Month: June 2009

More from the CIS AGM

Post author By Neal Yonson
Post date June 21, 2009

The Coles notes version of this post was already published: CIS restricts dual membership with NCAA.

Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS), the organization that governs high-performance sport at the post-secondary level, held its Annual General Meeting from June 8-12 in Gatineau, Quebec.

When UBC decided to defer its decision on NCAA membership until at least 2010, one of the reasons cited was unresolved issues reagarding CIS. In the context of potential NCAA membership, the three main issues identified were (1) Dual membership rules, (2) Athletic Financial Aid rules and (3) Quality of competition within Canada West. The CIS AGM is the only time of year where these issues can be dealt with formally by the CIS membership.

AMS

AMS Council: June 17, 2009

Post author By Neal Yonson
Post date June 18, 2009
12 Comments on AMS Council: June 17, 2009

AMS council tonight. Highlights:

Provincial Elections campaign budget revealed
Executive quarterly reports released
Student Court appointments

It’s a proxy party tonight. Low turnout, lots of substitutes. Leftover food also means a weird dinner combination: Pi-R-Squared with smoked salmon appetizers.

CASA Conference Recap

First up was a presentation to recap the recent CASA policy conference in Calgary. However, the presentation by Blake and Tim, which lasted just shy of forever, spent a lot of time outlining a laundry list of complaints about CASA, all of which have been brought up before. Less time was devoted to what actually occurred at the conference. Summary: Tim and Blake don’t like CASA. I would also suspect CASA doesn’t like Tim and Blake.

Some division within the executive was made apparent immediately when Tom Dvorak stated that CASA sent a letter addressing the AMS’s concerns in late April and that this letter was not shared with other executives or council. Hmmm.

Plenty of boring discussion (if you really care, I can send you notes), but the quote of the night came from Bijan:

“When students go to conferences, they like to have sex. There’s something about having sex with someone you’ll never see again that’s exciting.”

I could put it in context, but it’s so much better without it. Another great quote came from Jeremy McElroy, who noticed Blake’s constant negativity about CASA and asked: Did you have any fun in Ottawa?

In a show of more executive division, Johannes questioned where the numbers came from which outlined the cost of being CASA members, saying that the actual cost is much lower than claimed by Blake and Tim.

Lots of discussion; not much concrete came out of it, other than that documents need to be made available to everyone, and not hoarded. Also, this will continue to be an issue this year.

Provincial Election Campaign Presentation

Tim got up and gave a recap of the provincial election campaign that he ran. While there were successes including lot of work put into awareness and over 500 voters registered by the AMS, the most hotly anticipated part of this presentation was the budget for this campaign.

For background, I’ll refer you again to this Ubyssey editorial as well as a related radical beer tribune post. You can also read the recap from two council meetings ago about how part of this campaign was botched. And, as was confirmed tonight, it was at no small expense.

Without further ado, here is the budget breakdown:

[no idea why the huge gap is here]

Banners	616.85
Printing Costs	3,652.92
Ads in 24 Hrs	18,484.28
Bus Ads	3, 715.25
Website	2,627.29
Buttons	1,220.80
Design Services	445.70
Stickers	195.36
Hand Stamps	33.89
T-shirts	440.99
Videos	1,500.00
Campaigners	3,340.00
TOTAL	36.273.22

The ads in 24 Hrs (the newspaper) are absolutely mind-blowing. Geoff Costeloe was particularly enraged over this, calling it a crazy waste of money. I… concur.

Personally I also took issue with the fact that it took $2,600 to build this webiste. Andrew Carne pointed out that it was based on WordPress. I just buried my head in my hands at that point. Still, nothing compared to the money wasted on ads in 24 Hrs.

The budget is the subject of a Ubyssey article, but here’s the bottom line: it was a waste of money.

Executive Remarks

Blake’s Broadcast: 1st Quarterly Report available here; everything is in there.
VP External: 1st Quarterly Report available here; went to CASA conference; over 300 applications received for U-Pass subsidy; Translink is running “Be Part of the Plan”, encourage everyone to participate; looking forward to external policy committee meeting
VP Academic: 1st Quarterly Report available here; met with residence coordinator at UWaterloo, want to not only increase residence space but also its relevance; met with Michelle Aucoin about Olympics issues; hired student court; remodeled offices; working on TA training, university has allocated funding for it; met with fraternity and sorority representatives; reinstated University Commission
VP Finance: 1st Quarterly Report available here; AVP Catherine Metrycki did a lot of work to get a lot of stuff online; orientation for clubs with how to navigate AMS finance; looking at marketing for the upcoming year; attended alumni association retreat regarding alumni centre; looking at online payment systems to enable clubs to process credit card payments for memberships or events; Business Operations Committee is looking at Point-Of-Sale options, and AMS businesses contributed $1,114,981 to the AMS last year; preliminary budget prepped, found deficit, looking at budget reductions; budget will be presented next council meeting.
VP Admin: 1st Quarterly Report available here; met with student development about proposed renovations to Brock Hall; hired assistant
ECSS: missed this, but 1st Quarterly Report available here

Some Appointments-review stuff about salaries passed

Student Court Appointments

Emmanuelle Frederic – Chief Justice
Sara Askari – Judge
Feruza Abdajalieva – Judge
Alexander Cooke – Judge
Wilfred Chan – Judge
Adam Flanders – Alternate Judge
Jordan Snel – Alternate Judge
Constance Chan – Clerk

Conflict of Interest Motion

A motion came to council which would have required any member of council who also serves as a director of an organization which the AMS conducts business with to remove themselves from any In Camera sessions of council dealing with the other organization.

