Andrea Fellows – Amica Senior Lifestyles

It’s the largest town in Ontario, the aptly named Oakville and its 215,000 dwellers. Situated on Lake Ontario and halfway between Toronto and Hamilton, it could offer the best of three worlds to late middle-aged or older Canadians willing to privately pay for a mixture of the urban, rural and coastal during their golden years.

Andrea Fellows | Amica Senior Lifestyles | Senior Vice President, General Counsel

If they’re not already settled in Amica Senior Lifestyles’ retirement residence on Oakville’s Bronte Harbour, they’ll have a second option next spring when Amica Glen Abbey is scheduled to open in another part of town. This community in Oakville’s up-and-coming Palermo Village will feature ample green spaces and recreational and cultural opportunities. And for those residents who develop mobility, memory and/or dementia issues, there’ll be personalized support, as there is in other Amica residences.

The hustle and bustle of Toronto appealing to a different sort of retiree, there’s an Amica project springing up in the central business district. And for those in the Pacific Northwest, Amica Jubilee House recently opened in Victoria on Vancouver Island—the latest of the company’s 7 projects in British Columbia.

Meanwhile, around a dozen other projects are either under development or in various stages of construction and completion, primarily in the Greater Toronto Area and Vancouver, where demand is acute for quality private pay senior housing. From her office in Amica’s Toronto headquarters, Andrea Fellows oversees a slew of details necessary to get these projects set for ribbon-cuttings that can’t happen soon enough.

“There’s a silver tsunami or grey wave upon us,” says Fellows, now in her second year as Amica’s senior vice president and general counsel as well as its first and still only in-house lawyer. “There’s not enough high-quality housing available for this population, and that’s keeping all of us busy trying to keep up with demand.”

Difference makers

Fellows says at least Amica is making a dent in that demand. At last count, her employer operated 32 retirement residences and plans for more in the two provinces. In due time, she says the company might look south of the U.S.-Canadian border, but there’s plenty to keep everyone busy on this side of the 44th parallel.

And maybe none more so than Fellows, who was headhunted from a similar role at global real estate investor and developer Oxford Properties Group in October 2022 and tasked with building the legal function necessary to grow the Amica footprint. She likens the responsibility to assembling an airplane in midflight—and its every move is subject to scrutiny. Much is riding on Amica’s success, the company that was acquired and taken private by BayBridge Seniors Housing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, in 2015.

“I have been working on implementing new strategies to enhance compliance, contract management and overall governance while keeping pace with our strategic growth initiatives,” she tells Vanguard in June, shortly after onboarding a clerk as her first but hopefully not last hire. “I’ve been slowly making my way through a strategy to change, upgrade and insert procedures, but we do have a mandate to grow, and my time gets sucked up in that.”

Compounding that challenge, she explains, is that while most projects are in urban core markets where units can be leased quickly, each is unique, and one legal strategy doesn’t fit all. Nevertheless, she says most projects proceed satisfactorily, what with Amica partnering with quality development partners who can be counted upon for acquiring and rezoning land and breaking ground. And while other departments have come to appreciate an in-house legal boss, it didn’t always come naturally after years of Amica depending on external lawyers.

“Early on, I was educating them to appreciate that I’m not just here to review contracts,” Fellows recalls. “I’m here to engage with you early and contribute to the strategy and success of the project. My job is to make you better at doing your job.”

Business partner

Not too slowly, office culture did adjust, with Fellows attributing her colleagues coming to appreciate her as a business partner with legal expertise to all parties realizing the common mission. Though this is a private enterprise, she emphasizes that more than a bottom line is at stake, and practically everyone knows an aging person who might benefit from an Amica residence. She wishes her late immigrant grandmother could have lived out her final years in such a place while afflicted with dementia.

“Having seen what senior housing looked like, she didn’t want to go there,” Fellows says. “But it can be a desirable place to thrive for seniors with personalized care in the comfort of beautiful buildings in central locations, and we’re all part of creating more of it for this enormously growing population that’ll want to live in it. I have her in my mind and motivating me to strive for more, always.”

There was a time, however, when seniors’ well-being really wasn’t on Fellows’ radar. A 2007 Western University law graduate who spent time abroad as an exchange student at the Netherlands’ University of Groningen, she took an early interest in real estate law and, after honing her skills with Toronto-based Goodmans LLP, handled, among other things,  the hotel portfolio between 2013 to 2022 at Oxford Properties Group. When Amica solicited her services, Fellows found parallels between her experience working on hotel matters and seniors housing; she was also drawn to the noble purpose of aiding two favored constituencies: elders in need of private community housing and teachers benefitting from sustainable pensions.

“I’ve also learned a lot and can flex new muscles,” she says.

As demanding as the role is, Fellows finds it more conducive to family time and extracurricular activities. She and her husband, a tax lawyer, are raising daughters aged 13 and 10, the eldest of whom has her eyes set on becoming an aerospace engineer.

“Where that comes from, I don’t know,” Fellows laughs. “Math never was my subject. Nothing thrills me more than to see her overachieve at it and run circles around me.”

Nurturing that precocious girl complements another of Fellows’ interests, and that’s her role as a director of Women General Counsel Canada. Though women now comprise a slight majority of incoming law students, Fellows says they’re still underrepresented on the corporate ladder, and she hopes to set an example.

Then there’s Fellows’ membership on the board of  Pine River Institute, a residential treatment center for struggling youth near Shelburne, Ontario. So many young people suffer from addictive behaviors, Fellows laments, explaining it ranges from substance abuse to video gaming to obsessive online activity. She describes her time here as an eye-opener.

“It’s influenced how I raise my own children,” Fellows says. “I can’t watch over them all the time, but I can give them the knowledge and the tools to hopefully make their own smart decisions.”