In September 2023, the 4 remaining directors of Bridgewater Community Foundation gathered in Red Deer, Alberta for what the board chair described as a routine quarterly meeting, though the agenda contained nothing routine at all. The foundation's bookkeeper had prepared a detailed financial summary showing that current liabilities exceeded available liquid assets by a significant margin, with $340,000 in unpaid obligations accumulating across multiple creditor accounts. The document also revealed that the foundation had been drawing on operational reserves for 7 consecutive months to meet basic payroll and facility costs, and that projected revenue for the coming quarter would cover less than 40 percent of anticipated expenses. Rather than distributing this summary to all board members and entering it into the official meeting record, the chair and treasurer agreed before the meeting to present only a condensed verbal overview, omitting the specific liability figures and the reserve depletion trajectory that the full document contained.
This deliberate withholding of material financial information represents a critical governance failure that Alberta law treats with considerable seriousness. The Societies Act establishes that directors of a non-profit society owe duties of care and loyalty to the organization, and these duties necessarily encompass the obligation to inform fellow board members of facts material to governance decisions. When directors selectively suppress financial data that would reveal insolvency or near-insolvency conditions, they undermine the board's collective capacity to discharge its statutory responsibilities. The remaining directors who did not receive the full financial picture in September 2023 were deprived of the information necessary to recognize that Bridgewater Community Foundation had crossed into insolvency territory, and this deprivation was not accidental but engineered by colleagues who understood precisely what the withheld data signified.