The goal appears to be the exclusion of UBC BoG reps, specifically Bijan, from In Camera sessions. However, while BoG is the most obvious example, there are probably other people on council who would also be affected by this and would also be required to sit out of In Camera sessions from time to time.

This was a Matt Naylor motion, who was not present tonight. His proxy, Alex Lougheed, did not feel comfortable motivating the motion since it was not his. I
t was eventually sent to Code and Policy. Should be interesting to see if this comes back to council sometime in the future.

Olympics Motion

Bijan brought a motion to invite Michelle Aucoin, who is in charge of Olympics stuff at UBC to present at the next council meeting for an hour. There should have been no discussion about this, but there was some. This also should have never been a motion in the first place, but it was. (Council doesn’t need to pass motions to invite people to present to council.) Anyways, next meeting, look forward to an hour of Olympics presentation/discussion.

Committee Appointments

Fundraising and Sponsorship Committee: John MacLean

Dave Tompkins: “Like the guy from Die Hard?” (Different speling, unfortunately. Dave looked it up on IMDB as a distraction from council.)

External Policy Committee: Dusty C.

Next meeting: July 8.

Athletics Issues

CIS restricts dual membership with NCAA

Post author By Neal Yonson
Post date June 12, 2009
2 Comments on CIS restricts dual membership with NCAA

The Ubyssey-edited version of this can be found at ubyssey.ca.

Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS), the organization which governs high-performance athletics at Canadian universities, sent a bold message to schools looking to join the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at their annual general meeting on Thursday. Voting 55-20 in favour, CIS members instituted a policy which places stringent restrictions on schools who pursue membership in both the CIS and the NCAA. Under the new rule, member schools are only allowed to play in the NCAA in sports not offered by the CIS.

“The NCAA is a gigantic, multi-sport business entity and quite frankly the CIS is not. So we believe that it could be a threat to the existence of CIS and we reacted accordingly,” said Dick White, University of Regina athletic director and outgoing CIS president. “I hope it at least creates some pause for thought, but I also understand that the school and its athletic director and its president will ultimately make a decision which they think is best.”

The two schools in question are UBC and SFU, the only CIS members who have openly expressed interest in the NCAA. SFU’s senior athletic director Dr. David Murphy spoke passionately against the membership restrictions during the meeting, arguing that it “reeks of insecurity and protectionism,” and that the CIS shouldn’t shy away from competition, but rather use it as an opportunity to better itself and grow stronger. Dr. Murphy expressed his regret that the new rule was adopted, but that SFU’s plans are already in motion:“The [NCAA] application form is in. We wait, and we find out in July whether or not we have been accepted.”

For UBC, which deferred its decision regarding NCAA application until at least 2010, this provides one more piece of the puzzle. Uncertainty over what action, if any, the CIS would take regarding dual membership has long been one of the sticking points in the university’s consideration of NCAA membership. While the new rule is not an outright ban on dual membership, it essentially makes the pursuit of the NCAA an all-or-nothing proposal since the pool of sports offered by the NCAA but not by the CIS is very narrow.

“We’re not saying ‘you can’t join’,” explained CIS CEO Marg McGregor. “UBC and SFU and any university that wants to can join. But as a result of that, we will not be the league of convenience. We want to be the league of choice.”

The issue of personal choice was indeed one of the key reasons UBC opposed the new rule. “I speak in favour of dual membership because I believe it does provide universities choices,” said Theresa Hanson, director of varsity athletics at UBC. “From a dual membership perspective, we could still make a commitment to CIS sport, continue some sports in Canada as well as move a considerable number of sports to the NCAA.”

UBC and SFU were not the only schools to oppose the new rule, with a handful of other schools also expressing their disapproval. Ivan Joseph of Ryerson opposed the change because he thought allowing dual membership would enable more Canadian athletes to stay at Canadian schools. Jennifer Brenning from Carleton was also opposed, pointing to the fact that the CIS now has three different sets of dual membership rules depending on whether you want to play in the NCAA, the NAIA, or the CCAA. Before this year, the CIS had no policy at all on dual membership.

While uncertainty surrounding dual membership has finally come to an end, the result doesn’t make UBC’s NCAA decision any easier. One of the biggest issues, academic accreditation, remains unresolved and Theresa Hanson acknowledges that the closer you examine the issue of NCAA membership, the more complex it becomes.“I think it provides more challenges, the outcome, but I really think that [Toope] will make a decision that’s in the best interests of the university and of our student athletes.”