The Warpfish Chronicles

"28 years on the planet, and I still haven't figured out what's going on."

A CANOE Fairy Tale -- April 21st, 2002

This is a very short version, with a lot of the detail left out to protect both the innocent and the guilty. Maybe one day somebody will write the definitive story of CANOE. I hope somebody does.

This story begins in Fall of 1997. I had just graduated from the University of Waterloo, and I was trying to find a job. Any job. Anything that would get me away from Waterloo, where, I had just had the worst eight months of my life.

Heart-broken and without any confidence in myself or my abilities, I looked through some help wanted ads that were posted through the University, and found a job wanted ad for a webmaster at a small web company called 'CANOE.'

To be honest, I had never heard of them -- but, they sounded interesting enough that I would take a look at them. So, I went in, did the interview, and discovered it would be a programming job, in Perl. It would pay okay, and the environment seemed like a nice place (though it was a fair walk from the nearest subway station.)

But it was a job, and they wanted me, and I was too drained to search for another one. So, I took their offer, and, in September of 1997, I started working at the Canadian Online Explorer.

Now, I had worked at several jobs during my co-op years, including the Government of Canada, the City of Windsor, and the former UUNET Canada. I had been in several different environment. However, after a couple of weeks at CANOE, I found it was different.

What was it? To this day, I'm not sure. I think it was the feeling that we were in all this together, trying to do something that nobody said could be done -- build a news, sports, and entertainment information website that would appeal to Canada.

It was a big job. We were forced to make do with a makeshift budget, because our parent company (Sun Media), didn't have the cash to really fund us at the level we required. But, we made do -- and, because we didn't have the budget, we were required to take full advantage of the Open Source community, and we developed almost all our own products.

One thing we could leverage was the presence of Sun newspapers in several cities, so, we could build a website aimed at Canada and directed to all of Canada. We had a Toronto-centric focus, but we really tried.

It was a happy time -- lots of work, but everybody was working hard. We grew, slowly, but we made progress. We worked toward break even, and we knew the day was coming when we would be the CBC of the Internet -- where, we would take the Canadian online world by storm, the way CNN took the cable world by storm.

So what happened? To this day, I'm not sure either. I think it was because we lost focus -- we got caught up in the online madness that gripped the stock market, and, so, instead of working toward building the best website in Canada, we worked toward an IPO. We got corrupted by cash, brought in people who cared more about stock options than the dream, and, it all started to fall apart -- because, for the amount of work we did, and for the lack of compensation we received, only the dream could motivate the type of people we needed. We got confused over what we wanted to build, and we wasted a year trying to figure it out.

Then Quebecor bought us out. I'm convinced that Pierre Karl Peladeau didn't realize what he had bought -- he viewed us as a toy, something to make the stock analysts happy because he could say he was buying into 'convergence.'

PKP then increased our budget, on the order of 700%. He gave us the money we needed to grow, and, we thought that we had finally made it.

Then the bottom fell out. The stock market crashed, and PKP needed money, fast, because of his Videotron/Quebecor fiasco. So he started slashing and cutting. It was around this point I got it -- I had become disillusioned and burned out, and needed a change.

Soon, the core tech team that had built CANOE was gone, replaced by people who didn't understand what was happening. The editorial staff was slashed, and people who had been with CANOE from the beginning were gone. What was left of the dream was dead, and the website went into a survival mode.

Luckily, even at this point, there were people who stuck with it, who still believed, who still were willing to put time and effort and spirit into it. Good people, people that I knew, and people I had never met.

It seemed like it was going to make it -- there was talk that Canoe would be grown again. Then came the last round of talks, Quebecor's pronouncement that it would never work, and, finally, the announcement that CANOE would no longer produce original content, but would be only the outlet for other Quebecor properties, and the newswire.

Like all spoiled brats, Peladeau broke his toy, and when it was broken, he threw it away.

Still, I can't completely believe that it's over. There are still good people there, still fighting for it. There is still a chance of a renaissance. That would be something that I would like to be a part of.

Ex-CANOE staffers still talk about it, still shake our heads at how something so good could be so easily taken apart by those who didn't understand.

When I left CANOE, I moved over to the Toronto Star, and worked on their website. I've now gone over to Fantasy Sports Services, and I work on their products. They were both good jobs, I learned a lot, had some fun, and I'm paid decently well for what I do. I have no complaints.

But, I sometimes wonder what CANOE could have been, if we could have gotten decent funding early on. When I learned what the Toronto Star spent on their publishing system, I sat down and figured out it would have kept all of CANOE in the old days running for two to three years. What we could have done with that type of money!

Hindsight is 20-20 though. CANOE gives us many good exmaples of how to build a website, and many bad examples. But, in the end, this is a good story, even if the ending is still being written. It is a tale of caution, and also a tale of success, of what motivated, hard-working people can accomplish.

So, here's to CANOE, and all the good people I met through it -- I hope you find success wherever you may end up, and maybe, one day, we can work together again.

Jerry's Home Page