04/13/2026
Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the SPCA on Notre-Dame Avenue, though not to adopt. Just to visit. I'd walk the aisles and sit with the animals, keeping them company. Pets were always a part of my life, and that never changed.
Over the years, my fiancée Jessica Noricia Gordon and I adopted multiple pets. Some were a wonderful fit. Others weren't, and when that happened, we did our best by returning those animals with detailed notes about their behaviour, their quirks, and the kind of home they'd thrive in. We wanted the next match to be the right one.
Today, we share our home with two rescued cats, Bloom and Goose, who you can spot on the home page.
Jessica and I have worked many different jobs over the years. None of them were the kind of work we couldn't wait to wake up to. What we always came back to was simple: we love animals. We wanted to rescue more, live alongside them, and build a life where they were always part of it.
I also noticed something that had bothered me for a long time. Shelters and rescues across Northern Ontario, almost all of them run entirely by volunteers on top of full-time jobs and their own lives, were overwhelmed. Keeping track of pets, adoptees, foster families, and volunteers, while staying organized across all of it, with no real platform built to help them. They needed something that brought all of those pieces together in one place.
In August 2025, I started teaching myself how to code using AI tools. Yes, AI tools were used to build this. No, that didn't make it easy. It still meant months of learning, rebuilding, problem-solving, and figuring things out from scratch. AI is a tool, the same way a hammer is a tool. You still have to build the house.
Over time, I realized I wanted to use those new skills to solve a real problem, and the most pressing one I could see was right there: Northern Ontario's volunteer-run shelters and rescues, doing work that reaches far beyond pet adoption. When these organizations struggle to stay afloat, animals lose their only safety net. Many function as de facto community animal control; without them, stray and surrendered animals have nowhere to go, the burden shifts to municipalities, and the animals who depend on them run out of options. All of this, with no platform built to support them. So I built it.
And that's what became Great Lakes Paw Network.
Jessica and I are both still working full-time. We built Great Lakes Paw Network around evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks.
— Eric Lapensée
