For the next five weeks, we will be profiling the speakers on the regulatory panel for our conference. This week we introduce Ms. Natasha Dookie.
TOPIC: PAST AND CURRENT CHALLENGES – Disagreements on Council and maintaining a functioning College in challenging times
Ms. Dookie is a lawyer who has practised employment, labour, and professional regulatory law. Before practising at the College of Teachers, she was disciplinary counsel at the Real Estate Council of BC, and in-house counsel at the City of Port Coquitlam.
The College of Teachers is the self-regulating governing body for over 75,000 educators in British Columbia. Over the years, the Council has experienced a significant amount of internal disagreement, most recently culminating in a Ministerial investigation resulting in the Avison Report and a defamation suit brought by the BC Teachers Federation against the former Chair of the Council, Richard Walker. For more, click here.
The conflicts within the Council have required a focus on board governance procedures and specifically types of procedures for how differences can be resolved, how different views can be expressed at tense meetings, what external tools are available to assist a divided council, and more recently procedures for maintaining functions at the College during extremely challenging times and an unknown future.
Ms. Dookie will speak about board governance and college maintenance procedures, and her experiences of what type of procedures have and have not worked. These hard earned lessons will be valuable to all regulators, staff, and lawyers who, in the life of a regulatory body, inevitably face board(s) with members having significant disagreements and unfortunately, get entangled in the threat of litigation or actual litigation.