Cancer Care Ontario has taken over the space of former tenant Tornado Medical Systems on the sixth floor of the Whalen Building.
Officials with Cancer Care Ontario made the announcement Thursday at a local media conference. Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission acquired the space from Tornado and leased it to Cancer Care Ontario.
Tornado announced it would be shutting down the laboratory in Thunder Bay in June saying heightening expenses was the main cause.
The new space meant Cancer Care Ontario could take on some new staff. The company hired five new staff members, four of which were former employers of Tornado. Some of the new duties the employees will work on will be to write software and manage software.
Nick Kitchener, now a technical architect for Cancer Care Ontario, said he was glad to have a new job and even happier that he could stay in his old office on the sixth floor.
“It’s a little surreal being back in the same office,” Kitchener said. “If I blinked I would think that I was just on holiday.”
Kitchener worked as a project manager for Tornado and he said he now has different responsibility since moving to Cancer Care. Working for Tornado, there was more federal regulations to deal with compared to Cancer Care where they are simply working on software, he said.
Kitchener, who is from New Zealand, said Tornado made sure that he and the other former employees were taken care of and helped secure their jobs at Cancer Care.
Having experienced a company failing hasn’t given Kitchener any pause for concern. He said it’s fairly common for a startup company to fail and would be surprised to hear if Cancer Care Ontario ever shared the same fate as Tornado.
“You aren’t considered experienced in the startup world until you have had at least one crash and burn,” he said. “This isn’t my first startup coming. The fact is 90 per cent of all startups do fail. Cancer Care Ontario is different. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. We got the next 10 years and we got a lot of stuff we need to address. I would absolutely stunned if something happened.”
Rick Skinner, vice-president of Cancer Care Ontario, said they will be leasing the space from CEDC have completely moved from their previous space at ICR Discoveries.
Since the company started up a few months ago, Skinner said they have almost doubled their staff from the initial seven employees and that prompted the need for some new office space.
Skinner initially felt skeptical that Cancer Care could find the right talent in Thunder Bay but he said he quickly realized that the city had plenty of talented individuals.
“We’re continuing to look to grow the operation here because we can add capacity here in Thunder Bay far more efficiently than we can in Toronto,” Skinner said. “I was initially skeptical that a community this size and as remote from metropolitan centres as Thunder Bay would have the pool of talented IT professionals we were looking for. I was wrong to be skeptical. As far as I knew, Thunder Bay wasn’t known for technology or information operations but low and behold we found a hidden jewel.”
