Access to Co-operative Records
By Bruce D. Woodrow
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Co-operatives are required to keep lots of records. See section 114 of the Co-operative Corporations Act for some of them.
Some of these records must be made available to members, while others may be made available as a practice. And some records will normally be kept confidential.
Section 119 of the Act allows members to examine various records at the co-operative office during normal business hours. These include such records as the by-laws and the minutes of general meetings.
That same section of the Act also explicitly excludes some records, including minutes of the meetings of the board and any executive committee. Therefore, legally, members are not entitled to see board minutes. However, it is common in housing co-operatives to post board minutes or otherwise make them available to members.
Since some board items are confidential, these must not be made available. If the minutes include both confidential and regular items, it will be difficult to both make the minutes available but restrict access to the confidential items. The answer is to collect all of the confidential items from a meeting in a separate set of Confidential Minutes. The regular minutes can still contain a mention of a confidential item, in order, but refer to the confidential minutes.
The regular minutes can then be posted or made available in the office. The confidential minutes will be kept in a separate minute book available only to directors.
