tory and grants from Rockefeller laid the initial foundations. But by the mid-20th century, the province began to test new architectures for sustainability. The creation of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research represented a significant shift, using provincial resource revenues to endow research at a scale unprecedented in Canada. It was a recognition by Peter Lougheed's government that innovation required stability beyond the boom and bust cycle of the resource economy.

What it did is it funded researchers at varying levels and created stability in the research field instead of having to survive off the grants that you succeeded in getting. And I can't understate the significance, the willingness of Peter Lougheed to go along with the concept to research what he did, what he set up around the world. One finding was the identification of the first drug, it didn't eradicate it, but a controlled hepatitis B in the world. And the drug's called lamivudine and was isolated by Dr. Lauren Terrell. And he took the concept that many birds in particular, pigeons and so on, eat food that's contaminated. Well, how come they don't get hepatitis B? And eventually he isolated a common which he called lamivudine. And it took the circulation, widely circulated hepatitis virus, which eventually was lethal, and reduced it to a point where you couldn't even culture it out of the blood. It didn't eradicate it, but it got rid of over 99% of it. So that was a very major contribution early in the years of it. The second thing that came out of that, aside from the researchers, were two and then two more research buildings at the University of Calgary. And they made a world of difference because it meant there was a place to do research. It created a challenge because they had to find more money to actually renovate them and create the research programs that were so dedicated on the different floors. But that was a very major byproduct of that initiative.

Achievements from someone like Callaghan were not solitary. They were grounded in a provincial system that was willing to gamble on major physical infrastructure long before the demand existed. This impulse to build capacity in advance of need is not unique to medicine.

You know, the reality is the hearts of Albertans have always been in the right place. We've never been, you know, Luddites or, you know, drag our feet or something. And the economic incentive has always been there. Again, I attribute a lot of it to the resource industry. They definitely want to do things very efficiently. They want to make the most money possible. It's true of every company, but there's something special about the resource industry. They will definitely adopt something and there's no hesitation about it. Banking drags their feet. You know, try to, if you have fraud in your credit card, try to deal with that. I guarantee you, if the credit card companies were all headquartered in Alberta, there would be a more efficient way to dispute credit card charges. Kenan

Attributes Alberta's technological agility to the resource sector's drive for efficiency and profit. Yet parallel to this industrial pragmatism ran a different, perhaps more ambitious current. A desire for medical prestige that defied the province's demographic weight. This spirit was embodied by Dr. J.C. Callaghan. Dr.

Callaghan was involved in both Cold Hearts and The Pacemaker. And he gave a presentation on one of those topics at Boston. And in the audience was Dr. McKenzie, who thought, "There's a man for me. I want to get him to come to Alberta." And eventually he was able to do that. And he followed Dr. Callaghan through his training around the world. And he came to Edmonton and a very aggressive, if that's the right word, but in the most positive sense, surgeon. Within a year he had set up through the lab, they'd done all their practicing, and they did the first bypass operation in Canada. He then went on to do the first two heart replacements in Canada and the first three heart valve replacements in Canada. He's a very preeminent surgeon, but I think is another under-recognized Albertan.

Medical breakthroughs are often remembered clearly. In contrast, Alberta's contributions to information technology are often embedded invisibly into the tools of daily life. Few realize that the smart board or the Jaffa programming language have roots in this province. Keenan hopes to shine more light on who he considers to be one of the most innovative Albertans in information technology. I think if you ask

That question of someone in California, James Gosling's name would come up. And I go back a long way with James because I remember him when he was a high school student who we kind of thought was maybe snitching computer time from the university. But we also realized he was awfully smart, so we let him snitch computer time. He went on to do one degree with us. We taught him everything, you know, we could teach him. And then he went on to do some more degrees and invented Java. And Java is in everything. It's in your smartphone. It's in your camera. It's just everything you can think of. Your car runs on Java. And we tried to get a good answer from him on what did Java stand for? And he said, laughingly, just another virtual algorithm, but he didn't mean that. Gosling's

Trajectory underscores the critical role of post-secondary institutions in nurturing the raw talent that drives technical fields. To

