TBA: How's the Takeover of the UCP Board Working Out For You?
Here's an explainer on the recently leaked fight over AGM costs
The Globe and Mail recently reported on some jockeying happening at the UCP Board over the cost to attend the Party Annual General Meeting. Superficially, it’s pretty boring stuff: some folks want a cheaper AGM, some don’t. It seems to me that the point of the article is that UCP members like to fight each other. No surprise there.
One of the major reasons Take Back Alberta is so focused on the cost of the AGM has to do with their plan for world domination. Their primary goal is the full takeover of the UCP Board. The yearly AGM is where that transfer of power takes place and as such TBA is laser-focused on it.
A full takeover of the board is actually a two step process. Elections for board positions are staggered every second year, with half up for grabs each year. In 2022 the Chief Financial Officer, VP Membership, VP Communications, VP Policy and one regional director for each of the province’s five regions (Northern, Central, Southern, Edmonton and Calgary) were on the ballot; in 2023 the President, Secretary, VP Fundraising and five more regional directors will be elected.
TBA swept all nine available board seats in 2022 - all incumbents were defeated (including yours truly for the VP Policy seat). This victory proved that Take Back Alberta had real power to organize and bend the system to its will.
It was also an expensive victory. TBA paid for numerous members to attend the AGM to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those tickets cost $375. Each!
I wouldn’t blame you if you questioned TBA’s “grassroots” bona fides for essentially paying people to vote in an election. I also wouldn’t blame you if you questioned TBA’s motive for lowering the next AGM ticket price - are they concerned about the little guy or are they just trying to buy the next vote at a discount?
Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here. It is burdensome to pay $400 for the simple privilege of voting. As my friend and colleague Vicki Kosmak-Lefrense indicates in the Globe and Mail article I linked to above, AGM ticket prices have been a bone of contention long before TBA came on the scene.
The reason an AGM costs as much as it does is because it’s not just a day to vote, it’s a celebration of the Party and its members. I’ve attended a few of them. Spending time with like-minded (and sometimes unlike-minded) politicos over a beer in the hospitality suites is a real joy. While the business of voting at the AGM is the purpose, the social interactions are the point.
That being said, there are people who aren’t interested in the celebration part and just want to vote. Every year a small but significant group of people come only to vote and head back home immediately without participating in the festivities at all.
It’s also worth considering how large this province is and how far a person from northern or southern Alberta has to travel to attend an AGM. The event is generally in early November when there’s already snow on the roads. Due to the combination of distance and road conditions many folks from northern Alberta allocate multiple days for travel, which means extra hotel rooms and time off. AGM attendance is a non-trivial commitment to be sure.
So, how do you allow more people to vote without forcing an undue burden on them? There are a number of solutions, each with pros and cons.
The approach I’ve championed in the past is opening the vote electronically to all members across the province. While not without its costs and challenges, it’s relatively cheap and gives everyone a chance to participate.
Unfortunately there are two reasons it’s difficult to switch our board votes to an online process.
The first problem is basic human behavior. For voting where political parties are not chosen people often just pick the top person, and a vote without cost is more likely to have that play a factor than one you travelled hundreds of kilometers and spent hundreds of dollars to cast. Board positions are boring and most members, even relatively engaged ones, don’t know enough to make informed decisions. I frankly knew nothing about the board prior to my own involvement and suspect most members don’t have strong opinions about its function. Anyone who has voted municipally can probably understand the issue here.
The second problem, and the one that fundamentally prevents online voting, is that Alberta conservatives really, really, really hate electronic voting. Part of it is from bad experiences in the past (such as the 2018 leadership election). The other part (I really hate to admit this) is that some of our members have let stolen vote paranoia from south of the Canadian border leak northward.
In any case, I’ve come to accept that - at least for now - online voting is a non-starter.
If you are serious about letting every member vote and don’t want to move the ballot online there’s always the mail-in option. This is expensive and time-consuming for Party staff but frankly so is holding an AGM. One could envision a user fee to offset the cost.
Long story short, the debate about AGM costs and how to resolve the burden of internal voting has been happening in the UCP for a long time, and none of the proffered solutions are exactly straightforward. Most Canadian political parties hold their AGMs similar to how the UCP has traditionally done it, so the status quo is a somewhat pricey central function.
Well, this year we now have TBA, who has a real vested interest in reducing the burden of voting (altruistically or not).
It’s a bit difficult to figure out exactly what TBA wants. I think they are putting forward the idea of reducing the cost to $150. As reported in the Globe and Mail, Mitch Sylvestre has been promoting a letter amongst the various constituency associations (CAs) asking for us to support a $150 cap. It’s not unusual for CA presidents to work for consensus like this, but given Mr. Sylvestre’s high-profile role in the TBA one would assume this is where TBA would like to see things go.
Again, there are pros and cons to this approach. I’ve heard the choice between $150 and $375 compared to the difference between sandwiches and steak; having been on the AGM planning subcommittee before I’d actually say it’s closer to the difference between having it indoors or outdoors. In November.
Once you add the cost of hotel rooms, food and travel costs for AGM attendees, that $225 difference becomes a much smaller percentage. At some point a reasonable person starts to say “I’d rather do this indoors at the Grey Eagle than in an abandoned mall parking lot”.
