Last February, I and other members of the community formed a non-profit society to engage and support the local independent music scene. At the time I was between full-time jobs and, in the back of my mind, I thought if the society was able to support a staffperson, which it has not to date, I would be interested in becoming a paid executive director.
I knew that, after working for a non-profit student newspaper at Camosun College in Victoria for nearly 15 years, if this was to happen and I was to be paid by the society I helped to form, I would have to resign from the board of directors to avoid any conflict of interest.
This was based on a gut feeling and common sense. Whether perceived or actual, being paid by a board of directors while I still sat on it was a huge conflict of interest in my mind.
At the college newspaper, our strict policy when student board members applied for paid positions with our society was that they would have to step down from the board of directors before their job application was even filed. This was written into our society’s bylaws as a way to protect the students from conflict of interest.
According to the BC Society Act, there is nothing stopping a society from hiring one of its directors, including its president, into a paid role. Schedule B of the act can be adopted as a generic set of society bylaws, and while it states that directors cannot draw a salary for their duties as a director, there is nothing stopping them from paying themselves for other duties, such as those of an executive director or project supervisor.
When Pebble in the Pond Environmental Society president Judi Tyabji took $67,000 of Job Creation Partnership grant funds to pay herself to supervise Tanned, Wild and Woolly, a sheepskin products manufacturing business, she wasn’t doing anything illegal or in opposition to the BC Society Act.
But that doesn’t mean her decision to take the job funded by provincial and federal grant funds while she remained as the society’s president was the right thing to do.
Tyabji has spoken out against the New Democratic Party opposition MLAs who addressed the situation during provincial legislature question period on Thursday, March 10, accusing her of conflict of interest.
Tyabji called the allegations “ridiculous and disappointing.” She even went as far as to suggest the NDP was trying to sabotage the release of her upcoming book about BC premier Christy Clark.
It is unfortunate that Tyabji made the decision to draw a salary from the tannery business without first stepping down as president of the society that was running it.
It is even more unfortunate that she has spun the NDP’s concerns over the grant program into a story of her being targeted for ulterior political motives.
Not everything is a political attack. Gut instinct and common sense will always tell you when something just feels...wrong.
Jason Schreurs, publisher/editor
