One day following the official announcement of his appointment to the Order of Canada, Bowen Island based lawyer, venture capitalist, entrepreneur and business professor Haig Farris escaped to Hawaii and missed one of the worst winter storms in decades. In a brief phone interview with, The Undercurrent, Farris says he learned of his appointment to the Order of Canada a few weeks before Christmas.
“I found out that I was nominated by a former student of mine, Jay Agrawal at the University of Toronto,” says Ferris. “However I am not privy to the details of the nomination.”
Officially, Farris has been nominated for his contributions to the development of the venture capital industry and technology sector in Western Canada.
As former Undercurrent editor Louis Loik explained in a profile of Harris published in May of 2016, Farris is a co-founder of D-Wave, the first company in the world to sell “commercially available quantum computers.”
Farris says that his role in bringing the musical Billy Bishop goes to War is one aspect of his career that he would like to highlight. He explained how this came about in an email:
I introduced Lewis Allen, a good friend of mine and a well known Broadway producer to the Billy Bishop show in Vancouver, circa 1978. He loved it and we arranged to see the show in Listowell in Ontario a few weeks later with his partner Mike Nichols. At the time Lewis and Mike owned the Broadway Annie show. Mike Nichols loved it and at the after-party in discussion with John Grey, Eric Peterson and Chris Wootten it was decided that Lewis and I would raise the money to finance a Broadway production and Lewis and Mike would work with John and Eric to open a Broadway production. All of that happened and it was a thrill to see such a great and brilliant Canadian show hit the big time. Eric Petersen won the best new Broadway actor award that year and the show has been continually produced many times in various locations everywhere .
Farris says this, and everything he’s done in his career, “has been a lot of fun.”
