By Jessica Wind (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: May 22, 2013
The time has finally come for SUS to break ground on the fabled Student Union Building – that is, if they can make it through a general meeting.
The first Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) in April presented the two-page motion that, if passed with 75 per cent majority vote, would hopefully allow SUS to break ground this summer.
This same motion originally passed by referendum in 2011, but has to be reapproved every year.
“The lawyers build into the motion a one-year expiry,” SUS president Shane Potter explains.
The motion was unsuccessful after former Computer Information Systems Student Association (CISSA) president Derek Froese stated that inadequate notice for the meeting was given. Although his concerns were partially addressed at the meeting, the motion was still voted down and another EGM was scheduled for May 17 to readdress the motion.
However, the rescheduled EGM on May 17 caused Froese to once again question the SUS board regarding their efforts to provide students with adequate notice about the meeting. The point of contention concerns interpretation of the term “written notice,” which is how SUS is bound to inform students according to their own bylaws and by the BC Society Act.
“We’ve never ever had a problem with it at any general meeting in the past, so for it to come up during the building motion was a little bit strange,” Potter comments. “We did take it seriously – we looked at the policy and the policy does state that you do require notification by written notice. The problem is the term written notice is about the most legally ambiguous term that you could possibly have.”
Potter went on to explain that SUS then contacted five post-secondary schools in BC whose student unions operate under the same BC societies act that SUS adheres to.
“We talked to general managers, we talked to presidents, we talked to VP internals, we talked to everyone that we could,” he explains. “Essentially … they do basically the same thing we do. Written notice is satisfied under the society act by putting up posters [or] by posting on the website.”
In a discussion on the Facebook event page, it was suggested that SUS make a greater effort to inform every student about the upcoming meeting. Potter admits that sending out student-wide emails is not a bad idea, but notes that it would rely on the university to send out notice in a timely fashion.
“If we were to write into policy that [we have to] give notice through emails, the notification process would be delayed until we can make sure the university gets the emails out,” Potter explains. “I agree that we need to look at more creative ways of notification … But for us to write into the policies that we can’t have a valid general meeting [means] we’re going to have a lot of invalid general meetings.”
Potter says he is prepared to have a conversation about the definition of “written notice,” but feels that the SUB motion is not the place for such a debate.
“Let’s have a philosophical debate about what written notice means … but don’t stall the building of the student centre to do that,” Potter says. “That’s not fair for the students that are paying for this building.”
The EGM has since been rescheduled for Monday May 27. Emails have been sent out to students from the university on behalf of SUS and posters have been pinned throughout the campuses.
