UPDATE: July 8, 2025 – An update to supporters on our ongoing dispute with the CCPA and the path forward. Read it here.
February 20, 2025.
From Seth Klein, Shannon Daub & Sussanne Skidmore
(Seth and Shannon are former directors of the CCPA-BC. Sussanne is the final chair of the CCPA-BC Steering Committee. All are now board members with the BC Society for Policy Solutions)
Dear Friends,
We know the unexpected news of the closure of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ British Columbia office must be confusing and alarming to many of you. Thousands of you have been supporters of the CCPA–BC office for years, in some cases decades, and you may be feeling sad or disappointed. Those of us who have launched the new BC Society for Policy Solutions feel the same. And we want to provide you with more context – you are due that.
As you have recently learned, there have been strained relations between the CCPA and the CCPA–BC for a number of years, dating back to 2017. But that wasn’t always the case. For the first two decades of the CCPA–BC, relations were excellent – cooperative and mutually supportive. Indeed, the CCPA national structure was, in many ways, a model of Canadian federalism; under the rubric of one legal entity, there was a national office that focused on federal policy and numerous provincial offices that focused on provincial policy. The BC office was the first of these provincial divisions. Each provincial office emerged because local people (progressive academics, trade unionists, community activists) felt a need for a progressive think tank in their province, and then approached the CCPA about establishing a provincial CCPA office. The CCPA national organization, in turn, was supportive of these efforts, and provided some key shared services. In most matters, however, the national board delegated governance of each provincial office to a provincial steering committee.
These local bodies were granted considerable autonomy. So long as they stayed true to the charitable mission of the CCPA, they were free to hire their own staff, raise their own funds, set their own research agendas, and structure their affairs in a manner that best suited the needs of local social movements. In the case of the BC office, years of signed, historic agreements established how we would share the costs of building a donor base, providing you with high-quality progressive research, and share the revenues that resulted. For most of you in BC, you have long understood that when you donated to the CCPA, your contributions would be shared between the national and BC offices.
For many years, this decentralized model worked very well, and indeed, was key to the success, trust and profile of the CCPA across the country.
In recent years, however, the model started to break down. While there remained excellent collaboration on the research front, new leadership at the national CCPA was more inclined towards administrative centralization, and growing tensions emerged over issues related to fundraising and governance. The relationship started to sour to the point that, at various times, it has been dysfunctional, toxic and distracting to our shared mission. In the case of the BC office, it led to the loss of several excellent senior staff, leaving the office’s Steering Committee fearful for the CCPA-BC’s survival. These tensions affected the capacity of the BC office to run its operation effectively, and undermined the ability of the BC office to implement new practices it believed could raise new revenue for the organization and strengthen its important work.
You as a supporter deserved better.
We tried to resolve these deep organizational tensions for a challenging eight years. In 2018, the BC Office first proposed to become a closely affiliated but independent legal charity. Fearing that the national leadership of the CCPA may have been preparing to simply subsume the CCPA-BC and its assets, the Steering Committee felt it wise to create a new charitable BC society as a safeguard (the entity we have now formally launched as the new BC Society for Policy Solutions, BCSPS). However, this society was not made operational in 2018. Instead, after organization-wide discussions, the BC Office agreed to participate in an organizational review process, which aimed (among other things) to develop a revised formal structure that better reflected the role and needs of the provincial offices. Over the ensuing years, we invested tremendous time and resources trying to implement the resulting new structure, without success. In 2022, we once again proposed to become a closely affiliated but independent charity. Good faith negotiations took place, and we even came to an agreement in principle – one that the CCPA board did not ultimately approve. We then negotiated another model that sought to disentangle the BC office from the problematic administrative, fundraising and governance issues within CCPA, while remaining part of the single CCPA legal entity. That effort also did not work.
In September 2024, after many years of dysfunction and a human toll that had become far too high, the CCPA-BC Steering Committee came to the decision that legal separation was necessary, and formally brought forward to the national board of the CCPA the following motion:
Be it resolved that the National Board of the CCPA enter into a timely and good faith process with the BC Office Steering Committee, to negotiate a speedy transition of BC Office operations and ongoing work to the BC Centre for Policy Alternatives [the separate legal entity now renamed the BC Society for Policy Solutions].
Importantly, virtually everyone who has been involved with the CCPA–BC, both in the past and present, supports the decision to become a separate legal entity – every past BC Office Director, every past BC Steering Committee chair, virtually all our allies in the labour movement and our social movement allies and partners. The decision of the BC Steering Committee to seek independence was unanimous, and the entire BC staff save one person concurred.
