Keynote

So, I think I 100% agree with everything that Greg just said, and I think that over the last 10 years, I've been living those problems at a very small scale, and that is the scale of private practice. I'm an architect, having been through this full cycle of developing a business and trying to understand how effective the systems that I have to engage with really are in delivering the outcomes that they're supposed to be delivering. The reality is most of them deliver virtually none of what is set up as an ideal outcome at the beginning of that process.

So what I've found over those years is that I've constantly had to revisit why that happens and where my energy goes. I can be honest with myself about what I found. The starting principles of going into a field like architecture, which assumes that there's a creative aspect to it, that there is a practical aspect to it, that there's problem-solving, and that all of those things that come into it are what you're really up to, has been a frustrating and interesting process of trying to understand what that means.

You know, when Greg is talking about systems delivering what they're delivering, I completely agree, and I keep coming back to the central question of: why is it that we allow that to continue? Like, what is it about something that doesn't work that keeps us doing things that don't work? I don't have any answers, but I do have a lot of questions. So, I think that's what I'll use my few minutes here for.

One of the interesting things about the work that I've been able to do is that we engage with really large client organizations. These are some of the largest controllers of commercial property and largest investors into the Canadian economy and infrastructure, and they still behave in the same way that we understand them to, which is an incredible aversion to risk, and also a very short-term investment horizon, even for things that look long-term. Like, if you're talking about a piece of property that may come into its value 10 or 20 years from now, that sounds long-term, but it isn't really any different from the thinking of an initial return on an investment that you make that might come to fruition in six months.

So that problem keeps coming up over and over again. Even through asking the people that are also trying to deliver those projects and products, why is it that you think that this is going to do this for you? Where is your agency being exerted into this process? There isn't really usually an answer.

So I think this feels like one of the most important things we need to do in this country: to start unpacking that question of why we accept things that don't really work, or why we engage with things that are not really delivering what we want them to, and that we don't accept that. This is really what I think. I'll mention this as the innovation mindset. How do you help people to arrive at an unwillingness to accept something that is not optimal, and how can you help people to encourage that type of thinking?

Again, if we come back to what other people have said, the idea of Expo 67 is something that comes up in my family a lot. Both of my parents volunteered at Expo 67, and they both were part of that story. I've always had this sense of that as part of the founding story of Canada, of the positive things about the country that I really want to make sure that we're constantly going back to. So I feel like it's really important that we start talking more about what is positive about the country, things that make us able to tell stories in a certain way and able to come together in times of difficulty in a way that maybe other people can't as much as they would like to.

We're in a strange time where we're being confronted with the negative side of an American hyper-capitalism, and we kind of know that we are already part of the matrix, right? We've been having data extracted from us. Sorry, I'm just clicking things here. And we need to try to figure out how we can get everybody in our own ecosystem talking about things that matter now, in a way that we just can't be patient anymore. We have the need to develop a resilient economy and a resilient society on a whole bunch of different levels. We are really good at this when we need to be, but we don't do it enough.

And I'll ask some really simple questions about how well prepared we are for difficult times. Would you know what to do if the power went out for four days in your city in the depth of winter and there was no food coming in? How would you know how to talk to people? How would you know how to have a conversation about problem-solving? There are individuals that are going to be very good at that, but not everybody is good at that.

We can look to countries that are dealing with obvious real security threats and ask: how can we be a little bit more like them in terms of how we can decentralize things, how we can become a little bit more resilient, and how we can build a system that has that as a baseline expectation culturally woven into everything we do?

So that may be a strange thing for an architect to talk about, but at the end of the day, we know that these things are real now. We know that we have to solve all these problems regardless of what the future looks like. And I really hope that we're able to start asking those questions and that, at an individual level, we can start pushing back when something doesn't make sense.

So again, I have no answers to that, but I do have the big question and I can't let it go. So I'll just leave it there.

Panel

Francis Wang asked the questions.

How do we know we are making progress as a country?

I was at a conference on architecture in the UK in February, and there was a presentation from somebody from New York who did a survey. What they were talking about was structuring GIS data so you can actually use it. It occurred to me that we don't have that. If we want to talk about an innovation framework that will help us develop new things, we've got to start getting on the same page about a lot of stuff. Frankly, I advocate for national regulation of professions and everything like that to take out some of those layers of BS that we have to contend with, and all the things we do that don't create any value. We are an administration-heavy country, and while some of it is well-intentioned, not all of it is effective.

What about Monday?

By continuing to do what we're doing now: talk and make sure you don't shy away from having conversations. It's probably irritating for a lot of people because I constantly tell people when I think something isn't working. But there's also this question of choosing what your vector is. For us, that's shifting other things, but that starts by doing it. If you have the discipline to get yourself ready to do something, just go and do it.