Ray Ivany finally gets his name on something of value

Embracing the only real tangible result of the Ivany Report—using the word “Ivany”—the Nova Scotia Community College is honouring Ray Ivany.

To that end, NSCC’s waterfront campus will henceforth be known as the Raymond E. Ivany campus. The bold rebrand was announced during a ceremony Tuesday in Dartmouth.

“NSCC is a place where youth are inspired to innovate, to take chances and be creative,” Labour and Advanced Education minister Labi Kououlis said at the press conference. “These are all characteristics that Ray embodies. His determination and drive continue to inspire every student who attends the college.”

Ivany served as NSCC’s president and CEO from 1998 to 2005, where he helped secure a landmark $123-million investment from the provincial government. The money helped fund NSCC’s expansion, making room for an additional 2,500 students and paving the way for a shiny new Dartmouth campus to replace the college’s run-down former digs on Bell Road (razed and replaced by Citadel High).

“Ray Ivany, a two-time college graduate in engineering technology, positioned NSCC at the forefront of postsecondary education options in Nova Scotia,” said current college president Don Bureaux in a press release.

Ivany’s name is already attached to a less-impressive institution, having famously chaired the Nova Scotia Commission on Building Our New Economy. In 2014, NS-COBONE released its game-changing Now or Never: An Urgent Call to Action for Nova Scotia report—commonly known throughout the land as the Ivany Report.

Though its lessons are still preached from the pulpit at Province House, over the last three years the Ivany Report has morphed from a dying province’s blueprint towards new life into buzzword fuel—a pamphlet of clichéd catechisms, spat out by every industrial grifter, political theorist and soulless PR drone hoping to rub two Bluenose-emblazoned government dimes together.

So the waterfront campus is a big step up for the Ivany brand.

Ivany was also president of Acadia University from 2009 until June of this year.