Managing the costs of the AGM is surely a worthy point of discussion, isn’t it? A reasonable person might ask why the President of the UCP Association won’t allow a motion related to AGM costs to even be heard. The root cause isn’t the President, it’s the motion itself.
First, a sidebar for those unfamiliar with how committees like the Party Board work.
The Party Board has rules (as most committees do) about how decisions are made. To get anything done you need to move a motion at a properly constituted meeting - this ensures that all committee members get a chance to weigh in on all decisions.
Motions are clearly written statements describing business that the Party Board will do. They follow a clearly defined format and need to be well-written to avoid ambiguity or confusion.
An example of a well-written motion is as follows: “Whereas Joe Friesenhan is one handsome devil, be it resolved that the UCP Association will send Joe Friesenhan a letter telling him that he is handsome”. The be it resolved is what will be done and the whereas is why it should be done.
You’ll note that this example resolution is specific in what will be done - a letter will be written and the contents are clearly defined. (It’s also completely correct and justified.)
For the Party Board, the rules allow motions to be made by its members with voting privileges as long as they are reflected on a meeting agenda. A motion that is not on an agenda is not allowed to be voted on - that’s what an “out of order” motion is. The rules require all motions to be presented 7 days in advance of meetings. All meetings require at least 21 days of notice.
It is generally up to the President to decide what is on the agenda or not. The President has broad latitude to make that decision and can choose to exclude a motion for any reason.
In cases where the Party Board feels the President is putting an undue burden on a particular motion there is a way around it - any ten directors on the Party Board can call a meeting with 21 days notice and can put whatever agenda they choose forward.
One more thing: in cases where there’s an emergency decision to be made the President can decide to forward motions via email to the full Board. There are rules about how this needs to happen but in general it’s reserved for an emergency, and again the President has broad latitude to decide whether or not to allow it.
The reason you need to know all of that technical stuff is that it gives enough context to understand the many problems with the motion as proposed by the TBA members of the board and how this will now inevitably pan out.
As previously mentioned, motions need to be presented according to fairly straightforward rules. The motion in question was not. One of the regional directors just sent it in an email to all of the other board members and asked them to vote on it. The President didn’t declare it out of order out of spite, she did it because it’s completely and undeniably out of order. Any vote resulting from that email would have been essentially meaningless.
Okay, so TBA screwed up the delivery of the motion. Is that an unforgivable sin? Of course not. The motion can be resubmitted, notice can be given, and life can move forward.
Too bad someone decided to leak this to the press.
To function properly, boards require collegiality and confidentiality. You need to be able to put all of your cards on the table, be brutally honest with one another, and really fight things out without fear that what you said behind closed doors will be used against you in the public. The secrecy that boards operate under isn’t about elitism, it’s about maintaining open communication without fear of reprisal.
I can’t tell you who leaked the motion to the press. I can tell you that the motion was openly and publicly discussed on Telegram in one of the TBA channels on the day it was emailed to the Board, and I assume that’s where the press got it from. A leaked screen capture from the TBA Telegram is where I got it from. (I’m not a member of TBA; this is just further evidence of how leaky the TBA Telegram is.)
Since I highly doubt that non-TBA members are leaking confidential information through TBA channels, I think we can safely say what side of the house the leak came from.
Once trust has been broken to this level there’s no getting it back. The UCP Board has basically become the United States Senate, with the current President as a tie-breaker. Good luck making radical changes to the AGM price now.
Since this motion has been leaked I have access to its full text:
I move that, in light of having over 25 year’s [sic] experience in hospitality and event management, that Patrick Malkin [VP of Membership] be vested by the United Conservative Party Board of Directors with the authority to manage and oversee all future UCP AGM and policy events effective today, including being in charge of preparing budgets and pricing for the AGM for Finance and Board approval.
I don’t want to nit-pick but this is not a terribly well-written motion. If I were on this committee, even if I agreed in principle with what the mover was asking for I’d vote it down. You want a single individual to have total authority over all future UCP AGM and policy events with no qualifiers or expiry date? Why does he need to be made AGM Emperor-For-Life?
Beyond that, it doesn’t speak to the desire to achieve an outcome - cheaper AGMs for all - and instead presents a demand for authority. How does declaring an AGM Emperor-For-Life lower costs? It only works if you assume everyone not on your team is an enemy and that the only way to achieve your goal is to remove them from the equation.
This is, in my view, one of the fatal flaws in TBA’s strategy. David Parker’s plan to take over the boards is predicated on the notion that the only way to be successful is to completely remove all forms of dissent. This doesn’t work unless TBA controls all of the seats at the table.
With control of half of the board, TBA could have engaged in an open conversation with unaligned board members and come up with a compromise position that reflects the points of view from across the province. Could they have gotten the price down to $150? I don’t know - probably not. Could they have made real progress towards lowering the bar of entry? Given what I know about the board and its members, I believe the answer is yes.
Instead, their current machinations have achieved nothing. We’ll see if the status quo remains through to the 2023 AGM.
All of this is deep inside baseball, but it reveals a fundamental problem with TBA’s approach to governance. I have no doubt that the UCP will struggle with the inevitable consequences.