Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to appear.
I was appointed to the board of Rights and Democracy in November 2009. My first board meeting was January 7 and 8, 2010. The evening of the first day of that meeting the president, Rémy Beauregard, tragically died of a heart attack. Four days later, a letter, with the names of all staff appended, called on the leadership of the board, the chair, vice-chair, and chair of the finance and audit committee, to resign, citing harassment of the president.
So I had to ask myself what was going on here. The charge of harassment, I could see, was absurd on its face. None of the three accused of harassment lived in Montreal. They were busy people, and in my experience were often hard to contact. The chair, in the weeks before the meeting, was virtually incommunicado, spending most of his time in hospital with his then dying wife. She died just a few days before the board meeting.
Moreover, the sole specific complaint in the letter requesting resignations had nothing to do with harassment. The specific complaint was that the performance evaluation committee of the board treated the president unfairly, because it sent the performance evaluation of the president to the Privy Council without first having given the president a copy and an opportunity to comment. The president did get a copy of the performance review from the Privy Council through an access to information request and did have an opportunity to comment on the review before any decision was made in the Privy Council on that review. In my opinion, as an administrative law lawyer litigating the duty of fairness almost constantly for decades, there was nothing unfair in that.
Before I was appointed I was not told a whole lot. I was asked if I had any skeletons in the closet. I said, “Well, I'm a Liberal”, but that did not seem to matter. I'd been on the board before, between 1997 and 2003. I was told there was a division in the board and my experience as a past board member would be helpful. I was told there had been a dispute about three small grants to organizations in the Middle East, but that the president, when criticized about the grants, had distanced himself from them.
Was this an issue or the issue, these grants? Apparently not. I decided to test the waters myself at the January board meeting by presenting a resolution repudiating the grants. The motion passed unanimously, with the president speaking in support and saying, “We could have done our homework better.”
A staff representative, Charles Vallerand, in a letter to the Globe and Mail on January 16, indicated that the dispute the staff had with the board majority was not about policy.
On reflection, it was my view that to look for one answer to the question of what was plaguing Rights and Democracy was overly simplistic. I considered there to be a sequence of issues, each issue related to the others, a set of nested dolls. The issue of the three small Middle East grants was not an irrelevancy but rather embedded in another issue, the performance review of the president.
The performance review of the president, completed by the performance review committee and sent to the Privy Council in May 2009, had a half-page reference in the 16-page review to these three grants. So there was a small reflection of the grants in the performance review. The performance review was a lot larger issue and was the immediate cause of division within the board. The president, as he was fully entitled to do, disagreed with the performance review sent to the Privy Council. But for reasons I must confess I still do not fully understand, he brought his disagreement to the board and not to the Privy Council. The president asked the board to decide that the performance review should be withdrawn from the Privy Council, but structurally the board had no authority to deal with the performance review. The president proposed a bylaw change so that the board could deal with the performance review. That proposal, as well as his request for withdrawal, was still pending the day he died.
The performance review was itself embedded in a still larger issue: the relationship between the board and the staff. From the paper record he left behind, I can see that Beauregard's concerns were not just the content of the performance review but also its scope. He considered the performance review as commenting on matters that were in his view none of the business of the performance review committee. An over-expanded scope for the presidential performance review committee meant that for the president to obtain a positive performance review, he would have had to conform to the views of the committee on matters that in his opinion were not properly within their jurisdiction but were rather part of the president's reserve domain.
We can see that the dispute is not about personalities but a continuation of the dispute, even though many of the characters have changed. The dispute about performance review was embedded in the larger dispute itself about accountability, about whether the staff or the board decided the course of the organization. But even that issue was embedded in a much larger issue, the role of Rights and Democracy.
Rights and Democracy was established to give grants to third world NGOs that would promote rights and democracy. It was set up at arm's length from government in order to avoid giving the impression of political interference in foreign countries, which direct Canadian government granting to foreign NGOs might give. Yet the staff and management of Rights and Democracy, from my perspective, has all but abandoned that original parliamentary intent.
There are NGOs, of course, to which Rights and Democracy gives money, but none of this is simply the awarding of grants among applications. All spending today by Rights and Democracy on NGOs results from elicited requests. The organization devises the programs and finds NGO contractors to deliver them. NGOs that receive grants today from Rights and Democracy are doing what Rights and Democracy wants, on contract.
The original vision was that the third world NGOs that received grants from Rights and Democracy should be independent from the Government of Canada. This has been perverted into a notion that the staff of Rights and Democracy should be independent from its board. Yet independence of the staff from the board violates the statute of the institution that vests authority in the board over the conduct and management of the affairs of Rights and Democracy.
As well, independence of the staff on the board makes no sense. The Government of Canada should take the NGO world as it finds it and not try to manipulate it through money, but that is different from saying that a government-appointed board should leave the staff of a government-devised and wholly financed creature to do whatever it wants. It is, on the contrary, bizarre to suggest that the Government of Canada should fully fund an institution to hire people off the street to run its own political agenda in the name of human rights without its appointed board raising so much as a peep.
This was a problem I could see even when I was on the board before. Again, the catalyst was the Middle East, where there are often disagreements. Rights and Democracy had a fledgling Middle East program, which the board terminated in 1998, when I was a member of the board.
Warren Allmand then, without board approval, sent two letters to Bill Graham. One of them expressed shock at Canada's voting against one of the many anti-Israel resolutions at the then United Nations Human Rights Commission. Another was an anti-Israel diatribe condemning Israel for violating every international crime known to humanity. This time it was the Hezbollah terrorist attacks from Lebanon that generated that letter.
As a board member, I then wrote to Bill Graham, pointing out that I was a member of the board and disagreeing with what Allmand wrote. At that time, Allmand and his staff, in good grace, accepted what had happened and we moved on, but these were two trains moving on the same track toward each other on a collision course.
One could question the mission of Rights and Democracy as devised by Parliament, even as the organization stayed within the statutory vision. But it has not, by, in effect, creating programs that it is running itself with NGO delivery. We can see the notion of independence of staff on the board, not just because of what the staff have said, but also because of what the past presidents have said. We have a statement from four past presidents asking the Prime Minister to address a subversion of the independence of the organization.
Where does that leave Rights and Democracy? If this were just a matter of hot tempers, tempers could cool and time would heal. If it were just a matter of some misspoken words, apologies might remedy the rudeness. However, if the problem lies with the structure and relationship within Rights and Democracy itself, the resolution of the problem is not so simple.
Independence of a government-created and fully financed operation from a government-appointed board makes no sense. Unless and until we have a staff that have accepted that the board is responsible for the direction of the organization, the problems at Rights and Democracy will persist.
Thank you.