It’s been a bit quiet around Insiders lately: writing long posts take work, and we’d rather be enjoying the sunshine. But that doesn’t mean things have stopped happening. Make sure to check out AMS Confidential’s News for N00bs for the latest news (and lulz!); rather than overlap, we’ll come up with our own alliterative title and report even hackier things for you. Without further ado…
Category: News
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Graduation Ceremonies Underway
Just a quick post to let everyone know the 2010 congregation ceremonies are taking place this week. Yesterday, English, Econ and other small arts programs crossed the stage. Today it’s more of the same, including Poli Sci, Law and Education.
Telestudios airs a live stream of the ceremonies, unfortunately using Microsoft proprietary platforms (.asx and Silverlight). If anyone knows how to get those working on a reasonable platform leave a note in the comments thread. I tried to get a capture stream running in VLC, but failed.
On a more personal note, I’ll be crossing on Monday at 1:30pm. Tune in for what hopes to be a spectacular student speech by my former boss, Michael Duncan (no pressure), and come meet up with us for photos after the ceremony’s over!
Avid readers of this blog may recall a post from last summer entitled: “Did The Killers Kill the Liquor at Thunderbird Arena?”
The original post should be read in its entirety, but if you’re too lazy the synopsis is that in July 2009, UBC Athletics put an application forward to amend the liquor licence at T-Bird Arena. (Apologies to Doug Mitchell; T-Bird Arena is much simpler to write than DMTWSC.) At the time, campus RCMP had serious objections to the proposal based on a series of major infractions at previous licenced (and non-licenced) events at the arena and things were not looking good for Athletics.
In the fall, the Liquor Control and Licencing Board (LCLB) issued their decision on Athletics’s application and it didn’t work out very well. In short: Yes, the Killers killed the liquor at Thunderbird Arena.
Last fall, the Board of Governors gave its consent to UBC’s newest policy, Policy 92: Land Use and Permitting. Look closely at the top right-hand corner of the policy. The approval date listed is October 2009.
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One problem: the Board never met in October..
For the first major time since 1977, the Province will be conducting a review of the Society Act.
The Society Act is the legislation which the AMS exists under. There are similar acts in BC law which deal with other forms of incorporated bodies, such as businesses and cooperatives. Societies are incorporated not-for-profit bodies.
From the press release, the review is being framed around two questions. First, if the corporate model is the best for societies, and second, the extent that societies are regulated.
This is timely as the recent legal opinion on the Society Act and AMS bylaws makes Students’ Council impotent, unable to keep the AMS executive accountable.
The AMS is one of the largest societies in BC and is one of the only ones with mandatory membership, and hence mandatory fees.
The deadline for submissions is April 1st, 2010.
We need to be able to acknowledge current political structures, like the government, and the law, and work within them for reform. Equally important however, is that we engage in an active critique of those structures, which should entail some forms of confrontation.
– Stefanie Ratjen speaks on civil liberties and the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
It has been confirmed that Stefanie Ratjen, former VP External of the AMS, has been hired by the BC Civil Liberties Association to run the Legal Observer training and Know Your Rights workshops at UBC, which are partially funded by the Student Legal Fund Society, which is in turn funded by student fees.
Is Stefanie a motivated, committed individual legitimately concerned about the impact of the Olympics? Yes.
Does Stefanie’s hiring destroy any pretense that existed about the BCCLA’s program being neutral and non-partisan? Yes.
Happy First Week all. Here’s what happened while you were out.
On Campus
The Student Board of Governors representatives turned over. Tim Blair bids farewell, as Michael Duncan takes his place. Bijan Ahmadian and Alexandra Caldwell (UBC-O) were re-elected for their respective second terms.
The University approved a plan to in-fill Totem residence. This was met with surprise and glee from at least one editor of this blog. (Board item front page, 60-megabyte board presentation .pdf)
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Gordo In Da House
Ah, election day. The day I walk into the SUB for my morning coffee and notice over a dozen cameramen and reporters just milling about in the concourse. Were there more bonfires last night? Another murder in the park? Doesn’t seem likely.
Who’s that grey-haired man with snazzy glasses walking in with an entourage? Why it’s Gordon Campbell, coming to the SUB for his voting photo-op!
I wish I had had my own camera on hand, but I suppose you can watch some footage on any newscast this evening. It was interesting to see the news machine at work.
He brought the full entourage, including the seldom-seen wife, kids and grandkids, with one big burly RCMP officer dressed in black, constantly standing on the periphery.
As he entered a voting booth, he had his back to the reporters. Being hopelessly naive, I expected the cameras at that point to turn away, or stop filming at least temporarily, to respect the fact that voting is supposed to be private. Instead, they stepped it up a notch. The CityTV cameraman was particularly shameless, holding his camera aloft above his head in hopes of getting a better shot. For Christ’s sake, do you want him to just pass around his marked ballot? It’s not like you don’t know who he’s voting for.
