Why diverse representation matters at the E-Comm board

This is the second of three parts in a series on 911 and who is represented beyond the dispatchers. On Thursday, we’ll look at the growing issue of climate-related disasters and how it affects the disabled community. Read our first part on a disagreement about representation that left an E-Comm seat vacant for two years.

Nobody seems to disagree that representation at the boardroom level is lacking in the Lower Mainland, despite the conflict over choosing a second E-Comm board representative.

Asked if they see the diversity of Metro Vancouver represented in boards and committees, council members from Burnaby, New Westminster, Port Coquitlam and Coquitlam all agreed that there needed to be some changes.

New West Coun Mary Trentadue said she believes the health of an organization is directly linked to who is making the policies.

“It’s very well reported that having diversity at your governance table does impact the health or wellness, or the ability of that organization to do well and succeed,” she said.

“I think that perhaps that isn’t really considered. People don’t think that that is as important as it actually is.”

Mental health representation

And the issue is a serious one—E-Comm deals with some of the most dire situations people face. It’s the starting point for how the government responds in the moment to things like the heat dome or flooding. It’s also the first point of contact in mental health calls, which can have fatal outcomes for a person experiencing an episode if it isn’t dealt with right.

“We need social workers or people that are trained on a mental wellness check to accompany a police officer,” Burnaby Coun Joe Keithley, who sits on the E-Comm board, noted. “I think that’s essential.”

Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart went further, saying a police officer with a gun is not the right person to be sent on mental wellness calls in the first place. He also pointed to the way emergency services often come with biases against Black, Indigenous and people of colour.

“Mental health services, addiction services—those ones, I would love to see … properly resourced so that 911 can function for all the province. But right now, there’s big gaps,” Stewart said.

He added that this was something Coquitlam councillor and former E-Comm board member Brent Asmundson was trying to advance at E-Comm.

“There’s a whole bunch of those mechanisms that we need first responder systems to be more resilient to and more responsive to.”

The benefit of gender balance

When it comes to internal policies for staff, Trentadue noted that a board largely made up of white men has a “high likelihood” of not considering childcare in its policies. That’s because, despite women’s advances in the workplace, men still tend to take on less work around raising children.

“I’m not blaming men for this failure, but if you have men determining policy at the table, childcare is very likely not to come up ever. Because it isn’t. It just isn’t,” Trentadue said.

“It’s working conditions. It’s work-life balance. It’s [about] how do you manage illness in a family when you have to go to work when your child is sick?”

And she noted that when she worked at E-Comm before becoming a councillor, there were more women employees than men.

“So if you have an organization that has a greater percentage of women working there, yet you have a board of largely men making decisions, I think you’re going to have a disconnect,” Trentadue said.

But representation goes beyond men and women, she said, noting that board selection should consider what each member is bringing to the table.

“Do we have people sitting at that table that take transit? That are renters? That come from a different cultural background?” she asked.

“I think if you don’t have those people at the table there’s a very good chance that those things are not going to be considered when making policy. If everyone is driving to the E-Comm board meeting, they’re not talking about transit for their employees, generally.”

‘The luck of who nominated who’

Trentadue said she expects the frustrations won’t go away anytime soon, with representation issues throughout local, provincial, and federal governments.

So the question remains: how do we get representation not only on E-Comm’s board but in all of the public decision-making institutions?

Everyone the Beacon spoke to agreed that first and foremost, there’s an issue of representation on city councils. And that’s where boards like E-Comm, Metro Vancouver, and TransLink typically draw a large portion of their directors.

On Burnaby’s city council, for instance, only two of nine members are women—double the number of women prior to this summer.

In February this year, New West council passed a resolution calling on E-Comm to commit to creating a policy on diversity and equity in board representation by 2022.

In the March 8 council meeting, Keithley said he’s spoken to E-Comm vice-president of governance Sandra MacKay, and noted they would be coming forward with a response.

“These concerns are being addressed,” he said.

Changing the structure

Stewart, meanwhile, said he has been calling for changes to the overall governance structure of E-Comm. And he noted the issue isn’t just about equity.

Looking at the board members, it’s hard to make sense of why the municipal representation is laid out the way it is.

Surrey is grouped together with other municipalities, while Vancouver, Abbotsford, and Richmond each have their own.

Delta and its police board share their own representative, while the Tri-Cities, with double the population of Delta, share two representatives with Burnaby—which also has double the population of Delta—and New Westminster. While Delta’s police board is grouped with the municipality, New Westminster and Port Moody’s police boards are grouped in with a series of other independent police boards.

In an emailed statement, E-Comm spokesperson Jasmine Bradley said the organization’s 2025 strategic plan includes “modernizing E-Comm’s governance structure.”

“The company, and the way it is governed, has not evolved since E-Comm answered its first 911 call more than 22 years ago,” Bradley said.

“With an expansion of the scope of E-Comm’s work over the years, we have grown from a regional to a provincial organization. As such, it is time to update the governance structure.”

She noted E-Comm has “no influence over the selection of 18 of the 22” board members, “so it can only advance its goals of diversity and gender balance … directly with respect to the four independent directors.”

Trentadue said the issue of representation is “so simple” on the one hand, but challenging on the other.

“I sit on a couple of Metro tables, and I would say that the Metro tables have more women on them, for sure. But we’re all white. There’s very little diversity at those tables—very little,” she said.

“We’re white, privileged homeowners that are in politics that have a certain sense of power and cannot always be relied on to think of all the people in our community. It’s a bit like groupthink, when you get a group of people that are all kind of similar. It becomes very difficult for them to think outside their own box.”

Get Burnaby Beacon in your inbox.An in-depth understanding of the stories that affect Burnaby and beyond, every weekday.