Name Change
How complicated could it be to remove the name “Battersea” from our corporate name of Battersea Loughborough Lake Association? It turns out that for the simple change intended, it was not a quick process. Your Lake Association got caught up with all the hoopla and rigmarole of the corporate – government interface.
The Lake Association has been known by various names over time. It started as “Battersea Loughborough Association” in 1963. It was changed to the current name “Battersea Loughborough Lake Association” in 1983. During the year 1994/95, the Board did a survey of the membership regarding deleting Battersea from the Lake Association name. A result in support of changing the name was obtained but it not acted upon – for unrecorded reasons.
There continued to be more discussion over the years. The latest, back in October 2019, was in response to another Membership survey. The directors were assigned the task of establishing what had to be done. At first, we felt that we should proceed with the help of lawyers to assist us with getting this change made. The information provided by them was that all Lake Association members had to be contacted with the details and that they would sign, supporting the idea (or not) and return their vote to the Lake Association.
This wasn’t going to be easily done. The members of the Lake Association are a wide spread group, some of them living at the lake but also a large percentage living away from the lake and some not even in the same province or country. Some could be contacted through meetings of neighbours by board members but many would have to be done by post. The potential difficulties – including those for the return of the signatures and the collection of the vote - were going to be complicated. We needed another way to collect a vote more in keeping with the diversity of our membership. For lack of understanding how this was going to be done, the 2020 AGM passed by without being able to advance the name change process.
Meanwhile another problem had cropped up. The Lake Association is required to inform the province of the make-up of the board of directors and the executive of the corporation. The association had been sending off forms annually of the current board to meet this requirement. The expectation was that the government would discard the prior year board information and use the new list. Well, it doesn’t work this way. Although it is not clearly stated, the government is more interested in the changes to the board – Joe has left and Jane has signed up. A side effect of this recording method is that Joe might have been on the board for three years. Different people would have filled out this annual form and they could have used the name Joseph in place of Joe. The Ontario government took this information and processed it to show that we now had two “Joes” on the board, differing only by the formality of the first name. The same happened if Jane moved to a different address – again there were two board members created when the new address was submitted. Of course, not appreciating how this was done, an announcement of a retirement of a board member would only remove one member from the list of directors – the other would live on in the records of the Ontario government. The records still took a couple of attempts to clear up, even after our improved understanding of the process.
Since the original proposal to get the votes of all Lake Association members was not going to be feasible, it was decided, somewhat desperately, to review the Ontario government Corporations Act to see if a vote could be collected differently. After some looking, we found that the Lake Association could make a “special resolution” to have the name changed at a meeting “duly called for that purpose”. Our annual general meeting could be used to do that, getting away from the need to get and gather every member’s signature. Notices were sent out to every member for whom we had valid addresses. The members who attended the 2021 AGM voted on the name change proposal during the meeting. After some discussion, the resolution passed unanimously.
The last hurdle was that the government was going to an on-line system for corporations to interact with the government. Our paper based name change submission was summarily returned to us saying that we could resubmit on-line after setting up an on-line identity. There was a silver lining to this process; because this was a new system there was extra help available to see how the public would interact with the process. We were able to talk to a person (!) about what we needed to do; this helped to remove potential missteps. Our proposal was submitted on-line in late November 2021 and after talking to another person again (!) in January 2022 to see if there was some hold-up, we learned that the name change had been accepted.
Welcome to the new/old Loughborough Lake Association!