150!Canada Conference - WOW!

It has taken me a few days (almost a week actually) to sit down and collect my thoughts on an amazing experience - the 150!Canada Conference that IPAC along with our friends at MASS LBP organized on March 11 and 12, 2010. What a fantastic and energizing event!!

The purpose of the conference was to start us thinking about Canada's sesquicentennial in 2017 (it is not that far away). And, think & discuss the 300 delegates did!

On the first day of the conference we had 25 incredible & dynamic speakers - including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin, Peter Aykroyd who was Director of Communications for the Centenary celebrations, Roch Carrier, Jeff Melanson of the National Ballet School, Mary Simon, Tom Jenkins of Open Text and Senator Romeo Dallaire. Each of the 25 speakers had 10 minutes to present their ideas to the delegates gathered at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. This is a different format from our traditional conferences. But it worked very well as the speakers had to focus on their core message quickly and the audience was attentive the whole time.

On the second day, the delegates broke out into round tables based on a number of different topics and discussed ideas, made recommendations, etc that will form the basis of the report from the conference. This report, which should be ready in the next two weeks will be made public and sent to governments, businesses, community groups, etc around the country. We hope that this will kick-start the planning for the 150th.

It was interesting to meet local 150 organizations that have already been established in London, Montreal and Edmonton. These cities have already started to think about this occasion and develop ideas on how to celebrate this milestone.

For those of you who missed the conference - we will be posting videos of the presentations by all the speakers shortly on the website. As well, CPAC filmed our conference and will be showing it soon.

There was another first at this conference - at the end of the first day we held a concert at the NAC! Jowi Taylor and Dina Graser produced a spectacular show that included performances by the incomparable Jully Black and Radio Radio. Delegates were dancing in the aisles at the NAC!!

Special thanks to Peter Herrndorf and his staff at the National Arts Centre for all their assistance and kindness. Without their enthusiastic support we would not have been able to pull this off. Thanks to our sponsors - the Royal Bank of Canada, OpenText, and the National Film Board of Canada for all their support. And salutations to our media partners, Metro News Ottawa, the Walrus and the Literary Review of Canada.

Thanks to all the facilitators and others in the special red 150!Canada t-shirts for ensuring that the conference ran smoothly.

Finally a very special thanks to our partners at MASS LBP and especially to Peter MacLeod.

This is but the start of a 7 year journey to 2017. Stay tuned for more on our sesquicentennial.