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: Student Politics
Categories
AUS Student Court Ruling: WTF?
Might as well go a bit further into the Student Court ruling, for the sake of the archives. (The next time Student Court makes a questionable ruling, hopefully people will come here to find out why the last one was questionable too.) But not too in depth, so don’t be scared off. Unlike Naylor’s “Rising Scourge of Kritarchy”, reading the ruling is hopefully not a pre-requisite to understanding this post.
In going through the ruling, Student Court’s decision-making narrative appeared to go something like this:
[1] Mr. Trasolini, the Appellant, would like us to rule on the validity of Ricardo Bortolon’s decision to count a disputed ballot in favour of Mr. Platt.
[2] AMS Code gives constituencies the ability to make their own rules governing elections, provided that a set of 20 conditions are met.
[3] In AUS electoral code some of those conditions are met explicitly but some are only met implicitly, by giving the AUS Elections Committee (AUSEC) the discretion to set specific rules.
[4] There seem to be two main issues with which the Court is presented in this case:
1) Was the electoral framework sound? And, if so
2) Was the application of the framework correct in this case?
[5] For the parts of AUS Code where the AUSEC is given discretion, they did not set specific rules before the election. Instead, they used their discretion to deal with issues as they arose.
[6] AUS Code, by not having explicit rules and simply giving the AUSEC discretion to make decisions, does not satisfy the conditions set out in AMS Code governing constituency elections.
[7] We find the AUS Constitution to be in violation of AMS Code.
[8] In the event of a violation of AMS Code, the AMS Bylaws give us the power to render an action “void and of no effect”
[9] We consider the AUS Presidential Election to be an action, and declare it to be void and of no effect.
[10] Since the election has been invalidated, it is unnecessary to rule on the validity of the disputed ballot.
The UBC Board of Governors will be holding an extraordinary Board Committee meeting tomorrow, April 21st, to approve the new Commerce student fees and a Board 3 for the Sauder building upgrades (agenda). It’s important to note that the date-stamp on the agenda is April 19th. This means that there was only two days of notice given to the public (and Board members, as I have confirmed). This gives extremely little time for any consultation or feedback to happen. As members of the public are required to apply for tickets at least 24 hrs in advance, it makes it extremely hard for any interested parties to attend.
The agenda lists only the following four open items, and Sean Heisler, student Board rep, has confirmed that there are no closed items on the agenda:
Finance Committee
Join Property & Planning and Finance Committee
- 2.1 Sauder School of Business Building Project
Considering all the controversy surrounding the CUS Building Fee, it’s alarming to see this being pushed through so quickly and under the table.
In particular, this meeting raises a number of interesting questions:
1. Why is this so pressing that an extraordinary meeting has to be called?
2. Knowing the controversy surrounding this fee and the building project, is this being deliberately done semi-secretly?
3. There is no extraordinary Full Board meeting scheduled. Will these resolutions be brought into effect prior to a resolution of the full Board?
4. Is the Board 3 being rushed to prevent students from being able to change the building program now that they are a major donor?
Further discussion, rampant speculation, and a detailed analysis of each item after the jump.
On Friday, Student Court handed down a decision in Trasolini v. AUS Elections Committee which concluded that this year’s AUS Presidential Election is “void and of no effect”.
Upon reviewing the decision, Brian Platt sent an email to AUS council announcing that he was stepping down immediately. Elysia Pine, who was elected as AUS VP Internal this year, ascends to the presidency on an interim basis until the AUS can figure out what to do next. Basically the two major details that need to be worked out:
1) Who is the interim president? Should it be Elysia or should AUS council appoint someone else to fill this role?
2) When should the by-election be held? Could the AUS really hold a legitimate presidential election during exams, or worse, during the summer? Or is September the only viable option?
There will almost certainly be a special AUS council meeting held this week devoted to figuring out these details. Unfortunately there’s no obvious best course of action here.
With many uncontested (or essentially uncontested) races, SUS elections have not had much excitement factor this year. (Except maybe this.) Still, there’s one race worth talking about, and Kevin Moore shares his thoughts on that.
SUS AMS Rep
The race for SUS AMS rep is looking to be the most exciting of the SUS elections. Every other race is either uncontested, or has a councilor in it against a bunch of new people.
We’ve uploaded and posted links to all of the reports arising from the AMS Electoral Fraud investigation on our Twitter feed but since not everyone is twitter-savvy just yet, here are the links to:
Final Report from Isabel Ferreras (Elections Administrator)
Report from Forensic Data Recovery (Independent Auditing Firm)
Revised Elections Results presented in a somewhat awkward format.
Final cost to the AMS: currently estimated at $42,000-43,000.
