An Ottawa mechanical contracting firm has celebrated its 50th birthday — not by receiving gifts, but by presenting one. A big one.
OTTAWA
An Ottawa mechanical contracting firm has celebrated its 50th birthday — not by receiving gifts, but by presenting one. A big one.
Brad McAninch, president of Modern Niagara Ottawa Inc., recently presented a cheque for $100,000 to Robert Gillett, president of Algonquin College. The cheque is part of the $7 million the local construction industry is raising to assist in the construction of a new trades training building.
It’s a large contribution for one company to make, but McAninch said in an interview the decision wasn’t a difficult one.
“Algonquin College is the educational training centre for the construction industry in Eastern Ontario,” he said. “We’ve got well over 200 field staff here in Ottawa, and they, at one point or another, received training at Algonquin. It’s a very important project for us.”
The new building will be a $79-million project. All the money for it is in place except for the final $7 million, which the local industry has said it will raise. Modern Niagara’s donation is part of that.
The building will be called the Centre for Construction Excellence, and when it opens in 2011, it will add 600 new construction trades training spaces and become home to a total of 2,500 full-time and 5,000 part-time students engaged in cross-discipline training. It will allow the college to group under one roof all of its trades, design and building-sciences programs and research into one creative cluster.
Modern Niagara was founded as Modern Mechanical in 1959. In 1999, then-president John McAninch (Brad’s father) led the company into a merger with Niagara Mechanical. Modern Niagara Group Inc. came out of that and today is the umbrella group for companies operating in the Atlantic Provinces, Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta. Among those companies is Modern Niagara Ottawa.
Vice-president Yves Perron underscored the importance of the college.
“It’s a school for tradespeople — sheet-metal workers, plumbers, pipefitters—and that’s what we do. The guys who graduate from there are the guys we’re going to hire. It all makes sense.”
The new centre will house many disciplines related to construction, making an integrated learning approach possible. Thus students in the mechanical trades will work with students from other trades. The aim to graduate people who have some knowledge and understanding of the work others are doing.
Algonquin is presently evaluating proposals received from a short list of three design-build teams. The winner is to be announced by the end of this month, with construction to begin in October.
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