Eddie Norfolk
\nCricket Ontario recently announced the appointment of two new board members who were, apparently, elected at a the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on June 7, 2020. The Cricket Ontario website seems devoid of any announcement that any Annual General Meeting (AGM) was on the horizon but it does include a brief \u201cpress release\u201d, dated June 8, 2020, about some of the outcome of that AGM.
\nI had been told during the winter that a review of Cricket Ontario (Cricket Council of Ontario) Constitution By-Laws was expected as part of an AGM. A new set of Cricket Ontario ByLaws is stated as having been approved according to the cover of the newly posted version but the minutes of the AGM had not been posted when I was looking at the Cricket Ontario website on Friday (12 June 2020). Some of Cricket Ontario\u2019s other Policies and Procedures have been updated in recent times
\nI remain unimpressed that various aspects of the Cricket Ontario Policies and Procedures do not provide a clear perspective on how certain of these policies either reflect formal policies and procedures defined by Cricket Canada, as the national governing body of cricket, or those policies and procedures that should be applicable to the operation of all member leagues within Ontario.
\nIn the overall picture of cricket administration and oversight in Canada there seems to be a major gap that civil law cases relating to the world of Canadian cricket that involve Board Members, leagues, clubs and individuals associated with cricket boards and\/or clubs are not required to be formally disclosed to the relevant board or executive committee of any league or the national governing body.
\nThe provisions for formal reporting of such civil law matters to Cricket Ontario are somewhere between weak and non-existent in my opinion. I will not comment on whatever provisions exist in other Canadian cricketing provinces as I have not read through the various constitutions and bylaws.
\nI wonder how some people who have initiated certain civil law cases in Ontario can remain on certain boards while some of these legal matters creak along through the often slow world of the Ontario civil law system. There ought to be a requirement for those in the cricket world involved in such legal cases that embrace, if not strangle, the governance of cricket in Ontario and\/or that extend upwards to impact the administration and operation of the game at the national level, should step aside from formal office until such disputes are resolved.
\nBut \u201cRome was not built in a day\u201d as Mr. Ranjit Saini told me a number of years ago based on something I had written, probably for the Canada Cricket Online website, that will have been critical of slow progress in my opinion on cricket\u2019s progress in and around the Greater Toronto Area.
\nSome sources and a lack of information on the website or facebook pages of the Toronto and District Cricket Association (T&DCA) suggest there may have been few, if any, Annual General Meetings of the T&DCA in recent times. \u201cRecent times\u201d that can, seemingly, be counted in years rather than a deficiency such as an AGM being held a month or two late compared with any formally documented standard. One wonders what reports Cricket Ontario received from member leagues about cricket in Ontario during 2019 and what independent scrutiny was given of any such reports.
\nThe last time I attended an open session of Cricket Canada the phase where Provincial Reports, which had been published as available ahead of the meeting, were presented in some summary form or other. It was a far from impressive phase in the open session. I was left thinking \u201ccouldn\u2019t someone have sorted out during one of the earlier closed sessions how the presentation of the Provincial Reports should be made during the subsequent open session?\u201d So it was something of a shambles in my opinion, and it left me wondering about the ability of the Chair person to preside over such an important meeting.
\nMore recently I heard that one of the Trustees of the Maple Leaf Cricket Club had not been told that he had been appointed a Trustee. Someone must have spotted this glitch which underlines some of my concerns about how the T&DCA operates, as did my relatively recent discovery of an Ontario civil law case where the T&DCA was suing Maple Leaf Cricket Club (MLCC) and some individuals. None of the individuals had been a trustee of MLCC as far as I am aware. Now if one or more of the Trustees had transgressed then I could understand the T&DCA might take legal action against any such Trustees. But the action against MLCC seemed strange: the Board of MLCC, which is responsible for day-to-day operations, are all elected from within the T&DCA on a rotating basis. If there had been a perceived problem with some of the MLCC board members then the T&DCA could, presumably, have called a special meeting to remove such board members.
\nI wonder what Cricket Ontario knows about that particular case, or about some others that sit in the computer records of the Attorney General of Ontario. Records that can be viewed on a public access terminal within some areas of the downtown Toronto court setup on University Avenue. A re-location of where certain types of civil law cases are now heard during January 2020 seems to have reduced the number of terminals where you can (when facilities are re-opened) check on certain civil law cases to just one. The court rooms may be quite good following the change of location for certain civil law matters but the supporting administrative space seems much reduced. People were lining up or waiting for their number to be called in the elevator landing area on my visits to the new location in February 2020. How this change ties in with any \u201cAccess to Justice\u201d improvement is beyond me. It\u2019s a pity, with hindsight, I did not decide to spend $75 to request to access the case file during 2019. But it has some potential similarities to a broader case with a similar date of original filing with the court system in which the T&DCA and MLCC are both named as defendants. A case for which I have reviewed the court file after it was returned from off-site storage.
\nI wonder what the then Cricket Council of Ontario (CCO) board members knew or currently know in these days where Cricket Ontario is the legal name of what was originally the CCO about such civil law matters involving the Ontario cricket community?<\/p>\n
It may be a situation where there are some gaps in certain constitutions and\/or bylaws of one or more cricketing Board of Directors or Executive Board that currently fail to require formal notification but which should require such notification. Eddie Norfolk Cricket Ontario recently announced the appointment of two new board members who were, apparently, elected at a the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on June 7, 2020. The Cricket Ontario website seems devoid of any announcement that any Annual General Meeting (AGM) was on the horizon but it does include a brief \u201cpress release\u201d, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13293"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13300,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13293\/revisions\/13300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMeanwhile if some grounds become available for outdoor cricket in Ontario in the coming month or two then Ontario\u2019s cricketing leaders and players may be searching for washroom facilities at various grounds on the path to meeting some aspects of CoVID-19 standard requirements. The 2015 or so City of Brampton plans for sports facilities to meet community needs will have include some changing facility and washroom enhancements but such facilities may remain an outstanding need at other grounds in Brampton and in other cities, towns and localities in other parts of Ontario.
\nOfficial Cricket Ontario Website Post
\nCricket Ontario President Mr. Shah Zafar has had the following press release published (dated June 8, 2020) on the provincial governing body for cricket\u2019s official website:
\n\u201cCricket Ontario is pleased to announce the appointment of two new board members elected at the June 7, 2020 Annual General Meeting for the term of 1 year.\u201d
\nThe joining the board are Zahoor Butt, President of Mississauga Cricket League and Shoaib Nursumar, secretary of Hamilton District Cricket League. Mr. Zahoor will serve the executive board as Director at large and Mr. Nursumar as the Treasurer.\u201d
\n\u201cCricket Ontario board of directors are excited to welcome Zahoor and Shoaib to the board. Their leadership experience and expertise will bring energy, strengthen and commitment to development and improvement to the operation of the Cricket Operation to better serve our membership.\u201d
\nFavourable Comments on Facebook
\nThere are some favourable comments on Facebook that the two newly elected board members will be a positive addition to the Cricket Ontario Board. But I saw no notice about Cricket Ontario holding an AGM on June 7, 2020 when taking an initial look at some websites and facebook pages as June 12th, 2020 becomes June 13th, 2020.
\nEddie Norfolk
\nLink to Cricket Ontario Website Policies and Procedures Page<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"