The committee's chair first noticed the pattern during a quarterly review meeting in Peterborough, Ontario, when one of the experienced representatives who possessed institutional knowledge sat silent through an entire 90-minute discussion of a complex grievance procedure that she had personally helped draft 4 years earlier. The chair knew this senior member had deep expertise in the matter under discussion, having watched her navigate identical issues across multiple offices in previous terms. Yet she offered nothing, deflecting direct questions with vague references to letting newer voices take the lead. When the chair later asked her privately why she had withheld her knowledge, the answer was blunt: the last time she contributed substantively to a committee initiative, she found herself assigned to lead it, write the implementation guidelines, train 3 offices on the new procedures, and report back monthly for 6 months. Her reward for demonstrating competence had been a tripling of her workload while her fellow senior members, who had remained strategically quiet, continued with their baseline obligations. She had learned the lesson the committee's governance structure was teaching her, and in 2024 she was applying it rigorously.
This dynamic, where a governance structure creates incentives that punish the very behaviour it needs to function, represents one of the most corrosive patterns in volunteer committee management. The cross-regional employee concerns committee established by the provincial ministry in Peterborough had constructed, without intending to, a system that actively discouraged its most knowledgeable members from sharing what they knew. The 24-person body, drawn from 6 offices with 4 representatives per office split evenly between 2 junior members per office and 2 senior members per office, had developed unwritten norms that treated demonstrated expertise as a trigger for mandatory additional labour. Understanding how such perverse incentives emerge, what legal and governance frameworks they violate, and how they can be identified before they hollow out a committee's effectiveness requires examining the intersection of volunteer management principles, fiduciary obligations, and the operational realities of multi-office representation structures.