Advisory Committee Update #2

At yesterday's meeting, work on the next two advisory mandates were completed. There is now an Ontario Caucus (Mark Brownell, liaison), responsible for linking up with the full breadth of the Ontario membership, and an Opera Advisory (Wade Nott, liaison), responsible for connection with all disciplines working in opera across the country. As with the others, members who expressed an interest in participating in these will be contacted regarding involvement.

In addition, Council made some determinations on the following suggestions:

Insurance – the majority of the submissions in this area centred around the desire to strike a committee to review our insurance plan and propose improvements. However, the plan has just completed a major overhaul and was relaunched only three weeks ago. Council would still like to consider striking this committee as a feedback mechanism on the new plan, but will table the idea for 6 months and review it again at that point. This will allow more time for members to have experience with the plan.

Auditions and Engagement Opportunities – Council needs more information on the possible mandate for these two committees, and I will be contacting those who expressed an interest in participating to see if we can flesh that out a bit.

Member Education – this has a lot of overlap with our new Communications and Education Committee (Aaron Willis, liaison). We will be reviewing this to see if there is a specific branch of the proposal that would be a good mandate for a separate committee in this area, or if the committees are best combined entirely.

Diversity – mandate development for this committee is underway. As a side note, this is also a hot topic in general for Council, and will likely dovetail with that work.

Agreement Ratification – this topic is already on the Council agenda for debate. Council will table this suggestion until that discussion is underway, so that if a committee is needed to complete that work, a mandate can be developed to suit.

New Members – Council is about 80% done on reviewing our approach for welcoming new members into the association. We will table this suggestion for 6 months until that work is complete, and a committee mandate can be created in keeping with the update.

Working Conditions – no committee will be struck for this topic, since working conditions vary widely across the different agreements and policies, and ample input opportunity is already available as part of the negotiation and review cycles for each.

Rehearsal Models – The Directors, Choreographers and Fight Directors Committee (Vinetta Strombergs, liaison) has agreed to take this on.

Regional/local Support Committees – mandate development is underway for one to support the Atlantic Region.

Review work will continue on the remaining suggestions.