Daniel Tremblay · Chief Human Resources Officer · Canada
| Capacity | Committees |
|---|---|
| Ready to chair | Human resources and compensation committee, once I have served through a complete pay and bargaining year · Health, safety and environment committee of an organisation with field or line crews |
| Ready to join | Human resources and compensation committee · Health, safety and environment committee · Governance and nominating committee |
I am looking for one non-executive seat on the board of an organisation whose people work in crews, outdoors and often alone: an electricity transmission or distribution utility, a port or rail operator, or a Crown corporation responsible for infrastructure in remote regions. I would like to serve on the human resources and compensation committee or the health, safety and environment committee, and to chair one of them once I had earned the board's confidence. I am most useful where a board is about to renew collective agreements, replace a retiring trades workforce or extend service into northern or Indigenous communities, and where it wants a director who will ask what a rule means to the person in the truck. I am not looking for a seat on a telecom board, because of my conflicts, or for a seat where my role would be ornamental.
Reported to a committee
Board human resources and compensation committee
September 2021–present
Prepares the committee's papers on bargaining mandates, executive pay, pension matters and succession; attends every meeting apart from in-camera sessions.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Board health, safety and environment committee
2017–present
Presents field injury data, storm-duty reviews and the quarterly audit of access to truck location data.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Full board
2022–2024
Presented the workforce plan for the Bracewood acquisition, the 2023 and 2024 bargaining mandates and the contact-centre sourcing recommendation.
Member of a committee
Pension committee (management member)
2021–present
Management member of the committee overseeing two defined benefit plans and the defined contribution plan for later hires.
Served as a director
Board of directors; chair of the governance and human resources committee from 2023
June 2020–present
Director of a Moncton nonprofit that funds and places apprentices in electrical, telecom and construction trades; chairs the committee that sets the executive director's pay and reviews board composition.
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Not yet registered
India keeps the IICA Independent Directors' Databank for directors of companies incorporated there. It does not apply to the Canadian appointments I am considering, and I have not registered. A Canadian listed company would assess my independence through its board under Canadian securities rules; a Crown corporation would apply its appointing government's process.
A board with large unionised field crews usually sees its labour relations twice: when a mandate is approved and when a settlement or a stoppage is announced. I would help a board see the clauses in between that decide safety, cost and service, such as standby rules, posting rights, storm-duty hours and contracting-out language. I have sat on both sides of a bargaining table, as a steward in 1996 and as the employer's chief negotiator since 2023, and I can usually tell a board which concessions management will come to regret.
I would also bring a safety record I can explain. Since 2018 I have presented field injury data, storm reviews and the audit of our location-data letter to a board committee every quarter, including the bad quarters. I know what a lost-time injury rate conceals, and I would ask management for near misses and alerts as well as injuries.
My limits matter as much. I am not a financial expert for audit committee purposes, and I have never served on the board of a listed company. My nonprofit board service is real but small in scale. My natural committee is human resources and compensation, and I would expect to serve a full year before chairing one. I could contribute to a health, safety and environment committee from the start, and would be willing to chair one at a company whose crews do work I understand.
In 2024 our owners' operating partner presented a contact-centre outsourcing case to the board worth C$18.6 million a year. My estimate of the cost of losing our internal route into technician roles was about C$3.2 million a year, with wide error bars, and a colleague advised me to leave it out because it would look soft beside a supplier's price. I put it in the board paper with the uncertainty printed beside it and explained how it had been built. The board did not accept all of my argument, but it asked for the partial option and approved it. As a director I would ask management which numbers it had left out because they were uncertain, and I would rather see an honest range than a missing line.
In 2020 an audit found that a regional manager had looked up a truck's location while investigating a complaint about a technician, contrary to our letter with the union. Our head of field operations proposed dealing with it privately, because the manager had not used what he saw. I insisted that the finding go into the joint committee's minutes and to the board's safety committee, and the manager received a written warning. The union's president later told me it was the moment his members began to believe the letter. On a board I would want to hear about breaches of a company's own commitments from management first, and I would try to make that the easier course for the executive involved.
As chair of Saltbarrow's governance and human resources committee in 2023, I advised the board against a C$400,000 sponsorship from a large electrical contractor that wanted first right to hire our graduates. The money would have funded two years of apprentice placements, and several directors wanted to accept it. I argued that exclusivity would narrow our graduates' choices and make other employers less willing to take placements. The committee proposed a smaller grant without the hiring right; the contractor agreed to C$150,000. As a non-executive I try to ask who loses when an attractive offer is accepted, not only who gains.
Before my first meeting I would ask the company secretary for three sets of papers: the last two bargaining mandates with the settlements that followed, two years of safety committee reports, and the human resources and compensation committee's minutes on pay and succession. I would read them to find where management's account changed between a mandate and its settlement, because that is where boards most often learn late.
In the first quarter I would ask to spend a day with a field crew and an evening in a dispatch or control room, at a time chosen by the operations team rather than by me. I would meet the chair of my committee, the chief human resources officer and the head of safety separately, and ask each what the board has not been told plainly.
For the rest of the year I would sit through one complete committee cycle, from goal-setting through year-end pay decisions and disclosure, and propose nothing structural unless I saw a safety or conduct risk that could not wait. At the end of the year I would ask the chair whether my questions had been useful or merely familiar, and whether my telecom habits were helping the board or narrowing its view.
Three relationships would need to be declared and managed before I could accept a seat. The first is my employment. Keswald's chief executive and our owners would have to consent, and I would not join the board of a telecom or cable operator, a tower or fibre wholesaler, or any contractor or supplier that does business with Keswald.
The second is my history. I was a vice-president at Quillon Contact Services until 2016 and still know its leaders. I would declare that to any board considering customer-care outsourcing and leave the decision to others, as I did at Keswald in 2024 when Quillon bid for our overnight work. I hold no shares in Quillon.
The third is the labour movement. I was a union steward, I bargain with two unions now and I count several union officers among my friends. That does not make me partisan, but a board deserves to know it before I speak on a bargaining mandate.
If a conflict arose during a term, I would tell the chair before the meeting, leave the room for the item and check that the minutes recorded my absence. I would never carry Keswald's bargaining positions or pay data into another boardroom. If recusals became frequent, I would resign the seat.
I am a full-time executive at Keswald and would remain one. I would give any board a written account of my employment, my shareholdings, my nonprofit directorship, my former employers and my working relationships with union officers, and ask it to judge my independence under whatever rules govern it, whether a listed company's securities requirements or a public body's appointment criteria. Until that judgement is made I would call myself a candidate, not an independent director.