Vancity held it’s 79th annual general meeting on May 6, 2025. It did not all go smoothly. Most notably, the chair had difficulty counting votes. I spoke up at the meeting and wrote to the board the day following. And yesterday all Vancity members who attended the AGM received an email from the chair acknowledging the error in counting votes. This post tries to provide a more complete description of what happened.
Vancity is BC’s largest credit union. Vancity has been the ‘flagship’ credit union for several years, because of it’s size and because of it’s branding. Vancity comprises 1/3 of BC credit union assets. Further, with consolidation in this sector, Vancity presents a view of the future for BC credit unions. Small credit unions are disappearing. Vancity ought to be a model of good practice.
Over 400 attended at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, and others at four satellite locations and online. Vancity’s membership is @535,000. The meeting was initially planned to last an hour and a quarter, which seemed unusually short to me. In the end it ran about an hour and three quarters.
VOTING
Robert’s Rules of Order were adopted for use at the meeting. Under Robert’s Rules it is the responsibility of the chair to count votes.
At this AGM an app was used to collect and count votes. Registrants accessed the app on their smartphones or computers. This enabled those onsite and those participating remotely to all vote. Those onsite without smartphones were provided alternative devices (‘clickers’). This arrangement seemed functional.
The significant problem was in how the results were tabulated. The app interface gave members three options; for, against, withheld. The results were presented to the meeting only as (A) % ‘for’, (B) % ‘against’, and (C) % ‘withheld’. No actual counts were reported out.
On most motions the total of these three percentage numbers did not total 100%! The denominator incorrectly referenced the number of people registered (i.e. logged in) and entitled to vote; so those who chose not to vote at all were included in the denominator.
Under Robert’s Rules, the decision is based on a ‘majority of the votes cast’, either ‘for’ or ‘against’. An abstention, or withheld vote, is not counted. Votes at this AGM were not reported out in a manner consistent with Robert’s Rules.
The app’s vote count caused confusion. At the meeting, the chair declared results based on the % voting ‘for’ a resolution as reported by this app. On one occasion the vote was reported out as 41% ‘for’, 30% against and 9% ‘withheld’. The chair announced the motion had failed; because 41% was not 50%+. But when you stop and consider only the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes, the 41% is a clear majority (a 57% majority).
I, and one or two others, spoke up at the meeting to express concern about the counting. The chair did not appear to understand the problem with the app’s percentages. And there was no formal motion to challenge the chair. So, tabulated in this way, three motions presented to the meeting were declared by the chair to have failed.
Lastly, on one vote the chair observed that the reported count did not include those voting by ‘clickers’. It was implied that the counting was still in progress. Good process would have deferred the reporting out, and the announcement of the decision, until after all votes were counted.
In my view, this failure to count votes correctly reflects badly on the chair, the board, and the governance staff at Vancity. The result was that three motions to increase the compensation of directors went down. This seems a little ironic.
I left the meeting unsatisfied with the meeting overall. Vote counting was only one issue. AGM’s are the pivotal moment in the year when owners can hold the board to account. But this meeting was not a ‘model’ exercise in democratic/co-operative ownership. The meeting did not foster a robust assessment of the year, which saw Vancity report very modest growth and modest earnings. Nor did it provide a serious discussion of a future strategic direction – in a period of trade disputes, imminent recession, technological transformation, and rapid credit union sector consolidation. The owners did not scrutinize the performance of the board or the business in any meaningful way.
But before you take that the wrong way, I think the problems are not so much with people and people failing in some way. I think the problem is more systemic. There are intrinsic weaknesses in the co-operative ownership model when ‘ownership’ is divided equally among half a million people.