Why it took two years to fill a role on E-Comm board of directors

Correction: This story originally stated that the BC Emergency Health Services position on the E-Comm board of directors was not filled. In fact, the spot has been filled by Dr. Wilson Wan since the original announcement.

When the City of Burnaby joined the E-Comm board in 2019, a cohort of Metro Vancouver suburbs was given a chance to double their representation on the board of directors.

For two years, however, what took place was a lengthy lesson on the 911 service provider’s corporate governance and who is represented at the table.

E-Comm recently made headlines for its decision to not stay on non-emergency calls they transfer to the BC Ambulance Service until the paramedics’ dispatchers to pick up. The inter-city 911 service made the call after the summer’s heat dome put incredible pressure on emergency responders—particularly paramedics, who were understaffed and unable to respond to many calls for up to eight hours.

What didn’t make headlines a few months after the deadly heat event, however, was a first for the cohort of cities that includes Burnaby, New Westminster, the Tri-Cities, and Belcarra: the group finally chose a second representative for the board.

A piecemeal board

When Burnaby joined E-Comm, it was added to the cohort that already included New West and the Tri-Cities area. And with Burnaby’s addition, the cities got a second seat at the table.

But it took a full two years for the group to decide on a second board member.

In 2019-20, Coquitlam Coun Brent Asmundson took on the role, representing the five cities. And in 2020-21, Burnaby Coun Joe Keithley filled the seat. In each year, they were alone in representing the cohort.

As of this fiscal year, E-Comm has 22 board members, chosen through a piecemeal process. Some cities, like Vancouver, Delta, and Richmond, have a member of their own, while others are grouped into cohorts.

Surrey, the second-largest city in the province, is part of a cohort that includes White Rock and the two Langley municipalities, for instance, and Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows share a member between them.

Most recently, Vancouver Island gained its first representative, with Victoria’s deputy police chief representing the Capital Regional District and south Vancouver Island police agencies.

Other agencies, like BC Emergency Health Services, have a spot on the board, along with a cohort of independent police boards, including Abbotsford, New West, and Transit Police.

The local cohort’s reps

For years, the Tri-Cities/New West cohort had taken turns in choosing the councillor that would represent the cities in three-year intervals.

“When it was Port Moody’s turn, it was Diana Dilworth. When it was New West’s turn, it was Mary Trentadue,” said Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart in an interview with Burnaby Beacon.

“And then it was our turn, so our council had resolved that there was one council member that has always shown an interest in it. So it was over to Coun Asmundson.”

After Burnaby joined the cohort, the group agreed to give Burnaby a seat at the table off the bat.

To Stewart’s mind, Keithley was the second spot on the E-Comm board for the cohort, after Asmundson. But when it came to re-appointing Asmundson, there was a holdout—New West.

"We were stuck. We probably shouldn’t have gone to Burnaby if New Westminster wasn’t going to accept the second nominee."

Photo: Dustin Godfrey / Burnaby Beacon

“We started to do a lot of work around diversity, inclusion, and equity, and … it’s a very hard thing to get that at a boardroom table,” said Trentadue.

“If you take a look at any of the Metro [Vancouver] tables, they’re also sometimes quite unbalanced. And I had always felt that the E-Comm board usually had many men, like double men to women.”

When Burnaby joined the cohort, and a second seat was added for the group, New West suggested the group should nominate a man and a woman each time.

“Coquitlam, at the time, was really committed to having, I think, Brent stay on,” Trentadue said.

The standoff

Deciding on who represents the cohort at the E-Comm board of directors table requires unanimous agreement between the cities.

Trentadue said she called women on various councils to gauge interest in sitting on the board.

But with every municipality effectively holding veto power in the board selection process, the cities hit a brick wall—a standoff between retaining the existing selection system and asserting gender balance.

“We were stuck. We probably shouldn’t have gone to Burnaby if New Westminster wasn’t going to accept the second nominee,” Stewart said, adding that he had a recent conversation with E-Comm vice-president of operations Stephen Thatcher.

“I asked him: the board is, I believe, pretty gender balanced? And he said, yes, it has been for years. So I don’t know that that was an issue that E-Comm had.”

This year, the E-Comm board has eight women among the 22 director positions.

In the 2020-21 fiscal year, women filled six of the 19 board positions, and before that, there were five women on the board.

Among the four E-Comm-nominated directors, however, two have been women for several years.

“I understand her concern that, if there are two reps from this cohort, her preference was with one be male and one be female. … We had, as communities, agreed that [in] the rotation, we wouldn’t fetter each other’s nominee,” Stewart said.

“When New Westminster nominated Mary to the position for three years just prior to this, no one said, no, there’s too many women on the board; you have to nominate a man.”

Early attempts at resolution

Stewart said he wished the group had gotten together before approving the Keithley nomination to require that Burnaby nominate a woman. However, that would have restricted the city to nominating one councillor—until this past summer, when Alison Gu was elected in the byelection, Colleen Jordan was the only woman on council.

In an effort to resolve the issue, the various mayors met to try to resolve the issue.

“We had agreement,” Stewart said, “including [New West Mayor] Jonathan Cote. But after the meeting, that didn’t happen. … The agreement that we thought we had wasn’t there.”

Trentadue was not part of the conversation and Stewart declined to speak to the specifics in those discussions.

“It was a frustrating time, but it’s a sign of a larger set of frustrations that are incredibly important that we find solutions to them.”

Photo: Shutterstock

“We did reach out to Joe, who was our rep, and he was certainly sympathetic and didn’t disagree with what we were trying to achieve,” Trentadue said.

“We just did not seem to be able to move it forward. And so it’s hard for me to tell you why that happened because I don’t really know why the other municipalities were unwilling to do that.”

Coquitlam councillors appeared to be asking more or less the same question.

“I’ll tell you, there’s at least one member of our council, a female member, who’s furious that Coquitlam council doesn’t get a rep there because Burnaby nominated who they did,” Stewart said.

Asked why Coquitlam didn’t just nominate a woman from its council to the E-Comm board, Stewart noted there is “one woman councillor that absolutely refuses to be nominated because of her gender.”

“To anything, she says: if you think I’m capable, nominate me because of that,” Stewart said.

“We didn’t have any other members of council step up for that nomination. So we really do try to leave it up to council to self-identify for roles that they’re interested in.”

Filling the seat

The Burnaby-Tri-Cities-New Westminster cohort did finally manage to land a second representative at the E-Comm board for the 2021-22 term: Port Coquitlam Coun Nancy McCurrach.

Early this year, New Westminster sent out letters to the other city councils in the cohort, urging them to approve McCurrach.

“New Westminster council believes that this syndicate has the opportunity to show leadership and its support for diversity in public institutions by ensuring our nominations to the E-Comm board are diverse,” Cote wrote in an email published to the agenda in Burnaby’s March 8, 2021 council meeting.

The letter followed another from a couple of months prior, urging the same. Hurley noted at the time that Burnaby had already agreed to McCurrach being the second representative at the board.

Stewart said Coquitlam ultimately agreed to the nomination of McCurrach because it “became apparent that New Westminster’s objection hadn’t been overcome at all.”

“Quite frankly, it was just impossible to get together a meeting of [six] mayors to try to work through it one more time when we’d already done it once and thought we had an agreement,” he said.

“It was a frustrating time, but it’s a sign of a larger set of frustrations that are incredibly important that we find solutions to them.”

This is the first of three parts to the story of E-Comm’s board and representation. On Wednesday, we get into why representation is important—particularly for a board like E-Comm—and how it fits into a broader set of frustrations with E-Comm’s governance. Read part two here.

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