Due Process

Howdy. Long time no blog.

First off, I read this today and thought to myself, that's a cool idea. That is, if you're into hockey and everything.

So, things have been pretty busy, hence the bloglessness. But I did something last week that was just fascinating to me.

I participated in due process.

I have been a member of a credit union, along with the rest of my family, pretty much since birth. The sad thing is that I never really took an interest in it. Whenever something happened, like my dad wanted me to invest in shares or something, he would just give me a blank application, tell me to sign the appropriate places, and the rest would be taken care of. Basically, I have no idea what I have in my accounts.

The credit union (currently the third largest in Ontario) has decided to merge with another credit union (currently the largest in Ontario) to become one whopping huge credit union (largest in Ontario, third largest in Canada). But since it's a credit union, all of the members get a say as to whether this merger is going to happen or not. Unlike some other major financial institutions that shall remain nameless.

After work, I hurried home and went with my parents to the special members meeting where we would have a decent convention-style meal, listen to the chairman and others say good things about this merger, and then vote. Almost everything involved making a motion to do this or that, having someone second it, then voting by holding the little card in the air. Other than in Model UN, I've never taken part in anything like this (and even back then, it was extremely marginal participation).

So, all of this sounds boring, right? Sure, except that there was some tension when the one director who had resigned due to his opposition of this merger stood up near the end of the question period and started talking about all the negative things that the chairman "neglected" to mention, including the real reason why the director resigned. You should have seen the chairman's face while this guy was making his remarks. The problem was that we had voted at the beginning of the meeting to limit questions or comments to two minutes per person, and that the question period would not exceed one hour. Of course, both of these events were about to occur with this guy at the microphone. Half the people in the room (there were about 1200 people present from all over the province) wanted him to keep talking, the other half wanted him to shut up so we could vote. People were screaming across the huge convention hall, it was total chaos, and I was strangely captivated.

The chairman finally got the room under control, and we voted. There were three categories of voters, two of which were shareholders only, and the third being all general members. There had to be a two-thirds majority in each category for this resolution to pass. When the votes were tallied, both of the shareholders results were in the 87-88% range in favour of the merger. The general member result was 67.5% in favour. This was another first for me. My vote actually made a difference.

So that was the end of our meeting. The other credit union held their vote the following night and were also in favour, so on April 1st, the merger will be complete.

We had taken a chartered bus to the convention centre (provided by our local branch), and on our way back, I was sitting next to an elderly gentleman. We were all munching on cookies, and as we waited to exit the parking lot, he leaned over and asked if the vote had gone the way I wanted it. I hesitantly said yes, since I wasn't completely sure it would affect me at all, and I didn't really have too much to say about it. He mentiond something about the weather (it was pouring rain), to which I agreed. He went back to eating his cookie, and I felt that he was trying to get a conversation out of me, and I wasn't being very co-operative. So I jumped in and asked him a question. That was all I had to do. He ended up talking for the rest of the ride, first about how he wanted to buy some property back in the day, and the credit union gave him the loan on the spot, and how people had tried to buy it from him over the years but he held out and was going to pass it on to his family after he was gone. Then we somehow got into the topic of age, how his wife had died some years before, and how both his parents and his wife's parents lived to be in their 90's or 100's, and how it's because in Poland they have good water. Then it became an environmental talk, and if they ever produced a good hydrogen car he would be the first one to buy it. I said a word or two here and there, but I basically just listened to him talk because he seemed to enjoy it so much. When we reached our stop, I said goodbye and he smiled at me and waved. What a pleasant man, I thought to myself as I got off the bus. I really hope he gets to own that hydrogen car.

"Could have been your statue, could have been your friend, a whole long lifetime could have been the end"