ORIGINAL: britbrat
We are in tentative agreement here. In addition to providing insurance and frequency protection, MAAC, or some sort of local or regional organization, forces a degree of discipline upon the modelling population. People being people, without a "governing" organization there would be an unsafe and chaotic morass of modelling behaviours. No frequency discipline, no regard for disturbance, or risk to the population at large and no reasonably structured training process would exist. There would also be no cohesive competition rules, although that probably wouldn't bother a large number of modellers.
Necessity is the mother of invention (or survival)....MAAC was formed by competitors for competitors. If MAAC today were to cease its involvement in competition (or fold altogether), competitors would form another organization within Canada.....we do so because we would need to. MAAC would most likely cease to be the "official" model aviation body in Canada at that point as they have no affiliation with the international governing body of model aviation....what that would do to their relationship with insurance brokers and Industry Canada I have no idea.
MAAC priorities....
Frequencies - I see this today as semi-important today and of decreasing value in the years to come as tech improves. I beleive that JR's next high end radio will be of the spread spectrum variety and have little use for our 72 MHz we use today. Futaba's R149DP receiver has such high signal rejection that unless someone is standing right next to you with a fully extended antenna you have almost zero chance of being shot down (I have personally tested this).
Insurance - I can easily beleive that we will be on a second payer system as per the AMA in the near future as the costs continue to rise. What the fallout of that will be I dont know, the AMA seems to have had little issue with it. Personally I beleive this is a good thing as it places more onus on the individual to be smart about safety as its their personal insurance on the line first.
Fields - I dont think much can be done on this within our geographical/demographical size range without significant time and resources spent....comparing us to other countries is apples to oranges in most cases.
Those are commonly the most referred to things that MAAC should be focusing on.....
What else...?