Following the resignation of its vice president and incoming president, Lee Trentadue, the Canadian Booksellers Association has shuffled its board members into new positions.
Treasurer Christopher Smith of Collected Works Bookstore in Ottawa has moved into the vice president’s role, and trade director Ellen Pickle from Tidewater Books in Sackville, New Brunswick will now be treasurer. The CBA is now seeking to fill the vacant trade director position from the CBA membership.
Trentadue resigned from the CBA board, she told PW, because she did not believe that even once she became president she could address the problems she sees in the way the board currently operates.
“The really basic [problem] is that we weren’t meeting often enough. Regular board meetings were not being called. Regular committee meetings were not being called, and yet issues that should have come out of those meetings were decided upon,” she said. Trentadue said she often heard about board decisions second-hand from BC booksellers who also complained that they were not being informed and included. “I didn’t know how decisions were being made. I just think that there needs to be a lot more structure to what’s going on there because it is such a crucial time for booksellers.”
One such issue was the CBA’s role or lack thereof in negotiating a partnership for independent bookstores with Google when it launched its e-bookstore in Canada recently. “We were supposed to be in talks with Google, that was the last I heard, and then all of sudden nothing is happening with us and the campus bookstores have signed a contract and McNally Robinson have signed their own contract. None of that is going through CBA, and I’m wondering what happened,” she said.
Trentadue is the owner of Galiano Island Books in British Columbia, but she says most meetings were teleconferences, so geography should not have caused her to be excluded from discussions and decisions. “I was on the board before when this was not the case and it can work. … I know when Susan Dayus was executive director we had no trouble having regular meetings and all of us lived in different cities.”
Changes began about a year and a half ago, she said. “I should have been vice president for a year and then president, but there was so much flux at the time, that it was decided that Mark [Lefebvre] would continue on for one more year as president…. Susan was leaving and we’re still in the infant stages of working with the [Retail Council of Canada, a partner association,], there were too many changes at once.”
Trentadue said she didn’t believe she would be able to make changes even once she stepped into the president’s position. “I don’t know whose making decisions and I suspect it is too few in terms of number of people making decisions…. I did get the feeling that there was an atmosphere of ‘don’t rock the boat.’ And I think that might not change.” She added, “I wouldn’t say I was constantly fighting with the board or anything. But I didn’t always agree on the direction and I always said so.”
One of Trentadue’s other concerns is the CBA’s relationship with partner association the Retail Council of Canada. “I don’t know how this decision was made but Bill Yetman of RCC … has the title of interim executive director. It was just announced to the board at our last AGM board meeting in May,” she said. “I am going to write a long letter of some of the things that I think might really help the situation, and I think one of the things that might help would be to have that relationship very clearly defined with CBA having its own very strong independence.”
Current president Mark Lefebvre said he did not want to comment on these issues in the media, but said the board thanks Trentadue for her three years of service. “The CBA board remains committed to ensuring there continues to be a voice for Canadian booksellers and to continue to work with industry partners and offer services that benefit our members efforts to run successful businesses that benefit the cultural landscape of our country.”
