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On the occasion of our annual Bob & Mary Anne Phillips Memorial Lecture, Heritage Ottawa is pleased to mark the 50th anniversary of the Ontario Heritage Act with a panel presentation on the history, implementation and challenges associated with this seminal piece of legislation.
Fifty years ago, on March 5, 1975, after years of struggle at community and municipal levels, the Ontario Heritage Act was proclaimed, establishing the long sought-after legal process to protect local heritage in the province. The Act gave municipal councils the right to preserve properties and neighbourhoods valued for their cultural heritage significance. To ensure public participation in the process, the Act provided for the creation of local heritage advisory committees. Amendments in 2005 gave councils the power to delay and ultimately deny approvals for alteration or demolition of designated buildings.
But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Join our panel presentations to learn about the emergence of a conservation movement in Ottawa, the challenges of implementing the Act, and the examples that show its successes, and its weaknesses.
SPEAKERS:
Madeleine Meilleur has worked as a nurse, a lawyer and a politician at municipal, regional and provincial levels of government. She is currently Executive Director of Museoparc in Vanier. She was a cabinet minister in the governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne. It was as Premier McGuinty’s Minister of Culture in 2005 that she pushed through significant changes to the Ontario Heritage Act which was thirty years old at the time.
Victoria Angel is an art historian with a graduate degree in heritage conservation. She has experience in the private, public, and academic sectors. While at Parks Canada, she led the development of the Canadian Register of Historic Places and subsequently served as the Manager of the Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office. She has taught heritage conservation at the University of Victoria and Carleton University, where she is an Adjunct Professor.
Victoria is a Principal at ERA Architects Inc. where she works primarily in the areas of cultural landscape analysis, neighbourhood studies, and conservation planning for large-scale rehabilitation and adaptive reuse projects. She previously worked on the Senate of Canada Building Rehabilitation, the University of Toronto Cultural Heritage Resource Assessment and Secondary Plan, the National Arts Centre Rejuvenation, the Booth Street Redevelopment, and the Kìwekì (Nepean) Point Redevelopment, and is currently serving as the Senior Heritage Planner on the Centre Block Rehabilitation.
Marcus Letourneau is President of M.R. Letourneau and Associates Inc., a specialized heritage and strategic planning firm focused on creative solutions for the management of cultural heritage resources. He has over 20 years of experience in heritage legislation and strategic planning and has been involved in over 300 projects related to heritage conservation, land-use planning and cultural heritage landscapes. Marcus is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo and an Instructor for both the Cultural Resource Management program at the University of Victoria.
Dr. Letourneau is the founder of LHC Heritage Planning & Archaeology Inc., an Ontario-based heritage consultancy firm (2015-2023). He has also taught at Algonquin College; in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University; was a senior cultural heritage specialist for Golder Associates Limited; and the senior heritage planner for the City of Kingston from 2004 to 2011.
Robert Pajot is a Heritage Ottawa Board member and chair of its Workshop Committee. Over his 30-year career in the field of heritage conservation, Rob has worked in the private sector, for government at the City of Ottawa and at the federal heritage Center of Expertise, and at the National Trust for Canada, a non-governmental organization, where he was Project Leader for Regeneration. Rob has volunteered for heritage organizations at the local and national levels where he has contributed to advocacy and professional development activities.
Photo: Ontario Legislative Building, Queen's Park / Wikimedia Creative Commons License