GATINEAU – The telecom glitterati (yes, yes, insert your joke here…) graced Gatineau for the Canadian Telecom Hall of Fame annual awards last night at the Museum of Civilization, right across the river from Parliament Hill.
Bell Canada president and CEO George Cope (just a FEW people were trying to get a word with him!), CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein, MTS Allstream president and CEO Pierre Blouin, SaskTel CEO Bob Watson, RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg, new CWTA head Bernard Lord and former Industry Canada DM Michael Binder were just a few of the over 250 in attendance at the annual gala.
The full list of the many award winners can be found on the Telecom Hall’s web site, www.telecomhall.ca, but it was Lazaridis’ acceptance speech while accepting the “inventors and innovators” award which garnered the most buzz.
Regarded as the maker of the BlackBerry (he’s the gadget guy at Research In Motion while other co-CEO Jim Balsillie is the marketing and business development side of the split chief executive’s office), Lazaridis said that compared to the rest of the world, Canada’s economy is the brightest and now “is the time to invest.”
“Our economy is sound,” he added. “This is the time for Canada to pull ahead of the rest of the world.
“We need to decide ‘do we pull back, or press on that accelerator because we know there’s lots of road ahead’,” he added – and he wasn’t just talking about his own company with that comment.
– Greg O’Brien