Then came the posing with his ballot half in the box. If the photo-op nature of this event was not yet obvious enough to observers, he asked everyone if they had gotten the shot they wanted before actually putting it in the box. Then the scrum moved outside for a brief Q&A.
At this point I was thinking: where’s the AMS? Let me first say that I absolutely don’t have any expectations that it is the AMS execs’ duty to constantly harass Gordon Campbell or other politicians. That should not be one of the primary duties in their job description.
However, the external office did put out a press release in April bitching about how ministers made themselves unavailable, (followed of course by the obligatory NayloRant™). The AMS has told the world that they are quite eager to meet with politicians, and are unhappy that they were not able to. So you might think that having the premier walk into their own god-damned building on election day followed by a gaggle of reporters and cameramen might represent a good chance to ask him some questions! No such luck today, though Blake and Crystal did leave whatever they were doing to catch the very end of the scrum.
I couldn’t actually hear most of the questions and answers since in the interest of informing the public about this absolutely vital story (Premier ♥ voting and democracy!) the media formed an impenetrable wall around him, keeping the actual public away. He pimped out his grandkids, and gave some pretty stock answers to some pretty milquetoast questions. Then it was off to the parking lot by the bookstore to do… whatever else he is doing today.
Edit: Well, there it is. Gordo and his ballot, currently the lead picture on globeandmail.com. You can even make out the out-of-focus AMS logo in the background.
I definitely don’t want to turn into a news aggregator blog, but there have been a number of UBC news items lately that I thought were interesting and wanted to share. And trust me, I think it’s totally lame when I read something that is just a recap of other stories I’ve already read or heard about. So hopefully there is something in here you didn’t know about yet…
- The NDP wants to give $200,000 per year to the UBC Farm.
But only if they form a government. That’s a rather large ‘if’. Hooray for pandering!
- Hwi Lee, the student who sent email threats resulting in a lockdown of the BioSciences building, was given a conditional sentence of one year, as well as a six month curfew. In addition, he has to stay away from UBC, will have two years of probation and has to write a letter to the Ubyssey explaining the incident.
I guess the judge doesn’t read UBC Insiders – too bad.
- The family of Karol Jaholkowski, a man who fell off a fraternity house roof at Arts County Fair 2007, is suing UBC and a fellow fraternity brother for the injury.
I guess they don’t read UBC Insiders either. Otherwise they’d know lawsuits like that don’t work.
Incidents like this no doubt contributed to the RCMP crackdown on alcohol. However, I am 99.9999999% sure this did not occur at a licenced event, so if incidents like this are used to justify the stricter rules, it’s a red herring.
A Vancouver Sun story with more details from right after the accident can be found here.
- Metro Vancouver won’t be getting compensated for land in Pacific Spirit Park that was expropriated by the province. The two parcels of land in PSP, and the University Golf Course were to be given to the Musqueam First Nation in a land deal reached in 2007.
There is still hope that one day Hampton Place can be expropriated and turned into student residences.
- It costs >$200K to rent the arena for a weekend. That’s according to a lawsuit UBC launched, claiming they were not paid for an Anthony Robbins appearance on campus last fall.
I’m not sure The Power Within will be welcome at UBC again. This was one of the first non-hockey events to be held at Thunderbird Arena and a test of how disruptive these types of events would be to UNA residents. Everything was going fine until, unbeknownst to UBC, they decided to set up drumming and fire-walking outside the building…
- On my walk towards the bus recently, I noticed someone had kindly disposed of their UBC parking ticket on the ground. If anyone is curious, they have now started writing *WARNING ONLY* tickets, with threats of towing. I’m guessing they are doing it in order to log the plate numbers so they’ll know if you are making a habit of not paying. That’s strike one for you, Mr. Silver 4-Door Nissan.
The best part of the ticket is the last line on the back: “This Traffic Notice is issued by authority of the Board of Governors of The University of British Columbia.” Whoops.
- In NCAA-related news, Western Washington University (in Bellingham) folded their Div II football team last year due to financial constraints. Some of those ex-WWU players are coming to UBC to join the Thunderbirds.
From the article: “If you can get school paid for just for playing football, that is awesome. But the whole point of college for me, is to get my degree,” says Kelly Kurisu. There was nothing stopping him from getting his degree at WWU since the university did not go under, to the best of my knowledge. I wonder what incentives Athletics offered him to come here.
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Pierre Shakes It Up
Pierre Ouillet, UBC’s recently hired VP Finance, Resources, Operations is getting down to business. In a memo dated April 2, significant changes to the structure of many units in his portfolio were outlined. At first, it may seem strange that one of the stated aims was “an imperative to streamline and simplify our organizational structure to improve impact and efficiency” when in fact it could be argued that even more layers of bureaucracy were added. Nevertheless, let’s press on and find out more about these changes.