Give fair play to someone from Edmonton, Jonathan Schaeffer, Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer, was head of the computer science department at the University of Alberta. Long before most people were talking about artificial intelligence, he had solved the game of checkers. Now, that doesn't sound hard, but it was considered unsolvable. And he went on to do chess and go. So he pioneered artificial intelligence at the University of Alberta. Here at the University of Calgary, Dr. Brian Unger. He not only was a professor, and he had a lot to do with simulations. So simulation is a very important technique, particularly in the resource industry, because rather than go dig a big hole in the ground, you can make a model of the hole in the ground. And so Brian went out there, and he also ran a thing called I-Corps, which was given a large amount of money by the government of Alberta with one mandate: bring really smart professors here. So I-Corps was a recruiting thing, and Brian got to go wine and dine people all over the world, and some of the best ones stayed here. There was also Dr. Aziz, and he created something called the Computer Modeling Group. It's a really good example of how a university and industry can work together. They still have an office just on the research part near the university, and they solved really hard problems for the resource industry. So they were kind of straddling that. The Computer Modeling Group is still here. They still do great work, and he was definitely one of the leaders. Kenan

Describes a systematic, state-funded effort to import intellectual capital through programs like I-Corps. Yet the assembly of Alberta's scientific talent often relied less on policy and more on serendipity. In the late 1960s, the University of Calgary was attempting to construct a medical faculty that defied tradition, integrating basic research directly with clinical care. They needed someone who could bridge the gap between the laboratory bench and the living organism. The recruitment of Dr. Bob Church, a pioneer in genetics who would later transform the cattle industry, hinged not on a government grant, but on a chance conversation in a line-up at Expo '67. In the

Line-up to go to Expo in 1967 was Bill Cochrane, the brand-new Dean of the University of Calgary. And in the line-up was a lady by the name of Mrs. Church. They somehow came together, got together and got talking, and of course, her son Robert was just graduating. And she was obviously looking for a job for him, preferably back in Alberta, and here was the Dean. So she offered to be the go-between between her son and Bill Cochrane. And ironically, Bob Church's background and his interest in medicine and biochemistry was just a perfect fit for what Dr. Cochran needed, because he had gotten rid of the basic sciences of which biochemistry was one, and he needed people who could teach it clinically or could learn and adapt it clinically. And so he was ecstatic to get his hands on Bob Church and bring him back to Calgary. Reciprocally, Bob carried on with his own research, particularly involving artificial insemination in the cattle industry, and was very, very successful. There is a book that Bob wrote shortly before he passed away, outlining his involvement in the identification of DNA in the double helix. He was involved in some of the pre-research before that. You know, he had done research with the two people who got the Nobel Prize for it. For many

Years, we've looked at identical twins and said, "Oh, wow, how many things are similar?" Well, my mindset is always different than that. I always say, "How many characteristics and how many physical characteristics do they have that are different?" Because if we take the rote answer of genetics, which says, after Watson and Crick delineated the DNA structure, it was assumed at that time that all genetic information was like a book, and you read it from one end to the other. And my graduate work in Edinburgh was in the field that Waddington called epigenetics. And now, 60 years later, we have the technology that allows us to actually see what epigenetics is. And it's not that we are an individual. We are part of everything that's around us, and that includes the microorganisms and the flora in our gut, in our lungs. It's the millions of bugs and bacteria that are on our skin. It's all of the genetic information that comes into the food that we eat. It's all the chemicals, we assume. And then you put on top of that the genetics that we inherited from our parents and the mitochondrial genetics that we inherited from mom alone. And you put that all together. And I always looked at saying, "What is the biggest picture?" Church's

Experience reinforces the idea that innovation is an aggregation of factors: people, policy, and place coming together.

We managed to get a number of programs going in this province that were the envy of other provinces, actually. We had this growing Alberta deal that Don Simpson was coordinating. We had 40,000 Albertans come out to the workshops, from one end of Alberta to the other. And one of the areas they said was in innovation and technology. It's one of the areas that you've got to do something about. So we had over 5,000 people in the workshops. And ASRA, the Alberta Science Research Authority, was originally set up with Minister Diane Myrosch that reported directly to the Cabinet. And that meant that with six members sitting around the Premier Council table, we had none of these crazy silo programs. We had joint programs that were for the good of everybody, where everybody could move ahead and had allocation of the dollars. The first priority that came up was the information technologies. So I asked around and I said, you know, who are the Albertans? Who are the expats that are leaders in this field? And I had a list of people. And this is 1997. So John Roth from Lethbridge, who at that time was the CEO of Nortel, the biggest communications company in the world at that time, virtually. Paris Salone from Edmund, who was the president of GTE in Richardson, Texas. Jim Gosselin from Calgary, who had just invented Java software, who was with Sun Microsoft in California. Joseph Strauss, who was the CEO of JDS Interphase in Ottawa, who was checklist vacuum, but the University of Alberta in Physics was the only program you could get into. And Richard Taylor from Medicine Hat, Nobel Prize winner at Stanford. Bill Pulleyblank from Metasco, Nobel Prize winner with IBM. None of them said no. I laid a little bit of a guilt trip on them. None of them said no. And they came and that's how we set it up. So, SuperNet in this province was the first broadband provincial initiative. And it was for education, it was for Communication, it was for the internet, it was for business, it was for the benefit of the whole community because we're scattered so far. And our concern was the little schools, the high schools in small towns Were being closed down because there were not enough students. We said, okay, let's provide a broadband and put these online. And as part of that was the MBA program at Athabasca, Distant Education MBA program. And in addition, it's the I-Corps and BERS, the Banff International Center for Mathematics, which is the first new

