Reinventing the CCA: an update

March 22, 2012

It’s been a month since I have been back in the office after my tour of the coun­try and it is time I give you an update on where we are at in rein­vent­ing the CCA.

But first, I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to par­tic­i­pate either in one of the sev­en­teen pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions or in smaller group meet­ings held from Vic­to­ria to St. John’s over the past four months. Your input has been invalu­able and will help shape the future ori­en­ta­tion of the CCA. Your com­ments and sug­ges­tions, and the answers received through our on-line con­sul­ta­tion have been recorded and are part of the new busi­ness plan we are in the process of completing.

This plan will be pre­sented for approval at a spe­cial meet­ing of our Board in Ottawa on March 30th. This will be the day after the gov­ern­ment has pre­sented its 2012–13 bud­get in the House of Com­mons, but it is unlikely that we will know by then if our appli­ca­tion for tran­si­tion fund­ing has been accepted and if so, how much money we will be able to count on to imple­ment what promises to be a dar­ing, cre­ative and chal­leng­ing new busi­ness model. Our Chair wrote to Min­is­ter Moore last week ask­ing that we be informed as soon as pos­si­ble after the bud­get so that we can act accordingly.

This being said, I can assure you we are not twid­dling our thumbs as we wait for this con­fir­ma­tion. Over the past nine months, we have oper­ated under the assump­tion that the gov­ern­ment will see the advan­tages of sup­port­ing our efforts to become finan­cially self-sufficient. And we are fully aware that we have to hit the ground run­ning, as two years is a rel­a­tively short period to replace what, for the past 45 years, has been 75% of our fund­ing. Actu­ally, our three-year objec­tive is even more ambi­tious: if we want to pro­vide ade­quately what you said you expect of us, we need to rebuild CCA’s resources to at least the level it enjoyed eight years ago.

This is why the broad out­lines of the new busi­ness model were pre­sented to the staff two weeks ago. The new busi­ness model will imply a num­ber of fun­da­men­tal changes to the way we do things here. It will have an impact on the job descrip­tions of all of us. It will also entail changes to the gov­er­nance model of the CCA, so that it becomes a much more mem­ber dri­ven orga­ni­za­tion. All this implies that such changes must be imple­mented as soon as pos­si­ble after we have the green light from the Board to go ahead which, in turn, is pred­i­cated on our get­ting tran­si­tion sup­port from the gov­ern­ment. This is why we are cur­rently spend­ing a lot of our time and energy plan­ning the cru­cial first year of tran­si­tion, which starts on April 1! We have filed grant appli­ca­tions aligned with our strate­gic pri­or­i­ties and we have started work­ing on the eight dif­fer­ent sources of rev­enue iden­ti­fied in the busi­ness plan.

I thank all of you who are show­ing their faith in the CCA by renew­ing their mem­ber­ship for the com­ing year. This is the main period of the year for renewals and I am glad to report that money is pour­ing in nicely. This is a real boost to our morale, if we needed one! I take the oppor­tu­nity to thank my col­leagues at the Sec­re­tariat who show a remark­able level of loy­alty and ded­i­ca­tion to the CCA in these times of unnerv­ing uncertainty.

In clos­ing, I want to reas­sure you that life goes on! As impor­tant as set­ting the bases for the new CCA may be, these pre­oc­cu­pa­tions do not pre­vent us from keep­ing active in a num­ber of cru­cial files. We are still very much involved in copy­right and are plan­ning the post-C-11 period. We are prepar­ing for our first blush report of the fed­eral bud­get, which will be fol­lowed within a few weeks by our annual in-depth analy­sis. We are still beaver­ing away on our 2013 national pol­icy con­fer­ence project. And as you can see today, we pro­duce our new monthly e-magazine! We hope that you enjoy it and will wel­come your com­ments and suggestions.

–Alain