Not many Alberta CEOs can claim “we’re on the side of the angels.”

Not with a straight face, anyway.

But Ron Wallace uttered the remark last week with some justification.

He spoke on behalf of Ceramics Protection Corporation, an award-winning, publicly traded Calgary company which manufactures life-saving protective armour fashioned from . . . ceramics.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
The protective ceramic armour developed by Ron Wallace's company is used by Canadian, U.S. and Australian military forces.

Wallace held out a small, cold, soap-smooth square of the highly refined product — harder than iron and three times as light.

Slabs such as these, he explained, will soon be added to the exterior of public buses in Israel, to protect riders from shrapnel launched by exploding bombs.

Strange but true. This mild and scholarly chief-exec charts the daily course of a company that’s both a manufacturer of high-quality ceramics, and a cog in the global military machine.

Eleven-year-old Ceramics Protection Corp. of northeast Calgary is a Level One military security-clearance facility, although its products don’t inflict injury.

They guard against it. To Wallace’s mind, therein lies a world of significance.

“We don’t take lives. Everything we make SAVES lives,” he stressed. “It’s a nice side of the street to be on.”

Speaking of thoroughfares, Wall Street has its ups and downs. But no speculator ever went broke betting on a perpetual bull market on War Street, where business always booms.

Meanwhile, discerning readers may wonder: What possible use can there be for ceramics in a war zone?

It’s like this. The Calgary manufacturer, which trades as CEP on the CDNX, and which enjoyed a 48-per-cent increase in revenue (a bit less than $6 million) last year, produces ceramic tiles of unusual purity and strength.

They’re not as hard as diamond — but close enough for jazz.

For fans of the Food Channel, here’s a thumbnail recipe:

1. Start with an alumina-oxide powder base, created on site;

2. Spray-dry the powder, to a specific particle composition, shape and size;

3. Apply 600 tons of pressure;

4. Bake at 1,300-plus Celsius for one day;

5. Cool and serve.

What emerges from the oven is a ceramic of extraordinary hardness. Yet it’s light enough to be mounted on the outside of light armoured vehicles (LAVs), used by the Canadian and U.S. militaries.

“This modular (ceramic) armour greatly enhances the ballistic resistance of the vehicle,” Wallace explained.

The impact of a ballistic assault creates kinetic heat, intense enough to melt a metallic shield.

“But you cannot melt this ceramic,” Wallace said, tapping it.

“It will shatter, but absorb the hit,” he continued. “(Ceramic) will absorb the kinetic energy, because it was fused at 1,300 Celsius and can withstand much higher temperatures.”

So much for the technical rundown. Suffice it to say, the stuff works like a damn.

Developed by chief ceramist Dr. Eugene Medvedovski, with major backing from the Alberta Research Council, the material is made to specs so unusually and exceedingly precise that the product drew high praise from the American Ceramics Society, which gave the Calgary team its 2001 Corporate Technical Achievement Award.

It was the first time in the society’s 104-year history that a non-American outfit was chosen for the honour.

“There were quite a few noses out of joint. We beat VERY big companies to win this,” Wallace chortled.

More importantly, the Ceramic Protection Corp. has attracted notice from the industry’s plummier accounts. These include General Motors Defense, of London, Ont., which manufactures LAVs, plus the Calgary police TAC team.

Among global clientele are the Canadian, U.S., and Australian militaries. When Australian armed forces went into East Timor, they wore protective fragmentation vests containing Calgary-produced ceramics.

And Wallace knows the Aussies were pleased by the company’s commitment to quality, because they came back and tripled the order.

In the face of such evidence, it’s not surprising market soothsayers such as Murray Edwards — his Edco Financial Holdings Ltd. is the company’s largest shareholder — believe the Ceramic Protection Corp. faces an attractive future. The CEO, meanwhile, can reflect on a fascinating personal history.

A chemist by training, Wallace made a splash five years ago when he and his team from Agra Earth & Environmental Ltd. won an Alberta Emerald Award for their heroic containment of a mammoth oil spill. Some 150,000 tonnes of crude bled from a pipel

ine near the Arctic treeline in Russia’s Komi Republic, and the resulting mess dwarfed the Exxon Valdez disaster.

In response, the Albertans worked 59 successive 18-hour shifts in sub-zero temperatures. By building dams of gravel and sand, they kept the land spill from draining into the Kolva River, a major salmon-producing stream.

Wallace terms it his finest, and proudest, hour. And the story starts you to thinking . . . maybe the angels really are on this guy’s side.