July Report to BUSAC

Rob Lanteigne
Vice-President University Affairs
BUSAC Report
July 26, 2009

Welcome back council! This report is very lengthy due to the two and a half month gap between BUSAC meetings, so rest assured that future reports will not typically be 7 pages in length. Be aware though, that I have a habit of making my secondary reports and documents fairly long. Grab a coffee, kick back and enjoy reading about my summer so far.

Lobby Meetings

Within the past few weeks, I have had meetings with all four of our local federal MPs to speak about the issues of Student Financial Aid, Copyright and Academic Materials, and the issue of national research and data about Post-Secondary Education. In addition, I have had the privilege of briefly speaking with some of our provincial and national ministers, and the leader of Canada’s official opposition at announcements and events. I have been able to meet with:

May 20th – Dwight Duncan, Provincial Minister of Finance
May 25th – Tony Clement, Federal Minister of Industry
June 22nd – Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada
June 24th – Malcolm Allen, MP for Welland
June 25th – Rob Nicholson, MP for Niagara Falls and Justice Minister of Canada
July 14th – Dean Allison, MP for Niagara West-Glanbrook
July 14th – Rick Dykstra, MP for St. Catharines

At a Dwight Duncan luncheon, Sameer, Nazir and myself were able to ask about the new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) and its effects upon students. I spoke to Minister Clement about copyright issues, and was fortunate to have a picture with the minister posted on the Industry Canada homepage for a week. I met Michael Ignatieff at a public event in Welland, and was able to ask a question about ensuring access to post-secondary education for all qualified students, as well as filling the research gap at the federal level. I was also able to speak to him after the event. Mr. Allen will be helping us with issues surrounding student debt levels and ability to repay, and Mr. Nicholson is most interested in issues surrounding access for underrepresented students. Mr. Allison will be a great ally for us in the area of students with disabilities, and Mr. Dykstra continues to work for us on issues surrounding copyright and textbook importation laws. Many of our needs as students are being quite seriously tackled by our elected representatives of all party stripes, and I am fortunate to be building on a great tradition with long-established relationships through BUSU.

Inter-City Transportation Issues

As many of you may know, late last school year, GO Transit announced their expansion into the Niagara Region. GO Trains have already started rolling into St. Catharines and Niagara Falls on weekends and holidays until October, and rush-hour bus service will be coming to the region beginning in September, linking to the Go Train station in Burlington. This was a result of some hard lobbying in previous years, and we are happy to have a new way for our students to get to and from the GTA. The number of round-trips towards Toronto will exceed 20 daily in the fall.

In the aftermath of this announcement, I sent out a press release, which was picked up by the St. Catharines Standard. Some members of the private bus industry saw this coverage, and came into BUSU to meet with me about some of their concerns about GO Transit. Many of their concerns are extremely important, but especially a concern about the sustained level of coverage to the smaller cities and towns in Niagara should one of the two existing private carriers leave the area due to increased competition. This is certainly an area that I will be keeping my eye on throughout the year, as we need to protect the routes to Welland, Port Colborne, Niagara Falls, Fort Erie, Beamsville, Grimsby, Jordan and more.

A side-issue in this conversation led to the issue of offering a chartered bus service to our students out of town on weekends to many popular Ontario destinations at a reduced cost. Other student unions including Waterloo and Queen’s run a similar service for their students. We have done the research into the hometowns of our students, and believe that the demand might be there for certain routes leaving St. Catharines on Fridays. I have been following up with this company and have been contacting them about pricing for routes to Waterloo-Wellington, Peel, Durham, London-Sarnia-Windsor, and Kingston-Ottawa. This is still very much an issue-in progress, but if the price is right, we may roll out service on long weekends to gauge the demand for a regular, sustained service to some of these destinations.

The last transit-related issue deals with inter-municipal service in Niagara. As many of you know, there are currently six transit services in Niagara (St. Catharines including Thorold, Niagara Falls, Welland, Port Colborne, Fort Erie, and Pelham). Current laws prohibit these buses from crossing municipal lines in their service except for chartered routes, which is what BUSU buys through the U-Pass. The Niagara Region has hired a consulting company to look at the transit issues in the region, and has launched a survey to which we have posted a link on www.busu.net. I have submitted thoughts on behalf of BUSU to try and eliminate these barriers and borders which would allow for more efficient routes to get our students to and from Brock. Sameer has also been at meetings with this company. It appears that the ball is finally rolling on this issue, and we will be participating and monitoring the progress of this study throughout the year.

Provincial Grants

On May 1st, the provincial government announced that it was negatively affecting two grants available to students – the Textbook and Technology Grant, and the Distance Grants for students whose home is more than 80km away from any university or college. Both of these were previously available to any student who applied to them, however the government has decided to restrict them to only students who qualify for OSAP. Doing so took away the ONLY mechanism for students to receive government grants without being automatically forced into taking a loan as well. For our debt-adverse students, this is an especially significant blow. The Textbook and Technology grants for our remaining students will also not be increasing for this year as promised.

In the aftermath of this cancellation, I received some media coverage in the St. Catharines Standard, as well as a live interview on 610 CKTB.

Retail Operations

On May 25th, I was trained and worked a shift at SubCetera in the afternoon. All of the executive also underwent their training on different days, so that we are all familiar with the operations of our convenience stores. This allows us to understand the prespectives and needs of our employees, as well as having four extra fully-trained staff available for our stores in case we run into emergencies.

OUSA

My work with OUSA has been extensive so far this year. It “began” with the interveiws for the Director of Communications on May 8th to replace Tammy McQueen, who has moved on to a postgraduate program in Australia. As the only returning member of OUSA Steering Committee, I was asked to sit in on these interviews, where we eventually selected Alvin Tejdo to round out our staff team.

On May 11th, I was back in Toronto for a meeting with the Canadian Publishers Council (CPC), to review the results of a joint survey, and to discuss strategies to reduce the cost of academic materials in the future. Discussions related around the topic of “unbundling” CDs and ancillary information for students who just want a textbook with no support materials, and the future of online delivery methods including “digital textbooks” which can be “rented” with an expiry code, often at half the cost of a conventional hardcopy textbook. This was the 5th in a series of meetings with the publishers that began last year.

From May 26th to 28th, OUSA Transition Conference was held in Toronto, with the incoming VPUA’s and Presidents from across the province, as well as some of the outgoing members. The week included sessions on lobbying and media strategies, as well as some presentations from key organizational stakeholders (Kelly Jackson from the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, Paul Genest from the Council of Ontario Universities, Alex Usher from the Educational Policy Institute, Tyler Charlebois from the College Student Alliance, and representatives from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, and the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). All of these groups and more are vital partners that we have built strong relationships with over the years, and they help us achieve our educational mission.

The conference ended with a Steering Committee meeting, where the new executive slate of OUSA was elected. I am happy to let you know that I have been elected as the new OUSA VP Finance, alongside our new President, Dan Moulton from Western, and our VP Administration, Justin Williams from Waterloo.

Since that time, we have held two Steering Committee meetings, and our Strategic Planning retreat for the year. These have outlined our organizational priorities for the year including:
- The groundwork for our new Strategic Plan
- The continuation of the Blue Chair campaign this year
- The strategy to tackle the provincial tuition policy
- The strategy to tackle the new multi-year government plan for PSE after ‘Reaching Higher’ ends this year
- Media strategies
- Internal organizational functioning, such as a wiki to assist our lobbying efforts
- The revamp of the OUSA website
- Our policy development priorities
o Students with Disabilities
o Repayment Assistance Plan
o Student Success
o An Economic Lens on Student Issues
o University Differentiation
o University Inflation
- Our advocacy priorities
o Tuition
o Student Financial Aid
o Student Success
o Funding Excellence
I have also spent numerous days working from both Toronto and St. Catharines on the OUSA budget, as the new VP Finance. In previous years, financial controls have significantly lapsed, and the organization has gone two years without an audit. In addition, a lack of knowledge and policies around our finances have led to significant mis-postings, and budgets that look nothing like the actual expenditures. I have been leading a complete budget line-item overhaul, and the beginnings of developing strong financial controls and procedures for the organization. It’s easy to sum that up in a sentence or two, but it’s been a solid week of work so far, and will take a significant chunk of time moving forward this summer.

CASA

The CASA year started off with Brock hosting the Central Regional Transition Conference in late May. We had 24 student leaders here for a two day span, where they received an overview of the organization that would allow them to jump right into policy discussions at the next conference of the year. We were also able to show some great Niagara hospitality with a Maid of the Mist tour, dinner in the Skylon Tower revolving restaurant, and some winnings at the casino.

