Category: AMS

Once upon a time amidst the tacky coloured walls of the Almar Mater Society’s student union building, executive council was dominated by slates (basically political parties). Back then, elections were in some ways more colourful (in both the literal and figurative sense). Brand names were recognizable from miles away – the extreme conservative “The Right Choice” in navy blue, the centrist “Students for Students” in a lighter hue, and a communist resembling “SPAN”, not to be confused, though understandably often mocked, as SPAM. I need to insert here right away that I am a political product of the latter, though my political career took me past the great era of formal slates. Anyhow.

I have seen my share of executives interact with one another over the years, since 2002 until 2007, both before and after slates existed. By being a peripheral nuisance around the office, and having inherited some institutional gossip, I find myself unable to feel the same degree of outrage over recent events as the visitors who comment on this and other blogs

The reason I bring in slates into the picture is because they were a key vehicle through which politics was driven at the executive and council level. And I also include petty bickering into the term ‘politics’.

When I was running with SPAN, I experienced for the first time the true viciousness that is brought out of individuals during the electoral process. For instance, a colleague who I had previously considered a friendly acquaintance, sprayed me intentionally with water in order to get to a key postering spot before me. At another instance, physical threats had been posed. By the time the elections were over, the atmosphere was so tense that it was difficult to separate the personal from the professional. I personally got over it. And because my slate had swept the election that year, I did not experience the tensions that threaded through the year before.

Apparently (and this is a one sided claim) within executive council, it was an iron rule that each member of one slate would vote one way, and the other slate would oppose. Frequently the minority slate was voted down in their endeavours to the point where it was suggested that it was purely for the sake of sabotage. How valid this claim is I cannot assess, but I am willing to entertain the notion.

Enter the banning of slates. Former AMS president Spencer Keys championed this project primarily from an inclusiveness standpoint –individuals, no matter how qualified, who do not gain access to slates are severely disadvantaged in an election. This is true in “real life” as well, and in the AMS especially so.

Others would claim that there were other reasons why they supported this motion. For one, they found the blind loyalty towards a strict party line excessive and tiring. They may have felt like a footsoldier than a free thinking individual. There was enormous peer pressure within one slate to oppose the other parties.

Whether slates should in some way or form be reinstalled is a debate I would like to see on a different post. If I have one last comment on this, it would be that emotional baggage is an unfortunate part of continuity of a slate and its agenda. It’s the nature of the beast. It happens in the real world too.

And it’s this emotional baggage inherited from all these previous years which may have culminated into bitter executive dynamics, which is more the topic I would like to focus on. From the comments seen in previous posts, there seems to be a romanticized ideal of ‘executive cohesion’ floating around, the purpose or exact definition of which has not been elaborated by anyone so far. My guess would be that the executive should achieve a certain amount of reliability and trust among one another, as well as the ability to collaborate on joint executive projects. Personal squabbles should not sabotage the job they are elected to do, as in “I hate A so I am going to vote against anything A wants to do”. I don’t think anyone expects AMS execs to be best friends, or wear the same T shirts, or have brunch together every Sunday, or engage in a communal brainwashing program such that they become the same person (although I wouldn’t be surprised if these things have been done before).

This idea of ‘cohesion’ has been brought into conflict with an individual’s political agenda. The question here, then, is if there is a degree to which an executive (and I would argue council member) should limit her/his own politics in order to achieve cohesion with their (potential) colleague(s). This question has become especially pertinent in this particular case regarding the photo we published, where the political agenda antagonizes the very position of their colleague. I suppose it is a sticky situation. I can see how it could be taken personally by the individual affected. But should it? And will it?

Is it too naïve to believe that in our post-slate era, we should still be allowed to charge with political valence while allowing others to do the same? Removal of official slates did not equate political lobotomy. In the past few years we happened to experience little slate-like activity and consequently, a relatively quiet year. However, political assembly is a right everyone can exercise, and it is inevitable and arguably necessary at times. Kudos to A-Lo fans who mobilized to launch a poster campaign. Kudos to Knolligarch(s?) for mobilizing to deface them. I suppose I expect a sort of cordial professionalism once in office, which allows for a working rapport while their own individual politics still manifests into defacing each other’s posters.

