Former Employee Challenges Civil Liberties' Status Quo

For the sake of posterity, here's the Lawyer's Weekly piece on my (failed) run for the CCLA board back in 2006. I haven't heard much about the organization lately or how it's doing with the next Executive Director.

Former employee challenges Civil Liberties' status quo

Vol. 26, No. 17, Sep. 8, 2006

By Cristin Schmitz

A law professor who contends the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) needs “major reform” says his bid to join the CCLA’s board was undercut by an election ballot “skewed” in favour of all the other candidates.

When he tossed his hat into the ring last spring, Jeremy Patrick, a CCLA policy analyst for three years until he left last May to join the faculty of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, forced the 42-year-old organization to hold a contested election for the first time in decades.

The move was controversial because by then 15 candidates for the 15 seats on the board had already been chosen by a nine-person national nominating committee, after the customary call for volunteers from the members last Fall.

Traditionally the nominating committee’s slate of candidates, which includes people solicited by the committee, runs unopposed and is acclaimed.

Patrick told The Lawyers Weekly the CCLA’s education director pointed out to him that an election would cost what the organization now estimates is between $5,000 and $10,000 dollars. She suggested that he defer his candidacy to next year when his name would be considered by the nominating committee for inclusion on its slate. In 2005, the CCLA’s revenue was $437,302, while its consolidated revenue with the Canadian Civil Liberties Education Trust, with which it shares a five-person Toronto staff, was $874,686. The consolidated revenue in 2004 was $668,553.

Patrick became the 16th candidate. “I think it’s very important to get into the habit of holding elections,” he said. “I think the CCLA needs major reforms,” he explained, arguing that its priorities are too much set by Alan Borovoy, the group’s general counsel since 1968. Patrick criticizes the CCLA’s boards for not exerting enough influence on the group’s activities.

Voting by the association’s 6,000 members closed Aug. 24 and the mail-in ballots are now being tabulated by a chartered accountant.

“I think likely I am going to lose because of the way the ballot was situated and there is not really an opportunity to communicate with the members about why I am running,” Patrick said.

The two-page ballot instructs the voter to fill in Part A or Part B, but not both. In Part A, on page 1, the names and affiliations of the 15 people endorsed by the nominating committee are listed in alphabetical order.

The slate includes such prominent Canadians as filmmaker David Cronenberg, novelist Joy Kogawa, and several well-known lawyers, among them Toronto criminal lawyer Frank Addario.

The ballot also names members of the nominating committee, including ex-CCLA presidents Nelligan O’Brien Payne senior partner John Nelligan, former York University president Harry Arthurs and former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney. The voter is asked to mark one X in a box if he or she wishes to endorse the nominating committee’s slate.

Alternatively, if the voter wants to pick amongst all 16 candidates, he or she is directed to Part B on page two. There the voter is faced with the same list of 15 names and affiliations, numbered from 1 to 15, in alphabetical order. The voter is again informed that the first 15 names were chosen by the nominating committee, who are again named.

Additionally Jeremy Patrick’s name and affiliation is listed as number 16, out of alphabetical sequence, at the end. The ballot points out that Patrick was nominated by Daniel Justice and Kelly McFadden. The voter is instructed to draw a line only through the names of candidates “you do NOT support” and warned “for your ballot to be valid, you must cross out at least one name.”

A CCLA spokesperson said the design of the ballot was considered, and intended, to be fair, but the organization is open to suggestions for improvement in the future.

As for this year’s election, “it’s not a bad thing to have [an election], but it is expensive,” observed CCLA vice-president Kenneth Swan. “There is never any intention to exclude anybody who wants to be on the board, but there is a process in place [and] bypassing the process is expensive for everybody. The only idea of sending out the ballot the way it was ... is that we thought our members should be able to know who was nominated by the nominating committee in accordance with usual fashion and if they decided they wanted to be able to vote the slate, to vote the slate as it was, and if they decided they wanted to vote individual candidates to have all the names and have an easy way of dealing with them which is to strike off at least one name from that list.”

Patrick said the CCLA and Borovoy deserve “tremendous credit” as the country’s “leading voice” on civil liberties issues relating to national security, and for their successes in making police and other government authorities more accountable for the way state power is exercised.

But he argued the national group’s membership has been stagnant for more than a decade because it concentrates its efforts too much in Ontario, does not litigate enough, and frequently ignores important areas which implicate civil liberties, such as the rights of prisoners or the disabled.

Borovoy “is really interested in issues such as freedom of speech and national security and that’s great,” he said. “But then there are some issues like ... corrections and GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, two-spirited] rights, physical and mental disability and ... the organization just doesn’t do very much in those fields.”

Swan noted the CCLA’s efforts are directed by board “consensus” but remarked it is “not unusual” that Borovoy would play a pivotal role in helping set priorities. “That’s why you have an executive director.” Swan added, “the organization does do good work in some areas and it misses some other areas,” he explained. “It has limited capacity, limited resources and limited time, just like any other organization in the world.”

Asked to respond to Patrick’s view of his role, Borovoy told The Lawyers Weekly “I think he is attributing far more clout to me then I could ever dream of having.” More broadly, he remarked that the CCLA does more public interest litigation than almost any other organization. He said the group used to be more active in issues related to racial equality and gay rights, for example by challenging police discrimination and abuse in the Toronto bathhouse raids. “Since then there have been so many more organizations coming into the field,” he explained.“There’s no built-in resistance to doing a lot more of these things. You just tend to go in the directions where others are not going so that there will be more impact.”