On April 21, three of the four NPA city councillors, Lisa Dominato, Colleen Hardwick, and Sarah Kirby-Yung, left the NPA. If you were an NPA member you might have thought that things could not get any worse. Now they have!
On April 23, every single one of the three NPA school trustees, Carmen Cho, Oliver Hanson, and Fraser Ballantyne, announced that they too were abandoning the NPA. There really is nothing left of the NPA. They are now reduced at city council from the five original councillors elected in November 2018 to one lone council representative, Melissa De Genova. There are no remaining school trustees from the three elected in 2018. On Park Board, for the time being at least, they still have the two commissioners they elected in November 2018 – Tricia Barker and John Coupar, who was recently selected by the NPA board in a secret board meeting to be the party’s mayoral candidate in 2022.
I am not much of a fan of Facebook, but I do post my regular blog there and from time to time read posts. On Saturday April 24, I stumbled across a post by Penny Stainton Mussio, who is the wife of Wes Mussio, one of the NPA board directors. She claimed that the NPA board of directors did not call the required AGM in 2020 and has yet to call one this year because the NPA bank account could not afford it. The party I have belonged to for 40 years, COPE, held its required 2020 AGM by Zoom. It cost us less than $100.
Ms. Stainton Mussio also indicated that, thanks to a “mole,” she had learned of a secret plot by a group to overthrow the current elected NPA board. (I confess that I laughed so hard while reading through the subsequent comments that I nearly felt obliged to send Mark Zuckerberg payment for the best entertainment I have had in a long time!)
After reading her Facebook post, it became obvious to me that the reason the NPA board of directors had decided not to hold the legally required AGM was a fear that its membership was trying to take over its own board of directors. NPA members were organising to take over their own board of directors! Can you imagine that an organisation’s board of directors is in the hands of its members? How outrageous! And no wonder the NPA board is in blatant violation of its own bylaws and the Societies Act. This is unsurprising, considering board member Wes Mussio is a long-time supporter of Donald Trump, who routinely violated the rule of law to suit his whims while in office.
I have a deal for the NPA board that will save them “tens of thousands of dollars”: pay me a measly $5K and I will organise the NPA AGM via Zoom. That way, everyone is happy: the NPA membership gets their due process; the NPA board stops being in flagrant violation of their fiduciary responsibilities and the Societies Act; and Vancouver’s anti-racist, anti-poverty, anti-fascist coalitions get an anonymous $5000 donation. What a bargain!
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (Apr. 29, 2021): 419.85 ppm
One year ago (Apr. 29, 2020): 417.21 ppm
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