Who would have thought that an email from March 26th that invites CIRA members to “Have [their]your say: CIRA Governance Update” was so loaded. Luckily enough a co-candidate from last year’s board election, Kevin McArthur, spent some time reading about the changes – while I had to filed the email under “read later” for the time being, since I was traveling at the time. CIRA states that the changes are possible due to the new Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act. Kevin’s post on the topic is worth a read – he points out that the “Act does not permit the not-for-profit corporation to disallow member nominated directors“. Due to the late hour, I’ll just jump in with a summary of the proposed changes for now, which have me quite shocked.

As you may remember one point of discussion in last year’s election in the forum provided by CIRA was how to make the election process more democratic and encourage more members and stakeholders to participate in the elections. It appears that the board thinks that this can be achieved by cutting the member nominated and endorsed slate of candidates and also have those selected by the Nomination Committee. The Nomination Committee already had the power before to select the candidates for the majority of the available board sears – 3 versus 1 in the 2011 elections.

CIRA was kind enough to illustrate the change on their site.

The election process before the change:
The proposed election process after the change:

While I understand and welcome the desire to shorten the election process, I will be opposing the suggested change by emailing governance@cira.ca before the May 2nd deadline. Apparently the comments will not be published (at least not directly) but considered by the board.