Council Report - December 8

Hello Council,
Good luck on your exams, save travels back home or on holiday vacations, and may you get to spend this special season with your families, friends and loved ones.

Municipal Housing

I attended a meeting of the Thorold Town and Gown committee. Only routine matters took place and it was a short meeting, the increased policing effort between Brock and the Niagara Regional Police seems to have the intended effect of lowering the number of instances of problems in the area.

A few weeks ago, St. Catharines has passed a new housing bylaw which eliminates any references to certain types of housing, namely, boarding houses, rooming houses and lodging houses. The intent of this bylaw was to make it easier for fire and safety inspections to happen within rental properties, without legitimizing the conversion of some properties from single family homes to rental properties. The City of Thorold may be looking at similar action in the future.

Lastly, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the final appeal of the Oshawa zoning bylaw. This incredibly controversial city bylaw targeted certain neighbourhoods within a short walk of UOIT and Durham College, and placed severe restrictions on the area, including limiting the number of beds, parking spaces, requiring landlord permits, and more. It was challenged for unconstitutionality all the way through the court system. By rejecting this appeal, the SCC has basically reinforced the right of municipalities to set their own zoning standards as the city sees fit. This makes every future zoning decision so important, as the “unconstitutional” argument is not likely to hold weight anymore.

Senate

I have about 300 pages of course change requests to sift through, the same amount of work as usual each year for the Undergraduate Program Committee as each department submits their requests for next year. Keeping in mind the Brock 2014 plan and the potential phase out of 3-year degrees, I will be keeping a close eye on this process with every subcommittee.

The Governance Committee, as well as many others, continue to make recommendations about the academic review process which Brock gets to develop to our own needs, but must be submitted to the province by mid-March.


Referendums

I have been corresponding with the university about the various referendums which may be coming forward in February this year. Chris Green and I have a meeting on Monday Dec 7th about this matter. The report is written before that date, so I will be updating council verbally about the outcome.

OUSA

Last week was OUSA’s Lobby Conference, my most favourite time of the year. Lianne and I travelled to Toronto for four days, three of which were jam-packed with intense lobbying. OUSA had over 70 meetings scheduled for this week, and 16 delegates in 4 teams to do it.

The week took a rough and interesting start, as the PC Party staged a “final stand” protest against the impending HST legislation, grinding the operations of Queen’s Park to a halt. Two members were kicked out for the session (could be as short as a few months, as long as two years), but refused to leave the Legislature, disrupting any business that could be conducted. As a result, votes were delayed and rescheduled, and MPPs were called to emergency House Duty at other unscheduled times. This messed up greatly our perfectly crafted schedules, but it worked out OK. The week was a resounding success with our messages about Student Financial Assistance, Tuition, and Student Success.

I was the lead of a lobby team (Ringo) including delegates from Mac, Waterloo and Laurier, and over the course of the week I was able to meet with:
MPP Dunlop
Minister Bradley
Minister Matthews
A staffer for MPP Berardinetti
6 key policy staff members from MTCU
Minister Broten
MPP Jeffrey
Minister Gravelle
MPP Sandals
MPP Orazietti
MPP Mitchell
Minister Bartolucci
Minister McMeekin
As well as crossing paths and having side conversation with many others. Five other meetings were either deferred or cancelled due to the shenanigans in the House.
OUSA was, as a whole, able to meet with about ¾ of the cabinet, including Minister Milloy from MTCU. The response to our message was fantastic, and we look forward to seeing the policy and political outcomes as a result of this conference.



CASA

There was a meeting of the policy chairs held to divvy up tasks and update committee membership for the next policy cycle before the March conference. I will be chairing the International Branch Campuses group, and have begun to conduct some research on this topic already. I will also be participating in the Early Outreach policy group, and continuing with the Childcare group.

I also participating in helping clean up/correct some of the meeting minutes from the AGM a few weeks ago.

On Tuesday, two hours before the BUSAC meeting, there will be a conference call to finally vote for once and for final, on the new CASA voting structure. Be sure to ask me the outcome during the meeting if you wish.

