In this week’s RMTAO Friday File Board Chair Ian Kamm announced his wishes to survey the membership re: massaging spouses. It’s hard to comprehend why the Board Chair is dedicating any time to an immutable regulatory policy, and especially when:

• the profession has recently twice suffered negative media coverage, yet there appears no initiative taken towards a national media response team
• the RMT/ACT (for HST de-registration) website has been offline since last year
• the Resources page for members on the RMTAO website has been “under construction” for over 2 years
• the last member earnings survey is almost 10 years old, and the last comprehensive survey of the profession (commissioned by the CMTO) is almost 20 years old
• The Canadian Massage Therapist Alliance – a coalition of the sister provincial associations – appears inactive. Their last Facebook post is from October 2019
• the Community Based Networks (CBNs) – the hubs of support for many RMTs – are under-resourced and under-utilized
• the main point of engagement for RMTAO members – the social media page – has been unavailable for interactive dialogue and debate for over a year

In fact the usual opportunities members would expect from their professional association to dialogue and debate, to grow and evolve the profession – symposia, round table discussions with subject matter experts, town halls – are not currently offered by the professional association.

And the same old, persistent struggles for the profession – defining professional identity, supporting research and higher education for RMTs, mentoring RMTs at the entry-to-practice level, positioning MT in the health care system, HST de-registration, raising business acumen across the profession, improving relationships with insurers and gatekeeper health practitioners, ensuring across-the-board quality education and accreditation of training schools, supporting RMTs who face barriers to practice due to ethnicity, culture or gender, and strategizing how to bring massage therapy care to more people facing barriers of inequity, bias and trauma – go largely unaddressed.

Send a message to Ian Kamm, Board_Chair@RMTAO.com, and tell him where you would prefer he spend his time and attention.