5.6 Ending the Membership Extension

[Vladimir Drkulec]

The CFC did decide to end the membership extension beginning November 1st, 2020. The voting members from Manitoba Ken Einarsson and John Remillard sent us a letter on this topic. This is cut and pasted from an attached Word Document.



Vlad: The Manitoba Chess Association (MCA) is inquiring about the decision to reinstate membership dues in light of COVID-19. The MCA strongly believes that for the health and safety of all chess players, membership dues should continue to be deferred until we hear from the various medical authorities that it is safe to get back to as close to normal business practices. We realize that the business model of the Chess Federation of Canada (CFC), the MCA and other provincial associations will potentially be devastated until we return to normal business practices. The return to normal business practices should only occur after seeking and obtaining provincial medical board approval and clearance to return to past practices.

A couple of points on re-instating membership dues:

- By reinstating the membership dues, we believe a bad message is given to the chess player at large as they are also facing financial hardship as well. If the re-instatement of fees are because financial difficulties of the various associations, we should not go to the membership but look to other means such as Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) if we qualify.

- Re-instatement of the membership to us looks like a cash grab in tight times, as we believe right now the “value for money” aspect of the membership is not there and we must wait until this aspect is properly re-established. We then must strategize how we can bring back our past memberships:

- You can indicate that we do have some on-line tournaments but this is not at the same level of activities of pre-COVID. We believe that it will be quite difficult to get back the chess player after COVID as they might have moved onto other safer options in their opinion.

- There have also been some in person tournaments as well, although we consider this unsafe at this time. To get the buy in of the chess player the CFC should develop a minimum set of protocols/guidelines/policy statement for the organizers to follow if the tournament is to be sanctioned by the CFC. This might also be the norm after COVID, as organizer might have to develop a “COVID safe plan” which talks about the sanitization of chess equipment, spacing of boards, maximum number of participants in the tournament etc. Then the question would these plans be submitted to the CFC so the tournaments from the organizer can be considered as a CFC sanctioned event? At the next governors meeting, the MCA would like the membership fee issue be an item for discussion at the meeting by all the governors.