Take 16 active CFL veteran players (two from each team) and put them in Las Vegas for four days and you have the players' association's version of our annual general meeting where issues affecting the future of the league and its players are addressed to no end.
As scary as this may seem, despite having player reps decide the future of the association and many league issues at 7:45 a.m. every morning after an evening in Sin City, from what I can recall, things are looking as promising on the labour side of relations as they currently are on the management side of this CFL partnership.
Speaking with CFLPA president Stu Laird, he was very proud of how the union has evolved and expanded since he has been involved in the CFL as both a player and the association president. Over the course of its existence, the CFLPA has raised membership dues only once in the past 20 years for its players and that was in the form of a $10 increment.
In terms of infrastructure, things have improved dramatically, as well.
Nine years ago, the players' association for the CFL consisted of one seven-by-eight-foot office located in a gymnasium with one paid employee and a single phone line. Internet access and e-mail capabilities were simply a luxury this union could not afford at the time. Today, the CFLPA has five offices across Canada, four full-time employees, more than one phone line -- thank God -- and even our own website. So as the environment has improved dramatically for the Canadian Football League, so has the strength of the membership and union of the players' association.
From an organizational standpoint, there were some changes made to the executive board during this weekend. Former Blue Bombers defensive tackle Joe Flemming stepped down from his position as second vice-president on the board along with vice-president Jamie Taras and member-at-large Mike Morreale, who was unanimously backed in his new role as the marketing arm for the CFLPA "Pro Players" trademark.
Replacing these executives are Argonauts lifer Mike O'Shea, who was voted in as the new vice-president for the CFLPA, Stampeders guard Jay McNeil as the second vice-president, and ºber-kicker Sean Flemming as the new member-at-large.
In my third year as one of the player reps for the Bombers, I was pleased to see for the first time that the new commissioner of the CFL -- Mark Cohon -- attended the meetings along with COO Michael Copeland. In fact, after speaking with some of the most tenured reps in attendance, none of them could recall a commissioner ever attending our conference for as long as there has been a players' union or annual meetings.
Few people in the CFL understand just how important a successful partnership between the players' association and the league really is in going forward and addressing the many issues that surround professional football in Canada, so the fact that our new chieftain attended the discussions for a morning session demonstrated that he understands both the value of this partnership and the importance of establishing a strong relationship with the players' association.
The one thing I will share with you is that Cohon's message to us regarding his vision for the evolution of the CFL was simple and ambitious: to make the CFL the most respected sporting organization in Canada, bar none.
I would love to further identify all of the issues we discussed at our conference that will most likely be the initial steps in him accomplishing that mission, however, this year, after two successive years of stirring up a hornet's nest, I have been muzzled and warned by our CFLPA president, the head of our legal team, the COO of the CFL and the commissioner himself, that any and all discussion to which I was privy in our closed-door meetings between the league and the CFLPA are not to be shared with you, the public.
Why that is, I have no idea -- the secretive nature behind what I feel are commonly discussed CFL issues escapes me -- but in the interest of helping and not hampering this partnership, I have reluctantly agreed to be essentially neutered by the CFL for a week.
Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.
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