Strong cities are built on strong partnerships.
Lai and Associates was proud to serve as a Silver-level Sponsor of the 2026 Annual General Meeting and Conference of Ontario’s Big City Mayors (OBCM), held April 16–17, 2026 at Pickering Casino Resort. Hosted by Pickering Mayor Kevin Ashe, the two-day gathering brought together mayors, senior municipal leaders, provincial ministers, and federal housing representatives to tackle the issues that matter most to Ontario’s largest cities.
For us, sponsoring this event was a natural extension of our work. As a Pickering-headquartered Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider, we support the public-sector organizations that keep Ontario moving — and the OBCM AGM is one of the most important municipal gatherings of the year.
About Ontario’s Big City Mayors
Ontario’s Big City Mayors (OBCM) is a non-partisan organization representing the mayors of 29 Ontario cities with populations of 100,000 or more. Together, OBCM members represent roughly 70% of Ontario’s population and nearly 30% of Canada’s — making their annual conversations some of the most consequential in Canadian municipal policy.
The 2026 AGM focused on the priorities shaping Ontario’s cities right now:
- Housing supply and the Canada-Ontario Partnership to Build
- Municipal infrastructure funding
- Public safety and bail reform
- The ongoing homelessness, mental health, and addictions crisis
- Bill 9 and municipal codes of conduct
Why We Sponsored the OBCM AGM
Municipal leaders are under real pressure. They are delivering essential services — water, roads, policing, housing-enabling infrastructure — on a property tax base that was never designed to carry this much weight. They need space to compare notes, build coalitions, and work through hard problems together.
That is exactly what the OBCM AGM creates.
By sponsoring the hosted lunch, we helped make room for the kind of informal, cross-municipal conversations that formal agendas rarely accommodate, the hallway exchanges where a CAO in one city learns what is working in another, or where a mayor finds a partner for a shared advocacy push.
Beyond the Conference Room: A Visit to the Porsche Experience Centre
Our team was also invited to take part in a visit to the Porsche Experience Centre Pickering, located directly across from the Pickering Casino Resort. The experience created a chance for municipal leaders to connect in a more informal setting — and it showcased one of Pickering’s standout destinations at the same time.
There is a reason moments like this matter. Some of the most productive conversations in municipal policy do not happen at the table. They happen on the walk between sessions, over coffee, or — in this case — standing next to a Porsche 911. Place-based experiences help turn acquaintances into collaborators, and they remind visiting leaders what makes a host city worth championing. For Pickering, hosting the OBCM AGM was not just about logistics; it was a chance to show the province what the city has become.
Community Investment Is Part of How We Work
Lai and Associates has always believed that the organizations serving the public sector have a responsibility to show up for it. Sponsoring the OBCM AGM sits alongside our broader commitment to community, including our nonprofit pricing assistance, our work with municipal and public-sector clients, and our ongoing contributions to the regional business community in Durham Region and across Ontario.
We are grateful to OBCM, Mayor Ashe, and the City of Pickering for a well-run, substantive conference. And we are thankful to the municipal leaders and staff whose work — often without recognition — makes a meaningful difference in communities across the province every day.
Serving Ontario’s Public Sector
If your municipality, agency, or nonprofit is exploring Microsoft 365, Copilot, cloud migration, or managed IT services, we would welcome the conversation.
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