The Council Agenda - Part 1

In various reports, Council Links, EQ columns and blog postings over the years, I have made regular mention of the topics under discussion at the Council table. I thought it might be worth an electronic word or twenty to explain how those topics are chosen and how we go about discussing them.

To begin with, how do we decide what to talk about? Well, there are two types of topic on the Council agenda…

Cyclical
Because Council is charged with governing the association responsibly, year in and year out, there are a large number of recurring topics. For instance, it wouldn’t do to ignore the financial health of our RRSP funds and only review them after a problem became evident. In fact, all aspects of the work of Equity get reviewed every year. That way, we can identify issues while they are still small and address them proactively, rather than getting stuck wondering what just hit us.

Ad Hoc
For (almost*) everything else we rely on the “Request for Council Action”, a short agenda proposal. The RCA is the first step to being added to our “emerging issues” list, Council’s version of “new business”. It is most frequently used by Councillors or regional advisories to suggest a topic for inclusion on our agenda, but all members in good standing have access to it. At each meeting, Council reviews any recently received RCAs, and votes on whether it agrees to devote agenda time and member resources to an exploration of the topic.

Thus, filing an RCA is not a guarantee that the topic will be added to the formal agenda, but the odds are high. Of the close to 200 submitted in the last 9 years, only a handful were declined. In some cases, Council decided that, while the topic could certainly be fodder for a stimulating discussion, the issue was well beyond Equity’s ability to influence and the agenda time could be more profitably used for other matters. In most other cases, the topic is already covered off by existing policy, and the RCA is passed to the Executive Director for direct action.

When Council accepts or declines an RCA, either the President or another Councillor will get back to the initiating member or group so that they know what happened to the request. The President then schedules the topic for discussion in a future agenda, balancing the time-sensitivity of the matter with all the other things that we may have previously scheduled for discussion. At any point in time, Council typically has four or five modest-size topics on its agenda, and one or two major ones.

*Back to that asterisk. There is one other method of placing something on the Council agenda, and that is a member resolution passed at the National AGM. This is a legacy option, retained from the days when it was really the only opportunity for a member at large to propose a topic for the Council agenda.

There are several drawbacks to the resolution approach: you have to know the option exists (few do); it only happens once a year; it requires a quorum and sufficient support to pass at the NAGM; and it is most effective if presented in person, which means travelling to the location of the meeting. 

In contrast, the RCA form is accessible online year round, any member in good standing can submit one, and proposals are reviewed at every Council meeting. At one point, we debated getting rid of the resolution process entirely, but in the end decided to keep it because there was no harm in retaining it as an additional option.

And that’s what it takes to get a topic on the agenda. The next step is the discussion itself, and I’ll deal with that in a future post.