Staff at CFIB were always surprised to learn that creating new departments was about taking the yellow telephone slips off of my desk. The largest number of slips were calls from members needing help, then calls about provincial issues, then calls on national matters.
The Member Services function, called the Member Counsellor function today, began in 1977, and the first thing I learned is if you do not do the job well, members will cancel their membership. We lost a valued member when our first Member Services Officer told a member who was worried about an attempt to organize his plant wrote, "Whenever I face a problem as difficult as yours, I take it to the Lord." Phew.
Determining the nature of the Provincial Affairs function I wanted to create took several years. I learned a lot working with the Davis government in Ontario and served on an Advisory Committee to the Premier in 1980. The photo with Premier Davis is from that period. I found out that a specialist on labour law in their Labour Department wrote all the legislation for all the provinces and that he represented a kind of profit centre.
We enjoyed some wonderful victories working with the Davis government, starting with compensation to retailers for collecting retail sales taxes in 1975, and then the cut in provincial corporate taxes for small firms from 12-9 per cent in 1976. This led to reductions in provincial corporate taxes at all the provinces.
Premier Buchanan, in the photo with Director of Provincial Affairs, Brien Gray, was a source of information on the difficulty of working with the other Atlantic Canada provinces. In many cases, this was inherently political because so much of the work done at the provincial level was by bureaucrats who did not even live in Atlantic Canada. One department had its research and legislation developed in Ottawa, and another department worked with someone in BC. 
Learning about the special interests of the West coast meant spending a lot of time in Alberta and BC. Bill Bennett was very helpful and set up key meetings with Ministers and officials. His Social Credit government were colossal CFIB and small business promoters.
All of us see provincial premiers promoting provincial interests on television, but in private I never met with one Premier that did not care about the national interest as much as the interests of his or her province.
The new Director of Provincial Affairs, Brien Gray, was given the task of building a provincial affairs function for CFIB with offices in all the provinces, but focusing first on Ontario, BC, Alberta and Quebec, where most of the powerful public servants reside.
Brien did a great job over the years putting this function in place which included strong legislative teams that gave excellent service to the members. Nothing is more complicated than federal-provincial relations, and it took us a decade to figure it all out. The media exposure enjoyed by our Quebec lieutenants paid off in field renewal rates in Quebec, something that did not happen in other provinces.
The great lesson was that you could not represent your members’ interests in one province without being in all provinces, because the provincial legislative brain trust function as a team. Even in Quebec, some specialists did work for all the provinces.