As has already been discussed in a number of places already, UBC has recently created a Student Editorial Team to go along with The Administration Blog, where Pierre “zeeVP” Ouillet and Brian “BowtieBrian” Sullivan can communicate directly with the UBC community. The fact that the various different media have managed to each take something different from what was discussed during the first meeting is, I think, a positive thing. In that spirit, this posting is about something that definitely won’t be appearing in any other media source.
During the meeting we were discussing the (then-upcoming) CUS fee referendum when BSul mentioned something about an athletics fee at UVic having been recently turned down. It was a throwaway line, really, but my ears perked up due to my fanatical interest in athletics fees. As I looked into the details surrounding the proposed UVic athletics fee I realized something: UBC already did what UVic had proposed and had gotten away with it, successfully avoiding ministry intervention. And not only that, UBC will probably get away with it again in the future too.
The EUS Elections
Coverage by Bowinn Ma.
• EUS President 2007-2008
• AMS Councilor 2006-2008
• EUS Vice-President Internal 2006-2007
• EUS Executive Social Coordinator 2005-2006
Currently an Arts student, Bowinn is two years removed from the EUS. For reference, she and her government brought Engineering such initiatives and services as the Engineering Student Centre Project, the EUS Organizational Structural Changes, EUS Constitutional Reform, First Year Study Space, e-nEUS, PP Clubroom Crawl, Policy Reform, the branding and marketing reform process, and Tutoring Services.
Candidate Forum Moderator: Matthew Naylor, Arts
Attendance: More than at AMS Elections Debates
Length of time: 3.5 hours.
As per my AMS Elections coverage pieces, I must insists that this is an opinion piece. Don’t like it? Too bad.
This election is an exciting one indeed. With a whole whackload of opposition candidates, every position is ripe with competition between the ‘bred’ candidate (ie. Got involved through the rungs and layers of volunteer positions leading up to Executive positions, high levels of experience, understanding of the inner workings of the Society, respect for the Constitution and the processes it protects) and the ‘new’ candidate (ie. Little if any understanding of the organization, next to no experience in any of its processes or student government in general, high levels of passion and anger, perhaps overly enthusiastic about what I personally believe are somewhat unrealistic goals). I describe these as I see it, based on me watching hundreds of people put in enormous amounts of effort over the greater part of a decade and seeing what can be realistically accomplished through it all.
This year on Insiders we’ve tried to stay away from ranty editorials but this time I can’t resist.
I was brought into this commerce fee thing innocently enough, when Alex told me about a CUS meeting where they would be discussing the fee. I was happy to stay out of it and let him deal with it all until I got a message saying that he couldn’t make the meeting and could I please go take notes in his place? So I went, and got my first taste of the CUS.
From the beginning, the process behind running the referendum has been poisoned and as is widely acknowledged, is an inititative of the Dean, not the CUS. Most, if not all, of the info the CUS went on appeared to have come in the form of “Dean Dan said…” and the CUS blindly trusted anything that was said. I understand that Dan is a popular fellow. I had the pleasure of working with him on a university committee considering NCAA membership. He’s charismatic and persuasive. But it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily on your side.
So as far as the comments Dean Dan made today, we had given Dan an outline of what we suggested we would like to see him talk about. That being said, Dean Dan is obviously in a position where he wants, you know, he is personally invested in this and we really wanted him to share the information that he shared with us two Fridays ago. So he shared that information with students as well. He went on to share his own personal biases as well.
Connor McGauley, incoming CUS President
From March 1, 2010 CUS meeting
Categories
The Henry Angus Tuition Fee
Commerce students are before the ballot now. There are some good backgrounders out there. We scrapped ours because frankly, it was too dry. The important lessons coming from the history are:
1. The rhetoric behind accreditation grew stronger with time. At first it was not being mentioned, then there were short references, now there’s direct citations from documents no one’s seen.
2. Fun accounting tricks took place. The development was “phased” and then a lot of the project was shifted into Phase 1 slowly in what is most likely an attempt to maximize funds from the first CUS referendum. This includes things that didn’t need to be there, like A/V.
3. Phase 2, in a sense, has to happen. If only Phase 1 occurs, its costs go up because building code and seismic improvements are in Phase 2. When you’re tearing down walls to upgrade to code, you may as well save money and make those walls pretty. It would be really stupid to not do Phase 2.
The fact that ‘phasing’ is irrelevant if you have to do both is beside the point. What’s important to note from the history is that there is this financial model that was created by the administration, and they’re relying on the inflexibility they built in to get a desired outcome. It’s like arguing “we shouldn’t stop the train, because I deliberately broke the breaks.”
This piece goes into the nature of tuition and student fee accounting, what’s wrong with this question, and the bad precedents it is setting.