The national board, however, refused to entertain the BC motion. Through the fall and into this winter, the BC Steering Committee and the board of the new society implored the national leadership to enter into negotiations. We offered to work with a mediator. While seeking to be legally independent, we expressed our strong desire to remain formally affiliated with the CCPA. And we repeatedly stated a commitment to finding an equitable and fair solution that would leave both offices financially whole. We urged the national leadership to come to a speedy resolution, so everyone could get quickly back to our urgent work at this vital moment for our country, and we pleaded with the national board not to choose a path of confrontation and the inevitable legal costs that would ensue.
All of these appeals were rebuffed, and to this day the national leadership has refused to enter into negotiations for a transition of the BC operations to the new society.
Instead, in early December 2024, the national board voted to close the BC office effective two months later. The board notified the CCPA’s National Members Council they were closing the office and would commence negotiations imminently, and they notified the BC staff and their union the same. Notably, however, the national leadership has carefully avoided clearly telling the BC donors that the office has been closed.
Rather than securing a fair agreement with a reasonable division of assets and liabilities, as one would normally expect in a separation or divorce, after 28 years of operations, as of February 2025, the CCPA-BC office has been shuttered. What was the BC division of the CCPA was effectively tossed out with nothing, stripped of everything we collectively built for nearly three decades – our financial assets, our physical assets, our donor base, our PolicyNote website, our social media accounts and other online assets. This was not how we wished this relationship to end.
Marc Lee has chosen to remain with the CCPA and is now a national employee. All other former members of the CCPA–BC bargaining unit have come over to and are now employees of the new BC Society for Policy Solutions, including researchers Iglika Ivanova, Alex Hemingway and Véronique Sioufi, whose research agendas will be guided by and accountable to people in BC.
Some of you have been told that the national board had no choice but to close the BC Office, due to BC unions withholding financial support and causing a financial crisis that left the BC operation unviable. We reject this claim. From the time of its opening in early 1997, the BC Office was always self-funded within BC and never needed financial support from the national organization. In 2024, once the Steering Committee of the BC Office came to the conclusion that the relationship had become untenable and negotiations to legally separate were needed, a number of organizational supporters of the BC Office elected to withhold funds from the CCPA, as they understood separation was imminent. Consequently, the BC Office ended 2024 with a large deficit; however, that deficit was fully covered by the BC Office’s own retained earnings.
Many of you have expressed frustration that this news was sprung upon you so suddenly. You are right to feel aggrieved. We very much wanted to share this news with you sooner. But because the CCPA is a single legal entity, we were not at liberty to contact the BC supporters and advise you of developments. And that remains the case to this day; without an agreement with CCPA national, we remain legally unable to directly communicate with supporters of the BC Office.
What now?
We still hold out hope that a just and equitable agreement will be negotiated, one that sees a fair division of assets, allows us to communicate with all past supporters of the CCPA-BC, and that will see us continue our long collaboration with our colleagues at the CCPA.
In the meantime, we are standing up the new BC Society for Policy Solutions, and we welcome your support.
Some of you have asked whether, as donors to the CCPA-BC Office, you are now automatically a donor to this new organization. The answer is ‘no’; the CCPA and the BC Society for Policy Solutions are separate charities. If you wish to support the BCSPS you will need to make donations directly to the new Society.
If you value and appreciate the national work done by the CCPA (as we still do), then we encourage you to continue to support the CCPA.
But if you also valued and appreciated the research and analysis work of the CCPA’s BC Office, then we invite you to now also become a founding donor to the new BC Society for Policy Solutions.
This new think tank is home to a great team you already know well, and some of the finest progressive policy experts around – people with deep experience in BC-focused research and policy development. You can see our team here. We will continue producing the same terrific research, analysis and policy solutions upon which you’ve long relied, and you can expect to keep hearing from our wonderful and seasoned researchers in the media. We will keep convening tables of policy experts and community representatives, to collectively develop and advance progressive policy agendas. And we hope you will take pride, like we do, in knowing that the BC Society for Policy Solutions will focus on the needs and priorities of all who call BC home, and on tackling the major crises facing our province.
We are excited about this new endeavour and hope you are too. So, join us in this new adventure, please!
We invite you to sign up for the BCSPS newsletter here.
We welcome you to follow the BCSPS on social media:
And of course, as we seek to rebuild our individual supporter base, we encourage you to become an annual or monthly donor to the BC Society for Policy Solutions, which you can do here.
If you have more questions, we’d be happy to hear them – feel free to reach out to us at info@bcpolicy.ca.
Thank you for your support and understanding.
In solidarity,
Seth, Shannon & Sussanne