There used to be a log-linear graph in the Physics department of the number of Presidents, VPs, AVPs, students and faculty over time, extrapolated to the point where there’d be more AVPs than students. Adding more admin positions? Is it Thursday already?
– Darren Peets
The revised organizational chart can be found here. Although there are a number of blank spaces on the chart, no positions are actually vacant. Other than, that, it’s a pretty standard, boring org. chart.
Wait a minute… Al, is that you? Al Poettcker?! OH MY GOODNESS, what are you doing there? UBC will be going to court to claim that your organization is not under their control. But somebody snuck you and Philip Falls onto that org. chart anyways, perched right beside Pierre in the top middle. This must be some sort of conspiracy.
The Bare Necessities: Food and Housing
The merger between Food and Housing is already running full speed ahead with Andrew Parr, formerly Director of UBC Food Services, on top of the combined unit. UBC Food is now moved into the VP Students portfolio and the UBC-O food and housing units are also included. This merger coincides with the departure of Fred Fotis, former director of UBC Housing, for greener pastures. Most student politicians I have talked to were not fans of Mr. Fotis and Andrew Parr will bring a more student-focused approach with him.
The merger makes sense in that there is obviously a lot of interplay between the departments already. Cafeterias in residence are already integrated, while conferences and catering certainly do plenty of business together as well. However, Andrew Parr has no experience dealing with housing and childcare issues. While he considers housing a functioning department already (meaning that there is no need for any major overhaul; just continued management), long-standing challenges remain. The childcare situation is still at the top of many people’s minds, while the length of the waiting list for residence still poses problems.
Two different strategic planning processes are now underway: one for childcare and one for housing. We’ll see how much of a priority the AMS and GSS truly put on these issues, since there is a much bigger opportunity to drive change at this point in the process rather than simply bitching about the results later. The strategic planning will also be influenced by the results of the ongoing campus plan process. As we all saw during the last round of consultations, C&CP was hedging their bets on being able to use the “future housing reserves” (aka the UBC Farm) in every one of their plans. Now that that appears not to be an option, don’t hold your breath waiting for C&CP to come up with some wonderful plan for all this stuff. I’m going to tentatively say that Andrew Parr’s lack of experience in housing and childcare issues may actually be a good thing if he’s able to cut through the bullshit and end up with a plan that could actually work.
Pierre puts UBC on a diet: Let’s lose those LBS!
Some ancillaries have operated in an environment where funding had to come from charging services to other units. While it sounded like a good idea at the time, it had [created] some adverse behaviors – overcharging for services, creating internal bureaucracy.
-Pierre Ouillet
The Land and Building Services portfolio, which was responsible for infrastructure at UBC, has been dispersed among a few portfolios. UBC Trek and the Sustainability Office now find themselves under Campus and Community Planning. Building Operations takes over Plant Ops and Utilities. Infrastructure Development comes into its own with former Plant Ops head John Metras on top. I’ll let Alex explain this one:
Putting the former director of Plant Ops responsible for liaising with Properties will hopefully fix one of the problems with Properties: they don’t give a shit about life cycle–just capital costs.
-Alex Lougheed
Not only does this help advance UBC’s sustainability ethos, it just seems like common sense at this point. One of the themes of this shakeup is having UBC’s departments working together as a team towards a common goal. The point that Properties Trust needs to adjust their way of thinking about how they do business has been brought up before. This appears to be the follow through. I again feel compelled to point out the complete lack of control UBC has over Properties.
I guess any reform of Plant Ops at this point is a lost cause. They get shuffled, but with no real changes.
Despite the disappearance of Land and Building Services, the former AVP in charge isn’t leaving, he’s leading. Geoff Atkins is now UBC’s “Leader of University Sustainability”. I hope to expand on Geoff and his new role in a future post, but in short: Geoff is free to use UBC as his playground to test and implement new ideas about sustainability. What strikes me most about Geoff is that he takes problems and thinks about them completely differently that most people would. This is an amazing quality and makes him seem well-suited to a blue sky position like this; it also leads to his ideas sounding alternately brilliant and crazy (and sometimes both). He is truly passionate about sustainability issues which makes me hope he will be able to make the most of this opportunity.
HR moved under Toope
The VP Ops/Fin portfolio lost some more weight by having HR now report to President Toope. I honestly haven’t a clue why this change was made. Pierre Ouillet’s charming assertion that it “reflects the importance we are putting on our people,” definitely does not fly with me. This is where you are supposed to help me out in the comments section.
There were other changes as well; this post touched on the ones I found most interesting. The original memo is linked at the top, so read it for the full list.