7943

7943 J.W.K. (Bill) Lye

College of Entry: Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean

The Review 1969

Le Défilé 1967

I, like several of us, was a Service (Army) brat, ending up in Chilliwack, BC, where I joined the Royal Canadian Army Cadets, (RCAC), 1725 RCE Cadet Corps in 1961. It was here in 1962 that I first met Gord Hamilton, the Cadet Pipe Major of the Victoria, BC, RCAC Canadian Scottish Regiment Cadet Corps at a British Columbia Cadet Corps Tattoo, starting a lifelong friendship there, at CMR, at RMC, in the RCE and latterly as business partners and ski buddies.

After only two weeks in Soest, Germany, where my dad had recently been posted after Chilliwack, I returned to Canada and met up again with Gord on 3 September, 1964 at CMR, neither of us having known that the other had even applied. We were both accepted into the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers in 1965, graduating in 1969 from RMC with a degree in Civil Engineering. I and Don Bell l were selected that year as Athlone Fellows, completing our M.Sc. (Management), in London, England in 1971. I also attended the Canadian Army Command and Staff College in1975, along with many of our Army classmates.

After having served in several command and staff positions in Europe and at National Defence Headquarters I transferred to the Reserves in 1979. By this time, my wife Judy and I, having met in Germany, had started our family in Ottawa, and I started my career as a consultant specializing in the planning, financing and implementation of major capital works and infrastructure projects, and the governance and management of public real estate.

In 1984-85, I was a member of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Task Force on Program Review, and subsequently joined the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat to implement the reforms recommended by the Task Force related to the federal government’s massive property portfolio and to similarly advise several foreign governments.

I returned to consulting as Vice President Government Consulting of Colliers International Realty Advisors in 1997. At the same time, I was appointed a Senior Fellow in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’s University, Kingston, where I taught in its graduate program. In 1998, I co-founded and became the founding Convenor of the Queen’s Land Forum, a non-profit institute dedicated to improved management of public real estate. In 2003, I joined up with Gord again as Managing Partner of a new company, jointly owned by me and the consulting company founded and owned by Gord. At my first retirement in 2012 I was a Director of Leigh Fisher Management Consultants, a successor company. Since then, I have continued to advise former clients and have now finally decided to hang up my consulting shingle this year, 2024.

I continue to be a Professional Engineer, a Certified Management Consultant, and a Certified Ski Instructor and am proud to teach in Canada’s two official languages anywhere there is good snow. I was privileged to receive the President’s Award of the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Ontario for my public policy and finance consultancy and to be elected a Fellow of that institute in 2012.

I have been a member of the RMC Club since graduation in 1969, and first became active in Club affairs as a Councillor and Treasurer of the Ottawa Branch in 1976, latterly serving as 2^nd and 1^st Vice President and President of the Ottawa Branch. I was elected to the National Executive Committee in 1998 and served as National President in 2004-05. Subsequently I served on the RMC Board of Governors from 2011-2015. During all this time I have been overwhelmed by and grateful for the hard work of our Class Secretary Wil Bush as he has herded all of us cats since 1969.

Mike Johnson is separately chronicling the genesis of the Bade Bursary the creation of and management of which I have been privileged to assist many other of our classmates.

As a Past President in 2007, I readily agreed to raise funds to endow a post secondary education endowment for Lucas Dawe, the son of Capt. Matthew Dawe who was killed in action in Afghanistan that year. Lucas has just finished his first year at St. Lawrence College, fully funded by the endowment. I was also mandated jointly by the then Presidents of the RMC Club and the RMC Club Foundation to negotiate a formal agreement with the Department of National Defence to tangibly recognize the Club’s special status at RMC, to secure physical tenure and access to DND and CF services from the College and CFB Kingston, and to secure favourable financial arrangements with the Non-Public Property/Non-Public Funds organization of DND.

Since early 2021, I have had the best job of my career as Chair and President of the RMC Museum Corporation, a non-profit corporation which was mandated and incorporated to build, run and maintain the new RMC Museum which will be constructed just inside the Crerar Gate at the College. This will all be funded by donors through the RMC Alumni Association, and I am very grateful that many of our classmates are donors to this project and voting members of the corporation. To date, our class, and classmates individually, have donated around $100,000 to this project, and the official fund-raising hasn’t even started. Our all-volunteer Board has completed the schematic design which has been approved by the Commandant and viewed by many of our classmates; we have just selected our General Contractor; and we are now engaged in the design development and validation with our architect and engineering consultants. Stay tuned.

Beyond the RMC domain I served for many years as a member and Chairman of the Acute Care Board, (Regional Hospital Board comprised of the Chairs of all Ottawa area hospitals), of the Ottawa Carleton District Health Council. I also served almost three terms as a Member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Rideau Club, much of that time with Paul Hession, retiring from the Board in May 2021 to take the RMC Museum project.

Since our 2014 move to our “new” home my partner, Æmilia Jarvis, and I have painstakingly restored the Edmonds House, an 1850 stone home and its gardens overlooking the Edmonds Lock across the Rideau River opposite our property. I have also continued my volunteer work in the community as a Member of the Montague Township Police Services Board, and a Veterans Service Officer in the nearby Smiths Falls Legion. We share time here and at our home in Mont Tremblant, Québec with our 5 grown children (3 of mine and 2 of Æmilia’s) and 5 grandchildren (3 and 2) who live in Vancouver, Banff, Toronto, Ottawa and Cheltenham in England. One of my grandsons graduated from RMC in 2016 and continues to serve in the RCAF.

At a recent celebration of life, I did confirm with Brian Fritsch that I had finally given up trying, without much success, to regain the golf handicap I had before entering CMR.