2019 is a landmark year for Ontario’s professional planners. We are celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Registered Professional Planner (RPP) designation in Ontario; the first jurisdiction in Canada to offer it!

To commemorate this significant milestone, OPPI is facing change and guiding Ontario into the next quarter century by exploring the key issues that reach beyond regional and territorial boundaries impacting professional planners and stakeholders, and addresses issues important to the general public, elected officials and other decision-makers  for decades to come. We will aim to tackle these topics through a variety of educational offerings throughout the calendar year, culminating with OPPI19: Beyond 25 from October 1-3 at the Beanfield Centre in Toronto.

OPPI invites its members, related stakeholders and citizens to submit a proposal to speak at our Beyond 25 Conference, and to express your interest in assisting OPPI in the creation of other educational content throughout the year and beyond.

Key Issues

The key issues that OPPI will be exploring at the Conference are:

• Climate Change - Climate change is becoming a growing concern in every sector, profession and industry. From a government’s perspective, the list of things that need to be done to prepare communities for exponential climate change seems to grow longer by the day. Planners offer support by finding the most sustainable way to align a community’s diverse needs with the fragile needs of the environment, as Ontario continues to grow and change. Their research and professional expertise can positively affect policies that tackle climate change.
• Uneven Growth - Ontario’s communities are in a constant state of change. Economic, social, technological and political issues affect growth in both rural and urban areas for better (healthy growth patterns that create sustainable, viable communities for the future) and worse (slow growth or no growth and, sometimes, fast growth that puts a worrying strain on infrastructure).
• Technology - In today’s age of social media, data collection and internet dominance, and tomorrow’s age of technology yet-to-be-discovered, how will Ontario’s communities fare? Technology speeds things up, it connects more people across broader regions, it can make systems and processes run smoother in all aspects of rural and urban living - so how does a planner factor this in in community development? And how does technology affect the practice of planning itself, with the advent of new tools and platforms to use in researching and retraining? How will the nature of planning be changed by the incoming generation of planners who seem to have been born with a smartphone in their hands?

Essential Questions and suggested sessions

OPPI’s Planning Knowledge Exchange (PKE) Committee has developed a list of “Essential Questions” designed to encourage genuine inquiry into big ideas and core content which should be used when considering whether to submit a proposal.

In addition, the PKE Committee also developed a list of suggested sessions we’d love to see in action at the Conference . If you have other ideas, however, we want to hear from you!
  Please be sure to review the evaluation rubric that will be used to assess all proposals.

We are looking for speakers, authors, sessions and content that challenges convention, sparks dialogue, debate and collaboration. Share your ideas with us today by clicking here!

Key Dates

Online submission site opens: Thursday, November 1^st, 2018

Submission site closes: December 12^th, 2018 at midnight

Submissions must be received no later than 11:59 pm EST on the day of the deadline. Submissions will not be accepted after that time.

Notification of proposal status: March 2019