In the end, and from the practical perspective of a former councillor, I would sprinkle enough of this “cohesion” ingredient into the executive bunch in order to achieve productivity from them – as individual executives fulfilling their elected portfolio, and as the group that is at times required to present some sort of unified front. It seems to me like the latter point is threatened for some readers here. From a very systematic point of view, the people have picked their representatives and all the strings that come with these individuals. The political passion which I see in both team Lougheed and team “Knollarchy” does not have to be squashed just yet for the sake of executive cohesion, or pleasantries, or platitudes. Not yet at least. It will be the role of AMS council to watch the progress of the executives and decide if some or all of the executives are unable to splice out the personal from professional well enough to meet council’s standard. I have a feeling it will become obvious soon enough.

An excruciatingly long agenda was set for this last meeting before the winter break. After sitting on their laurels for a whole term, the Arts caucus decided to put everything they ever wanted in the AMS into this one meeting and throw it at us like a brick. Items of interest included re-establishing “unofficial” slates (whatever that means), a default role-call vote for all non-procedural motions, and code changes to try and make people submit documents earlier. The first one failed, the second carried, and the others I forget about. Whatever.

I want to spend this post talking about something else though. Now, journalism in general, and blogging in particular is the ultimate form of political passive-aggression. One can critique, bitch, call people out, and watch. One doesn’t have to do anything, or be accountable to anyone – and that’s what makes it fun to write (and presumably to read). Well, dear readers, right now I’m going to commit the tacky act of trying to both do, and blog at the same time.

I haven’t talked much about this on the blog (if at all) but I’ve been chairing an AMS committee for a few months now. This committee was originally envisioned to look at the idea of a randomly selected student’s assembly to supplement the AMS democracy and make it more representative of all students. Its mandate was broadened to include any form of improving political representation and engagement in the AMS democracy, and the committee was accordingly christened “the ad-hoc representation and engagement reform committee”. We’ve been looking at a variety of ideas to improve political representation over the last six months, ranging from changes to elections systems, to council composition, to the creation of new populist bodies like a student’s assembly or wisdom council, to more internal issues like committee reform and executive office hours.

Some of these ideas are pretty substantial, and have the potential for inconclusive philosophical debate. Some would take a fair amount of money and effort to implement. Others, we thought, were fairly straightforward and non-controversial. One such idea was a change in the voting system for AMS executives from First Past the Post (a terrible system) to Condorcet (an empirically better one). The basic idea of Condorcet voting is that it selects a “consensus” candidate to win. That is, the person that most people prefer over most other people will win. If that sounds vague, think of it this way: strategic voting is impossible. Vote splitting is impossible. The candidate that would win against all other candidates in 1-on-1 matchups is declared the winner. Condorcet offers substantial differences from FPTP, and also from the more widely known instant runoff voting, particularly in campaigns with three or more strong candidates.

This voting system is carried out by a ranked ballot (you mark candidates according to preference 1,2,3), and a fairly straightforward counting procedure which bases the winner off of a hierarchy formed by one-on-one matchups. For more information, see the wiki article on the method HERE.

Our committee learned about this system over the course of about four weeks. As soon as members of our committee understood the system, they agreed that it was superior. It was not controversial in our committee discussions, unlike other ideas that had been much more divisive. A few of us tried our hand at writing up the necessary code, since the researcher/archivist who normally would help with this task wasn’t up to it. So here we were, with code all drafted up (albeit a bit hurriedly, but with at least 5 revisions), unanimous approval within our committee, and the honest opinion that this is a really good, if small, change to the AMS democracy. We invited an expert on voting systems to give a presentation to council about the benefits of the Condorcet method. A member of the committee took council through a detailed simulation of how the counting procedure works, covering even unlikely scenarios of concern. We did a little demostration of the method and carried out the procedure on the spot. Then there was debate.

In this debate, several things began to dawn on me.

The quality of this debate was one of the poorest I’ve seen at AMS (though there’s probably been worse – I’ve only been around for less than a year). AMS council is often capable of really insightful, careful, and interesting debate. And when that’s the case, good decisions tend to follow. Here, there was clouded, misguided, and wrongheaded debate – and quite obviously, the results were less than ideal. What really disturbs me is the apparent incapability of most councilors to pay CLOSE attention, understand, and reach a decision on a slightly involved piece of code in the council chambers. It is well acknowledged that the council chambers is more or less the worst place to grasp code, improve wording, and micromanage technicalities. What disturbs me even more though is that given this (well-known) fact, council still doesn’t trust its committees – the working groups of the society – enough to take their advice! So given this mistrust, council needs to truly grasp ideas before they vote on them. Unfortunately, they get paralyzed and confused whenever they’re asked to understand and really concentrate on something a bit involved (like say, a voting system). Then they need only cry ignorance and confusion as a basis for turning that thing away, and before we know it, all technical and structural changes are nearly impossible.

