The OAA’s 135th Annual General Meeting of Members (AGM) was held as a virtual event on Tuesday, April 8, 2025. You can view the event in its entirety on the OAA YouTube Channel.

The 2025 Presidential Address, delivered by Ted Wilson, is provided here:

Aanii, bienvenue, welcome once again.

This is the portion of our AGM where I can address the membership directly.

I know we started our meeting today with a general land acknowledgement across Ontario, but I want to begin my own address by acknowledging that I am speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe—stewards of the country across the near North from the Atlantic to the Midwest for thousands of years.

Through my engagement with the Anishinaabe here in Greater Sudbury, I have enriched my knowledge as a community leader and as an Architect—particularly through the sharing and making of a teaching lodge on the main campus of Laurentian University with the Elders, knowledge carriers, and our students at the McEwen School of Architecture where I now teach following 30 years of practice.

This experience, and the set of relationships it has offered, has fostered in me the skills for leadership. I share these with you today, confident in knowing that those younger than I will seek the path of leadership that helps make organizations such as the Ontario Association of Architects the effective regulator that holds the public trust under the Architects Act.

As your President of the OAA’s governing Council, I am entrusted to serve and provide leadership, guidance, and critical perspective to assist our very diligent staff to perform their duties. I have the highest regard for each of them, as I do for our Council of elected members and Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council appointees. We meet, deliberate, debate, collaborate, and reach consensus on the many matters for which the OAA takes responsibility under the Act, ever mindful of the duty to serve and protect the public interest.

As part of that duty, we operate in reference to a five-year strategic plan. This document serves to provide focus on a set of priorities that serve the public by providing the means for those of us in the architecture profession to be ethical, effective practitioners.

Our overarching themes include diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as climate action. If we are respectful of each other, so are we respectful of the land.

And guided by these themes, we work with staff to offer learning for members through the continuing education program.

We regulate the path to licensure for Architects and Licensed Technologists, while upholding high standards and a commitment to the public interest.

We support the 14 Local Architectural Societies.

We engage with government, advising with our expertise so critical to the shaping of the built environment.

We create an exciting environment for learning and celebrating in Ottawa for our Reshaping Communities Conference next month.

We also offer our headquarters in Toronto as a model of a renewed building, today operating with a nominal energy bill. Soon, it will be fully refreshed with the work of JA Architecture Studio, winners of our landscape architecture competition. The team, along with others on the project including the OAA Building Committee, are striving to make our site a more sustainable, accessible, thoughtful, artful, and welcoming space

All this to say there remains much to do, as there has been over the many years the OAA has held the public trust, and continues to vigorously do so.

Ahead, we have the modernization of the Architects Act—this is no small effort, but will lead to a refreshed Act for the next generation of communities and architects to help inspire and shape them.

I am mindful of this work as I read the autobiography of The Honorable Murray Sinclair, Anishinaabe Elder, recently passed but long to be remembered for his wisdom, generosity, and stewarding of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I have the greatest respect for such leaders. Selfless and forever giving. I believe each of us in this profession, in our own way, holds compassion for people and the land, bringing them together through beautiful moments of architecture so communities can share in what becomes a better place.

I thank you for your consideration. I thank you for your persistence and aspiring to excellence in this most important and challenging profession. I challenge you to reach for even greater opportunities to exercise our collective efforts to realize an inspiring built environment. And I look forward to the opportunity to engage with many of you in Ottawa. Miigwech.