Think tank in mathematics since the 30s in Germany and France. And it's at the Banff Center. It was no accident that this committee of experts identified broadband as a priority. The Alberta SuperNet was a landmark attempt to flatten the geography of the province, integrating rural and urban information needs through a publicly funded digital backbone.

I was standing right near Ralph at the press conference when they announced the Alberta SuperNet. And everybody had superhero t-shirts on. I remember that. And I thought, this is pretty good because it's more connectivity. We didn't have connectivity into the rural areas. The then deputy minister in Alberta Education always talked about, we got to connect to many berries, right? And how would we connect to many berries? So basically what SuperNet did was to connect each town that had a library, a town office or an educational facility to a backbone. It didn't connect the farmers. Okay, they had to actually pay for the last mile when various companies would sell them services. But I remember one really good example. A woman said, I will pay anything to get the internet to my farm because we were in the plumbing company here and I need some plumbers apprentices. And right now the way I do that is I send them to live in Calgary in an expensive rental apartment for eight weeks to do the plumbers apprentice thing. Now I'm fine with sending them down there, you know, to learn a few things for a week or two, but most of this ought to be able to be done on the internet. But we don't have the internet. So once the SuperNet came, she was really happy. It saved her a lot of money and it meant that her employees could do their education whenever they wanted to.

While the SuperNet sought to connect communities, another sector was redefining how we locate them. Alberta became a global leader in geomatics. The engineering department at the University of Calgary and firms like Nortec did not just adopt GPS technology, they refined it for resource exploration and navigation in difficult terrain. It is a prime example of how academic expertise represented by leaders like Elizabeth Cannon was commercialized to solve the specific logistical problems of a vast landscape.

Elizabeth Cannon, President Emeritus of the University of Calgary, holds numerous patents in geomatics and they have a lot to do with improving the precision. And if you are landing an airplane, you kind of want precision. Unfortunately, if you're landing a Scud missile, you also want precision. So they're kind of dual use technologies. But the fact is, they're out there. Many of the development was done at the University of Calgary. And there's still a geomatics cluster here that does advanced research on that.

These stories reinforce that innovation is rarely the product of a single invention, but emerges from interdependent systems. It requires universities that train talent, industries that provide environments for application, and governments that fund long-term capacity.

So the university and industry are really complementary in Alberta because the stuff that gets done here, is immediately snapped up, particularly by the resource industry. They love money, and they want to find ways to save money and to find resources under the earth. So techniques like computer modeling, enhanced oil sand recovery, are usually pioneered in the labs of one of our universities. And then they go forth into the industry. The interchange between the university and to some extent the government as well. So the government has certainly been a sponsor of research and also a magnet to draw people here. And the good thing that we find is with Alberta's quality of life people want to stay here. Over

These seven episodes, we have listened to elders and archivists, farmers and engineers, politicians, artists, physicians and technologists. Taken together, their accounts suggest that innovation in Alberta has never been the work of a single invention or a single leader, but of many people trying to solve problems within particular constraints. As a historian, I know that future generations will decide how well Albertans have learned from those experiences. From the vantage point, we can see a pattern. The province has often found ways to innovate, to improvise, to borrow, to adapt ideas from elsewhere and to bring new institutions, even as older inequities and environmental pressures persist. Our hope in making this series has been to offer a richer set of examples and questions for thinking about Alberta's past and its possible future. Innovation can be a lens through which we might be able to gain a different insight into what makes Alberta what it is. However, it is not the only way to view the province's past. Can you think of other ways to explore the province's remarkable past that would unify its cultural, scientific, political and social history? *music*