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"MY CARD IS SITTING ON MY DESK, WITH A LINE ACROSS IT. IT SAYS 'PLEASE CANCEL.'" CHERYL FOY, DEPOSED CCCA PRESIDENT they had put into the CCCA. "It comes at a significant personal expense, and I've never minded that aspect of volun- teerism with the CBA and the CCCA." Even though Andree is angry and says she doesn't plan on committing any more time to the CBA, she says she struggled deeply with that decision. "Conceptually, I think that the Canadian Bar Association plays a very important role for us as law- yers, I do see the value of membership in the CBA, but I'm not interested nor willing to commit any more volunteer time," she says, adding that like Foy, she won't renew her CBA-CCCA membership. Horn also says her entire legal team won't be renew- ing their memberships either. Andree is particularly angry about finding out that the decision to dismiss the CCCA board was reached months prior to the actual deadlock in mediation. "It makes me sick," she says. She was refer- ring to a Nov. 28, 2010 CBA board meet- ing, held in person over two days. Horn, the CCCA representative, was asked to leave, and though she has no official records of the closed-door meeting, Horn says that is likely when the CBA decided to pull the plug on the CCCA board if the mediation in January failed. Both Horn and Foy say that decision removed the incentive from the CBA to have proper negotiations with the CCCA over funding and independence. Asked about the dismissed volunteers' anger, Patzelt says the CBA wanted to move things forward and break the dead- lock. As the dismissal letter mentioned, the decision was not a personal reflection on the volunteers and the CBA is grate- ful for the contribution of the volunteers like Foy, Horn, and Andree. "It was, I can assure you, a very serious, thoughtful, deliberative, well-thought-out process at that level," he says. "We are a volunteer organization and all of us value volunteers and the work they do. Those people put in a ton of work and effort in the CCCA, and so I admire them for their contribution that they have made, not just on the board but also prior to that, and I thank them for that because they worked very hard. The transition was no doubt a very difficult one, which was taken very seriously, and I'm sympathetic." Patzelt also notes that two members of the original board dismissed in January — Antoinette Bozac, general counsel at Canada Lands Co., and Fred Headon, sen- ior counsel at Air Canada — are part of the transitional executive body he now leads. "I think that speaks volumes," he says. AN IN-HOUSE CBA PRESIDENT lawyers among them, Headon's election as CBA second vice president in early April — which in 2013 will make him the first ever in-house lawyer to serve as CBA president — will likely do the trick. As someone who was at the leadership of the CCCA both before and after the board was dismissed, he says he believes the CBA's actions in the dismissal of the board were done in the best interest of the asso- ciation. "The CCCA's primary function is to advance the interests of [and] serve the in-house bar. And we needed to move beyond where we were in the discussion that had consumed far too much time, far too much energy for everybody involved. And I think everybody involved can hold their heads high to say that we tried," says Headon. "There were some very passion- ate people who were very committed to what we were trying to achieve all around that table, and it was one of those situa- tions in which lawyers often find them- selves — we reached an impasse." Headon says his new dual leadership role in the CBA-CCCA is a sign the I organization works well with external and in-house counsel under the same umbrella. "We are part of the same family, and this is how we work together. I think there is a lot that can be learned from both organizations. There are significant dif- ferences, but at the end of the day, we all practise law. I also think this a recognition of the strategic role that we play managing the relationship with external counsel and the files that we work on with them. And I think it's exciting that the CBA executive will now have a reflection of that part of the bar." n Headon's case the story goes further. If the CBA's 37,000 members wanted to send a message to the in-house CONFUSION ON THE OUTSIDE al counsel and vice president of Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc., who is also a former president of the board at the CCCA but hasn't been involved at the national level in the past decade. Schatz says tension between the private practice lawyers and in-house counsel, who have tried to carve out as much autonomy as they can, has been there historically, but calls the move by the CBA to dismiss the board unprecedented and heavy-handed. Schatz worries the CBA intervention B will mean the CCCA will lose some of the independence it already has. "With the struggle that has gone on for years, it is hard to believe that they would have taken this action to allow a strong inde- pendent structure recreated. They really cut the legs off the independent body that was there. I'm pessimistic that strong independent in-house counsel will again emerge within the CBA," she says. "If there was a duly elected body there, why was there a need for transition? I've never heard that they weren't fulfilling their mandate. I've never heard that there was www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com M AY 2011 31 eyond the two groups directly involved in the negotiations, there are people like Jill Schatz, gener-