Q&A with Sail Canada

Nov 7, 2019

new Chair, Hugh McGugan

Hugh McGugan has just been elected Chair, Sail Canada Board of Directors

• What are you going to do about communications and visibility of Sail Canada, outside the volunteers and staff awareness of the value Sail Canada brings is low …?   
[HM]:  As the majority of Sail Canada’s programs such as CANSail are delivered through the provincial sailing associations and other partners, I think it will always be a challenge for us to demonstrate the value that we bring as an organization to our member clubs.  In the last few years we have made extensive use of social media and other engagement tools, and we are starting to make progress in increasing Sail Canada’s awareness across the Canadian Sailing community.
 
• What about the National sailing team – Mike Milner has been there for several years – results are encouraging, how will Sail Canada support him and the Canadian Sailing team.  

[HM]:  Mike has been leading Sail Canada’s high performance organization for ~18 months now (May 2018) and in that time we have been making tremendous progress with many aspect of high performance/Olympic sailing including:
 –  activation of CENTRAL, EAST and soon WEST regional performance training hubs
–  establishment of an extensive national talent identification system and implementation of national training camps (YOTS) with ~200 up-and-coming sailors now being tracked,
–  athlete nutrition and sport medicine support,
–  and of course sailor-appropriate on-water coaching support.
 
• The history of Sail Canada and CYA was to lead globally with ISAF but ISAF is struggling what can we do as Sail Canada to help get ISAF focus back to the roots of the sport, which are sailing and yacht clubs.  

[HM]:  To be sure, World Sailing has been undergoing unprecedented changes over the last few years, including now the recent news that CEO Andy Hunt is planning to step down shortly.  Sail Canada continues to “punch well above its weight” in terms of our involvement and leadership at World Sailing.  I think the long term changes that we need to influence at World Sailing revolve around governance renewal and modernization of decision making processes for key aspects of sailing such as racing rules, and Olympic event formats and Olympic equipment decisions.
 
• What is Sail Canada doing to improve the communications with the PSA’s and their yacht club Members?  

[HM]:  Sail Canada’s provincial sailing association partners are key to the success of sailing in Canada.  We try to communicate constantly consistently with our PSA partners at all levels throughout the organizations. We are focused on enabling their success (and by extension the success of our member clubs) through providing world-class programming resources, coach and officials training, and other support resources for all kinds of sailors from high performance dinghy & Olympic sailing, to offshore keelboat sailing and cruising.
 
• Succession Planning – What about the “new Blood” – what is Sail Canada doing to get new names and volunteers on its committees…  

[HM]:  Over the last 2-3 years Sail Canada has introduced updated TORs (Terms of Reference) for all of our operational and program related committees, which include term limits for all committee members and chair volunteers.  As a result, we are already seeing significant renewal of our volunteer committee memberships and we are excited to be welcoming “new blood” in many of our volunteer committees.

Here is the combined old and new Board of Directors at the AGM

Front row left to right:  
Kate McLennen, Alicia Damley, 

Back row left to right:
Zac Baum, Rob Hemming, Todd Irving (past Chair), Hugh McGugan (Chair) Janet MacMillan (past Director), Bob Greenhalgh, John O’Dwyer.

Missing:
Barbara Pike