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1:04:32 Remuneration Committee introduction

1:06:02 Patti Schom-Moffat justifies the resolution to increase Director remuneration

1:12:50 Member Deborah asks: "How is it that a volunteer positions are remunerated at all?"

1:13:52 Member Melissa asked: "Why is there such a vast difference in the wage increase for the Board of Directors compared to your front-line staff?"


Vancity has a membership of over 560,000 (2022), and yet they were only able to get something like 139 people to attend the 2022 AGM (of course…what’s the point? There’s no meaningful democratic action.) This made it easier to get themselves a raise because many of the people voting would have been senior staff with loyalty to the establishment.

How the Board Got Themselves a Pay Raise

In 2022, the Board selected a committee to study the issue of Board remuneration. What the committee found was that—wait for it ........ the Board should get a raise. The rationale, in part, was that Board members' compensation is not commensurate with the work they put in, and so a lot of their work is "volunteer." How much work do they put in? Nobody knows.

Based on numbers I found in Vancity documents, we are paying these "volunteers" $97 per hour (now $103 per hour after the 6% raise). These numbers are approximate because the documents give only an estimate of how many hours they work. The remuneration committee thinks of this amount as an "honorarium." That’s not what an honorarium is, and it’s a problem that a remuneration committee would make such a mistake.

Moreover, the remuneration committee thought it irrelevant to consider whether the front-line workers were getting any type of raise.

The money isn't the problem. What we're seeing are symptoms of much bigger governance problems.

The Board permitted only two members to speak before the vote was held. Also, the meeting was ended 15 minutes before the scheduled end time, without responding to all members’ questions and comments.

The remuneration committee was: