Council Watch — No BSA debate
Ryan Bromsgrove
Opinion Editor
Feb 01, 2012
Given the recent kerfuffle regarding the BSA involving the minor inconvenience of more than $27,000 going awry, you’d expect Students’ Council to have some pretty strong opinions about them. Last week, they voted 15-8 in favour of granting a referendum for their members regarding a four-year extension of their Faculty Association Membership Fee. And given the publicly-available information thus far — that some unnamed person took advantage of a bank error to whisk away a tiny fortune and is currently going through the university’s disciplinary process which shows little sign of effectiveness — that’s probably the right way to vote. Give the decision to the business students over what to do with their faculty association.
But council is privy to more than just the publicly-available information, and eight of them, based on the full extent of their knowledge, decided to withhold their assent. The problem is that none of them bothered to explain why. Despite one-third of council voting against the motion, nobody took the time to speak against it. The closest we got was SU President Tighe’s revelation that there are outstanding requests of documents from the Audit Committee to the BSA from about a year ago, and combined with everything else lately that should certainly be worrying. But it was coupled with an explanation that the BSA provides valuable services that would be lost without the fee extension.
There was a long discussion in-camera after the BSA’s presentation at the previous council session, and councillors can’t debate on information that hasn’t been made public. But some information has been made public since then, and they certainly could have spoken about the embezzlement itself and how the BSA has handled the situation, ignoring any more specific details not yet made public.
To be sure, had they gone back in-camera to debate this openly, I’d be complaining about that as well, but these are the consequences of the reckless decision to go in-camera in the first place at the previous council — with no debate, by the way. It wouldn’t have been ideal for council to return to its secret debate, but secret debate sure beats no debate. Because a decision made with no debate, with a significant number of councillors on both sides, means only one thing. Everybody came to the vote with a pre-determined decision, unprepared to serve students best by engaging in debate, sharing their thoughts on the issue, and being willing to change their minds — or having sufficient conviction in their opinion to try to persuade others. If this is how council is going to deal with tough situations, they might as well stay home and vote via email.
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