This was quickly followed by the Policy and Strategy Conference in Calgary, where we set organizational direction for the year. Outcomes of this conference included:
- An ambitious list of Policy Development Priorities
o First Nations, Metis and Inuit Student Issues
o International Students
o Childcare
o Access Grants
o Copyright and Intellectual Property
o International Branch Campuses
o Graduate Student Issues
o A Pan-Canadian Data Set
o Student Debt Cap
o Electoral Streamlining on campus
o Academic Materials
o Distance Education/Online Learning
o Students with Diverse Abilities
- Advocacy Priorities
o Metis, Inuit and First Nations Student Issues
o Democratic Accessibility
o Childcare
o Graduate Student Issues
o Academic Materials
o Access Issues
o Affordability
o Research Renewal
o Dedicated Transfer
- A motion to post all minutes, documents and agendas publicly available on the CASA website
- The defeat of a motion to deal with voting structure reform at CASA, but the continuation of a committee to work on a new proposal
- A motion to have complete bilingualism with simultaneous translation service available at the next conference, and explore more bilingualism options for the future. The previous year’s surplus was dedicated to finance this task
- A committee to review the fee structure of CASA
- A committee to create a new strategic plan (I sit on this one)
- A committee to review the governance structure of CASA (I sit on this one)
- And various policy committees

I was also re-elected as one of the Central Regional Coordinators, which gives me more input and communications responsibilities between conference periods. As a result of this position, I then attended the Leadership Retreat in Ottawa last week to further strategize our priorities for the year. As of this writing, the decisions that we made at this retreat are still of a confidential and sensitive nature, but I will happily note that the organization is shifting away from a staff-centered model to be much more responsive of member priorities and input, and the committees and decisions that will be made this year will help enshrine a process that allows for a much smoother and more accountable structure within the organization.

Projects

I have begun (and in some cases finished) a number of projects which are not currently visible, but will provide us with the valuable knowledge and background tools to make strategic decisions in the future. Others are results that will be seen by the Board and the student body shortly, once they have been finished.

Financial Restrictions Policy

Near the end of last year, I created, and the Board approved, a policy which restricts the use of any money that BUSU collects as a result of the University’s flat fee tuition model. Simply not charging ancillary fees on the extra billed tuition is not a feasible option, either in time or finance. So this “extra” money should be returned directly to students in certain ways. We already have policies surrounding some of them: ESLPs, Food Vouchers and Campus Support, but there are some options which the policy included, that have not been developed yet. I have been working to create policies on three options: Emergency Student Grant Program, Scholarships, and Bursaries.

Ontario University Funding Grants

The way Ontario funds universities is incredibly complex: the manual concerning this is over 130 pages long, and is missing half of the information that is necessary to truly understand how operating funding works in this province, both today and historically. For use by OUSA this year, and by BUSU and others in the future, I have been working on condensing the relevant information into a much shorter booklet for use in our lobbying and media strategies.

Student Union Fees across Ontario

The last major review of where we compare to other student unions in terms of fees charged is at least four years out of date. Myself and Alex have been working to catalogue all of the fees that are charged to students at every university across the province, to find out where we stand and help us in our preparations for the BUSU Strategic Plan review.

Students Guide to Representation

There has historically been no “one-stop-shop” for students who are interested in getting involved on decision-making bodies within the university, or who are interested in finding out which body or group is responsible for making decisions in their area of concern. This problem has now been addressed with the creation of the Students Guide to Representation, a listing of all of these bodies, how to get elected or involved with them, and what they do on campus. This will be a section within the Dayplanner this year, and will have its own section on the BUSU website.

Dayplanner

Speaking of the dayplanner, a task that I took on this year was all the text and content revamp that needed to happen for this year’s version. It is now sitting in the hands of the Brock Press, and ready to go for September.

Website

And speaking of the website, with our redesign, there are a number of content changes that have happened, and will continue to happen as well. With the assistance of Jordan, and the rest of the executive, the site map for our new design was created by myself, and I have written the content for over 10 of our new or redesigned pages, with more still to come.

Executive Video

We want to create a fun welcoming and informative video for our students, which can also be placed on YouTube and viewable for the world. Lianne and I jointly created the storyboard for this project, and we are working with Brock TV to figure out the filming logistics. I don’t want to spoil the project and tell you what it will be yet, but filming will happen in August and it’s going to be un----------believable.

BUSU Budgets

I have also been playing with historical numbers and doing some analysis on our previous years, to get a mindset and framework for how BUSU’s budget needs to look in the future, during our Strategic Plan discussion and creation.

Other

Each morning, the executive does two Smart Start presentations for incoming first years students in the Skybar Lounge. We also then show up at the Services Fair in the afternoon to answer any questions, as well as sell Access Gold, Lockers, BOC memberships, and to collect lists of volunteers. This takes a significant chop to our day each and every day, but is so productive and useful to inform the first year students about what we do for them, why and how.

I was also pleased to be a part of the BUSU Relay for Life team overnight on the Brock campus last month. Along with Alex, Sara, Trish, Jacky, Curtis and Cailin, we rocked the night and survived the rain to contribute to cancer research.

Closing Lyric of the BUSAC
“I’m on a boat and it’s going fast, and I got a nautical-themed pashmina afghan” – The Lonely Island