Student News from Across the Country

This may become a routine section, we’ll see what other interesting news there is to report. This is something I keep tabs on all the time, but rarely do we see a two-week stretch like this one. But to keep you updated on the goings-on of the past two weeks:

Alma Matter Society at the University of British Columbia

President Blake Frederick and VP External Affairs Tim Chu submitted a formal Human Rights complaint to the United Nations about tuition rates in British Columbia making university inaccessible, supposedly violating some treaty that Canada has signed. The reaction on the UBC campus was swift and harsh: this action was not endorsed by council and cost at least $3000 in legal fees, maybe more. The reputation of UBC is at stake as well, according to many. The AMS council had an emergency meeting (which Frederick and Chu skipped), with unanimous resolutions to withdraw the UN complaint, and to request the resignations of both Frederick and Chu. They have refused to do so, and thrown two of their other executives “under the bus.” A formal impeachment meeting is scheduled for this weekend.

Dalhousie Students’ Union

The past few weeks have been considering whether to impeach their VP Internal, Mark Hobbs around issues of job performance. A meeting was scheduled for last week. After council deliberated, the motion to impeach failed: 13 in favour, 14 against, 5 abstensions: needed 2/3 to pass.

Canadian Federation of Students

Probably the most contentious part of the past two weeks, held their AGM in Gatineau. The ‘reform package’ of over 30 motions including policies on media openness, posting minutes online, random selection of judicial boards, the notification of all legal proceedings, separate budgets for the CFS-Services division, and cessation of legal action against members who have recently held referendums to leave, among others, was put forward by a number of Quebec schools. The ‘anti-reform’ motion, referred to ominously by its number ‘Motion Six’, was put forth by Carleton to make it tougher to leave the Federation. This motion would double the number of signatures needed to initiate a referendum (from 10% of the student body to 20%), lengthen the minimum waiting period between referendums about the CFS (from two years to five years), and limit the number of referendums that could be held in any years to four (there are no number restrictions currently, and at least 13 schools have submitted petitions to hold referendums this year.) The current window of up to 6-months notice required is already criticized as too short, with petitions required to be submitted before October 15th if a vote is to be held in the same academic year. It was a motion clearly acknowledged by both sides to lock in members and prevent attempts to leave the organization. No parallel motion was introduced about the process to join the CFS.

At the meeting, Quebec delegates were reportedly bullied and harassed, and some schools were asked to sign legal documents making them responsible for ‘any ramifications’ if their motions passed. Kwantlen, a school in the reformist movement, had their hotel rooms cancelled. Journalists who were part of delegations were forced to stop reporting on the conference. Only one CUP journalist was allowed inside, but was barred from interviewing anybody, or publishing any stories, until the conference finished. Willful confusion was created, with fake twitter accounts about CFS Quebec delegation, McGill graduate students, and even CASA were created to cause confusion for anyone following the proceedings.

In the highly contentions (and well-followed via Twitter) plenary session, all but two of the reformist motions failed. The ones that did pass were amended: one to put a list of all boycotts online, and one to make the minutes of opening and closing plenary available to members on request, though not on a public website. A motion to collaborate with CASA on issues of mutual agreement failed resoundingly. During the intense debate time for ‘Motion Six’, the fire alarm was pulled, and the meeting chair refused to recognize the allotted end time for the meeting once delegates returned. In a bylaw amendment that required 2/3 support, the motion received 44 votes in favour, 19 against, with 6 abstentions. The chair ruled it as carried, but the reformist movement protested: the CFS bylaws state that “2/3 present” must vote in favour, not “2/3 present and voting”. With 69 schools in the room, 46 would have been 2/3. The CFS officially claims this to be carried, but (even more) legal challenges may be pending, putting the official outcome of this vote into the unknown category right now.

VPUA Job Tip of the Week

Tip #7 – Globecampus.ca

We’re back to information sources this time around. Globecampus.ca/blogs is the rival compliment to the Macleans on Campus blogging team. So rival in fact, that a mother-daughter team in the Dobson-Mitchell family blogs against their son-brother Scott Dobson-Mitchell who writes for Macleans. Globe also features Joey Coleman, a former McMaster and current U Manitoba student who used to write for Macleans, and a few other student bloggers. This site isn’t as easy to navigate with a comments section that doesn’t work so well, and no central gathering page to see which blogs have been updated recently. But to find out about more goings-on across the country, you’d be hard-pressed to exclude Joey Coleman from the top-5 known names in PSE reporting. His often controversial topics can attract upwards of 60 comments, and is some fascinating reading (again: remember the reporting biases) for anyone getting a handle on some of these issues.

Closing Lyric of the BUSAC

“You make me smile like the sun
Fall out of bed
Sing like a bird
Dizzy in my head
Spin like a record
Crazy on a Sunday night”
- Uncle Kracker