I don’t take a pessimistic view on this: I think that nine out of ten moderately intelligent people have the intellectual wherewithal to listen, understand, and respond to a clear presentation. After all, we’re in university. But people emailing, facebooking, and dreaming when slightly involved material is being presented really doesn’t help. Closed minds don’t help either – and I saw some of that tonight.

In our committee we spent considerable time trying to decide what level of detail would be the most convincing to AMS council in regards to this particular motion. Our initial tendency was to keep it general and hope that council would believe and trust our unanimous judgement as a committee of council. Then we got cold feet and decided it would be a good idea to include the detailed simulations so that each councilor could make a informed, down-to-the-mechanism, decision for him/herself. Both these objectives failed abjectly. Not only did many councilors and an executive seem to distrust our motives (by making ludicrous conjectures about Condorcet favoring certain political stripes), but the greater proportion of councilors had absolutely no grasp of the system we were proposing and its very real benefits – as was made depressingly clear by strings of irrelevant comments, inapplicable criticisms, and illogical questions.

There were a few fair criticisms. Precious few. One was the “non-standard” code language we had chosen, which described a protocol in more mathematical language than usual. A few others regarding the breaking of ties and vote thresholds for candidate re-reimbursement were fair, and certainly worth a few more clauses. The significant one was how such a system would be implemented given the dire reality of an inflexible, expensive, and apparently non-functional computer system the AMS has purchased. Other comments ranged from the old standby of “it would cost to many resources,” at the most benign, to “but it won’t increase voter turnout!!!111” at the most irrelelvant, to “why would we elect the second best person form some random thing with vote-splitting,” and “what is the success rate of this system?” at the most bewildering. (paraphrases).

So, zooming back out again, here’s a generalized question. Given this example, (of a fairly small change that should be a no-brainer, but due to it’s slightly involved technical nature, turns out to be a quagmire of misunderstanding), how do we as s
tudents expect the AMS to function at a level that reflects a degree of intellectualism? Especially when it come to structure and administration changes of a slightly involved nature? AMS has passed, and I hope it will continue to pass initiatives far more over-arching, radical, and serious than this trivial example. The thing is that some cool and necessary good ideas can be explained by expressive words and hand-waving, and some cool and necessary good ideas cannot. They simply require detailed, painstaking, sequential procedures. Unfortunately, most structural reforms fall into the latter category- and this is the category that our current structure handles so very poorly. I’m sure the irony of this catch 22 isn’t lost on you.

That’s my frustration for today. I’ll probably regret it in the morning.

Yesterday there was an AMS council meeting. I missed it, but since everyone loves hearing about the machinations of democracy, or better yet, themselves, here’s a summary written up by Blake Frederick, the AVP Academic and University Affairs (otherwise known as Brendon’s minion), on his brand-new blog: http://universityaffairs.blogspot.com/. I also have word that a certain illustrious blog was featured to encourage more people to run for office! woot!

Reading Blake’s summary over, it strikes me that the code and policies committee is a bit ridiculous. Yesterday they brought forward a policy restricting sound recording and video recording at AMS council and committee meetings. This is a topic that when you really think about it, might actually be important a couple times a year. Whatever. But code & policies has pro-actively taken it on! It almost instantaneously devoted attention to this (in my opinion silly) topic, to introduce (in my opinion silly) code amendments, when at the same time, code & policies has been sitting on some big items that have literally been waiting for attention for years. Big items like committee reform, and a students’ assembly. These are initiatives that actually had council support, and partial approval, but were sent to the committee for some more work and expertise. Hah – the committee is basically a junkyard of abandoned policy. Apparently, committee chair Scott Bernstein’s personal aversion to the gaze of video lenses (the horror!) is more important than council’s priorities.

This actually brings up some bigger topics:

• Council tends to bundle things off to code & policies when anything of a slightly technical nature comes up, or when they can’t seem to agree. This means that any complex or controversial policies end up being delayed indefinitely, and council can conveniently forget about them. This is also symptomatic of the fact that other working groups in the society don’t seem to draft policies at all. There isn’t a great venue for policy consultation other than the committee, and the whole council itself. Both have proved agonizingly inefficient in different ways.
• In the terms of reference for the committee (code section V article 6), it is clear that the body is to be used by council as an expert group. If the code & policies committee doesn’t follow council’s priorities, in favour of (in this year’s case) bylaw changes and the chair’s personal initiatives, there’s a problem.