Rebooting the BCMA

Memberships must sometimes, in our personal view, look beyond what their Board has done, to what it hasn’t.

Our BCMA Board has not examined what is achieved by annually spending $18 million in mostly members’ dues, or in perpetuating 37 directors costing the membership annually more than $1.2 million. It has not confronted its failure to foster among members the view that 19 acclaimed or vacant Board directorships are worth vying for, or come to grips with more than 40 seldom marshaled vice delegate and nominator positions.

Several incarnations of governance committees, for all their expenditures, have brokered only limited changes.

True to our election promises from last April we are committing, to upcoming referendum, bylaws changes vital to reinvigorate the BCMA.

First and foremost will be to condense our Board of 37 directors, divided across 16 districts, into one chair, five officers, and five delegates, one for each of five health authority aligned districts, each with four vice delegates who shall together number GPs and specialists. 

Deciding after a district meeting and through new electronic balloting which single colleague will be our district delegate, and which runners-up our vice delegates, will encourage more competitively thoughtful, articulate, and deliberative visioning as to our future. It will also better enable our elected colleagues to appreciate, and bridge, the divides between our health authorities’ clinical administrators, GPs, and specialists.

Second is to reconstitute the two committees which are in members’ best interests to redefine, while empowering and entrusting the Board to tend to the remainder without requiring every time a bylaws change. For our nominating committee to ensure a regular supply of fresh and committed candidates, its positions must be free of incumbents steadfastly opposed to term limits. For our audit committee to ensure that spending is not just honest but seriously questioned, its positions cannot be owed to the directors. 

We further propose to limit continuous service on any one committee to 5 years of membership plus 5 years as chair, extensible by special vote of the Board for up to 2 years.
—Jim Busser, MD, FRCPC
Honorary Secretary Treasurer, BCMA Executive Committee 
—Charles Webb, MBChB
Chair of the General Assembly, BCMA Executive Committee