Is this guerrilla radio or what? Arriving at Ryerson’s Oakham House this past Saturday afternoon I’m greeted by a police-lined walkway welcoming me into CKLN Radio’s special members’ meeting. Who knew a community radio station membership voting to impeach its board of directors —?a semi-elected, semi-appointed group of Ryerson students, volunteers and staff members — would necessitate such heavy presence (apparently in anticipation of supposed OCAP involvement).
In spite of the excessive police attention, the upstairs meeting room is soon packed with just over 150 members gathered to discuss the matter of non-confidence with their current management.
At the centre of the dispute is the members’ claim that the board has been operating in secrecy and making decisions (such as hiring key staff members) counter to the philosophy of a community radio station, which they fear may be a move towards taking the station commercial. Whether or not those are valid fears (station manager Mike Phillips calls them “rubbish”), the board haven’t communicated much to CKLN’s membership, made up largely of students and volunteers.
“We’re only seeing certain things,” says programmer and spokesperson for the meeting Heather Douglas. “We know that Tony Barnes was put in place as the interim program director, we know that Mike Phillips was appointed as station manager and that there was no hiring process for either of these positions.” While the board claims that it is completely within its power to appoint such positions, especially when CKLN has been without a station manager since 2002, a vocal portion of the membership doesn’t appreciate the board broadcasting dead air. “We’re not seeing processes,” adds Douglas. “We’re not seeing any kind of direction.”
And this isn’t the first time CKLN’s board has attracted unfavourable attention. Facing the abrupt resignation of a number of board members and even the past program director Tim May, along with ongoing financial troubles, combined with a $400,000 lawsuit by suspended programmers and a recent move by the station’s paid staff to unionize, this most recent objection seems to be the culmination of a long-brewing mutiny. After all, to think that a community radio station with such a left-leaning anti-corporate history will just roll over and accept management’s edicts is like expecting courteous paparazzi at a Hollywood rehab clinic.
Neither Phillips nor Barnes would comment on the matter on the day before the meeting, but they later emailed an official statement to the members saying, “We do not consider this meeting to have been properly called and will not be attending or participating. We will accordingly not recognize the outcome.” While the six-page letter goes on to detail the technical flaws in calling such a meeting, it seems that the bylaws both the board and the membership are citing are extremely ambiguous.
Which, at the meeting itself, is neither here nor there, since the membership intends to use these bylaws, however flawed, to affect some kind of unified decision. Once the meeting is underway, they speed the process by asking if anyone is prepared to speak sympathetically to the board, to which there is virtually no response. Not surprisingly, the vote is enormously in favour of non-confidence and dismissal of the recently appointed board members.
With such a unanimous decision, the CKLN membership now have the far more difficult task of finding a way to actually get rid of the board’s appointed members. According to Dale Whitmore, one of the volunteers leading the opposition, the board scheduled a meeting on Feb. 26 to discuss the outcome of this vote, adding with a slight ironic chuckle that it would be “in camera.”
But Douglas is optimistic, saying, “We’re hoping that we’ll be able to get a new board, or at least an interim board in place to reorganize and find out just what’s going on and reorganize the station to get it back to what it was, which is a community station.”