Good Governance Starts With You

In my quest to carry out my mandate as Chair of Council, I have focused my own professional learning on best practices in corporate governance. As my term of office concludes at the end of June, I am preparing to leave behind a set of rules and procedures so that ethical leadership continues at the College. Succession planning and policy creation ensure that protocols and procedures are sustained as the faces of Council change cyclically.

Good governance is the key to our success

“Governing Ourselves,” also known as the “blue pages” in Professionally Speaking, offers members of the profession a glimpse into the daily matters and decisions that face your governing Council at the College. In addition to the decisions that are made by the Discipline and Investigation committees’ panels, you will also find regulatory and bylaw amendments throughout these pages, as well as policy changes that affect our profession. So what does governance really mean?

Take a school board, for example. Trustees are charged with governing the school board. They have the oversight abilities to allocate budget and to establish policies. Staff, in turn, carries out the day-to-day operations within the framework created by the policy-makers.

Within today’s organizations we are seeing a trend toward more robust systems of governance. One only has to look at recent scandals in the financial sector to see what can happen when a board of governors does not fulfil its fiduciary duty to its public stakeholders. When something goes seriously wrong, people ask, “Where was the board of directors during all of this?”

One example of effective corporate governance would be Ombudsman Ontario, an independent office of the Ontario legislature that resolves individual complaints and conducts systemic investigations relating to problems with government services.

The Ontario government recently passed a new bill that, among other things, gives the ombudsman expanded oversight over municipalities, university and school boards. This new bill also creates a separate patient ombudsman within the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and empowers the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth to investigate Children’s Aid Societies.

Help govern your profession

You delegate your responsibility to govern your profession, in part, to the governing Council at the College. Good governance includes appropriate questioning and probing to ensure that risks are mitigated by policies and actions. Looking at our ethical standards, you can see how care, trust, respect and integrity are integral components in the fiduciary duty to govern the profession and adjudicate matters that come before discipline panels.

Now that College elections are underway, it is critical that you participate in the privilege of self-governance by exercising your right to vote. The ethical act of casting a ballot demonstrates good governance. These 23 people, in concert with 14 publicly appointed members, develop public protection policies that ultimately impact the education sector.

Your Council has developed a strategic plan and is establishing a new committee charged with overseeing governance issues for the next term of Council. This will take the organization into the future with a solid footing of accountability, transparency and good governance. This will not only support the protection of the public interest, but will also be good for the education community as a whole.

There are many members of the teaching profession who are capable of governing our profession. Please vote for the people you believe to have the best skills needed for the job.