Last week, the Ontario Medical Association announced that the continuation of the 2026 Annual General Meeting (AGM) will occur on Tuesday, June 23rd, at 6:30 PM. This meeting will be virtual only. Once again, proxies will not be allowed. I would suggest that it is essential for every member to make an effort to attend.
My three loyal readers will remember that there were six member proposals (4 by Dr. Conte seconded by myself). Only one got voted on at the May 7 meeting, and the remainder will be voted on, on June 23. Regardless of what you may think of the individual motions, I would suggest the fact that members take the time to make proposals, and attend to vote is a good thing. It is important, as I’ve learned over the years, to pay attention to what’s going on at the OMA because so much of our livelihood depends on them.
This year’s AGM is proof of what can happen when members show up and make their voices heard. Now, I was criticized for my blog on the last AGM for calling out the shenanigans that occurred at the meeting. This all surrounded what were in my opinion, the two most important motions.
Both motions pertained to removing non-physicians from having voting authority over physicians at the Board of the OMA. To be abundantly clear, neither of these motions would have prevented the organization from seeking external expert advice on an ongoing basis. Organizations, particularly advocacy organizations like the OMA, do that all the time, as they absolutely should. Physicians are not experts in everything, and seeking out the best possible advice in different areas from experts in their fields is always a good thing to do.
No. These motions would simply have said that after getting the advice, and carefully reviewing it, the voting authority for who makes decisions at the organization should fall only on physicians. Only physicians have innate knowledge and lived in experience of how the healthcare system affects them. Only physicians will inherently know when such advice, well intentioned though it may be, will actually help, or those times when it is unhelpful.
At the last meeting, for reasons that are unclear to me, as I’m not a lawyer, the first motion, which would have removed non-physicians from the Board immediately, required two thirds of a vote. This motion, after much debate, got fifty-three percent. Now, I fully expected some of our colleagues to throw up roadblocks to the first motion. That happened. I won’t do a line by line analysis of that as I don’t think it’s relevant, but if it had just stopped there, I probably wouldn’t have made any comments about “shenanigans” or “the usual suspects.”
What happened was that once it became apparent that the majority of physicians at the meeting did want not want non-physicians voting at the Board level, it became crystal clear that the second motion, which only required fifty percent plus one, would likely pass. A friend of mine, who also attended virtually, commented to me, “I wasn’t in the room, but I swear I could hear the jaws drop and the shock from many of the people in the room.”
Rather than accept that the debate had already been had, that all of the points had already been made, and accept the will of the membership, some of our colleagues continued to try and delay the process and play games. Eventually they succeeded. The meeting was paused and now we have to do it all again. And those are the shenanigans that had me, quite frankly, extremely annoyed.
At any rate, the membership has another chance. If we all show up, we can vote on the second motion and determine if we do, in fact, want a large part of our futures decided by non-physicians. (Non-physicians have just over twenty-five percent of the vote at the board currently).
Other motions that are important for us to decide upon include the director election ballots process. This year marked, as far as I’m concerned, a new low in how the board director elections were run. The OMA screened candidates for board director and limited who could run based on their own criteria, that was fed to a third party firm to try to avoid blame. In essence, the OMA chose who we physicians could vote for. Furthermore, they impugned the reputation of one of the president elect candidates by printing subjective opinions about his social media posts.
The second motion would stop the OMA screening candidates and allow the members to pick who they want leading them.
Other motions include eligibility for board if you had previously held the role of president in the association. Once again, it is really the decision of the members, not the OMA, to rule out who can and can’t run (and yes, there’s a conflict of interest in there for me). There’s also a motion recommending the OMA not access personal tax information. The OMA has never actually accessed personal tax information despite significant misinformation about this. However, I personally see no harm in restating that again. And finally, there’s actually a really good idea asking the OMA to support their districts by sharing email lists in compliance with privacy legislation. Our districts do need strengthening, and this would help with that.
None of these changes, however, can occur without physicians showing up. It will take time. It will take effort. It is a couple of hours out our very busy days. I feel bad asking for members to sacrifice this amount of time, but at the end of the day, if we don’t pay attention to what’s going at the OMA, we will not get the results we deserve.
I encourage all Ontario physicians to register early for the AGM by clicking the link below:
justanoldcountrydoctor 