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WHAT WE DID LAST SUMMER (AND BEFORE THAT)
Those of you who were here last time will recall that I talked quite a bit about BAGB
Pic of bag + bee
Pic of BAGB committee
So now you know what BAGB is.
But why do we have a BAGB?
Well, it all began … [fading screen? To indicate flashback] with Elin Tayyar
Elin (our VP Finance) thought it might be useful to spin the AMS businesses off into their own separate entity, for a number of reasons. There might be tax benefits (or at least an avoidance of tax problems). It might also let the business side of the AMS pursue business without too much interference from the political side. This would mean that the political side, or the student government side, in other words Council and the Executive, would be following the policy of Nose In, Hands Off, a policy that had already been recommended by an outside consultant we brought in, Glenn Wong.
Glenn made a number of recommendations, one of them being that we introduce a Director of Services to oversee the support staff on the student government side. This position later became known as the Executive Director position, and it is supposed to be the equivalent of the General Manager’s position, but on the student government side. That is, the General Manager will oversee all the business operations, and the Executive Director is to oversee the Communications Manager, the Events Manager, the University and Government Relations Advisor, the Student Services Manager (formerly called the ECSS), the SASC Coordinator, and me (your Archivist and Clerk of Council).
The General Manager is Ross Horton. At the moment the Executive Director position is vacant.
But back to Elin. Elin proposed a committee to look into spinning off the businesses, a committee that was at first going to be called the Extraordinary Restructuring Committee, but that was changed because of the intervention of Hans Seidemann, head of the Boss Committee (also known as LPC, which stands for … Anyone? Do I have to sing the song again? ... The Legislative Procedures Committee.)
Some of you may remember Hans. He took a keen interest in the minutes of SAC. This endeared him so much to Caroline, who was in charge of SAC last year, that she presented him with two pies at one Council meeting.
Pieing picture?
Anyway, when he wasn’t helping with the SAC minutes, Hans took an interest in our acronyms and decided that this restructuring committee should be renamed the [read first, then click] Reorganization of Business Operations Committee, or Robocom.
Robocom hired a coordinator named Eric Gauf [see photo at end of 2012 What is the AMS presentation], who did a lot of work and ended up making the recommendations that led to the creation of BAGB [bag + bee], which in the end turned out to be not a separate entity, but a committee of Council tasked with advising on our businesses. Its chair this year, its first year of operation, is Erik MacKinnon, who you may have heard speak here about Whistler Lodge and Boom!Pizza.
So we went from GLENN to ELIN to ERIC to ERIK [shift letters] to BAGB [letters, then bag + bee].
Elin Tayyar, along with former president Jeremy McElroy, was also instrumental in committing us to building a brewery. At first the idea was to put a brew pub or a microbrewery in the New SUB, but when that became impossible Elin suggested partnering with the new project at the UBC Farm to put the brewery there. Council approved this idea last March, and there’s a Brewery Committee working on it.
Speaking of the new SUB, if you’re wondering how it came about, I can transport you very quickly back to 2008, when students voted in a referendum to approve a fee for a new Student Union Building (newspaper headline from end of my 2010 sub history presentation). This was a very significant development; it changed the conversation about plans for the centre of campus. The University had been talking of creating a University Town here, complete with high-rise market housing, but plans changed because we were able to offer $85 million for a new SUB.
Then followed some years of negotiations with the University over who would be the architect and who would be the project manager. These did not always go smoothly. [Ubyssey front page of Tristan Markle versus Brian Sullivan: http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_2009_01_30.pdf]
But finally there were agreements and the new SUB construction got underway with a ceremonial ground-breaking on February 29, 2012. And now here we are, a year or so out from moving into our new building.
Speaking of referendums and Student Union Buildings, this coming Friday marks an interesting anniversary which will be celebrated quite widely, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy [headline? Photo?]. This was relevant to the AMS and UBC, and the Student Union Building, because the day of the assassination (November 22, 1963) was supposed to be the final day of voting in a referendum on building this building, the one we’re in now. Because of the assassination, UBC cancelled classes that day, and the AMS postponed the last day of voting to the following Monday.
http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_1963_11_25.pdf
That referendum failed, by the way, so you may wonder how we’re in this building. But they reran it in February 1964 and it passed. So the lesson is, I guess, if at first you don’t succeed, vote, vote again.
…
We don’t care too much about Toronto in these parts, so you may not recognize this man:
Rob Ford
I mention him not because he has any connection to the AMS (thank goodness, I hear you say): AMS Council has produced a couple of prime ministers (John Turner, Kim Campbell) and we even had a Council member (James Sinclair) who went on to father a daughter who married a Prime Minister (Margaret and Pierre Trudeau). He thus may posthumously become the grandfather of a Prime Minister (Justin Trudeau). We also had a member at large (Mike Harcourt) who went on to become mayor of Vancouver and Premier of British Columbia, but I don’t know of any Toronto mayors who got their start here.
I mention Rob Ford, though, because from the news reports it has emerged that the bylaws for the city of Toronto somewhat resemble the bylaws at the AMS. City Council in Toronto cannot remove the mayor; they were reduced to passing a motion asking him to take a leave of absence. Our bylaws used to say that AMS Council could remove members of the Executive, but we were informed a few years ago by our lawyers that that provision contravened the Society Act, one of the Acts that governs the AMS.
So in one of our recent referendums we amended our bylaws to remove the offending section, and now the only way to remove an Executive would be by referendum of the membership or by a general meeting of the membership. We did try this three years ago at the end of the November scandal known as UNgate.
UNgate erupted in November 2009, after the AMS President and the VP External ((Blake Frederick & Tim Chu) hired lawyers to go to the United Nations to lodge an official complaint against UBC, the Province of British Columbia, and the Government of Canada for violating a UN protocol on access to higher education. Blake and Tim arranged to have this complaint lodged without previously informing Council. When asked why, Tim Chu said it was because they knew Council wouldn’t approve of it.
Well … That stirred things up. Council wanted to remove Blake and Tim, but finding out that they couldn’t, they resorted to putting various restrictions on their powers; again this is similar to what City Council in Toronto is doing. Then there was a referendum on removing Blake and Tim, but it failed to get the necessary 75% majority or meet quorum, though it came close. …
There was a November scandal in 2010 as well: this one was known as Gazagate, and it involved whether we should allow a donation to the Boat to Gaza that our Palestinian club and the Social Justice Centre, one of our Resource Groups, wanted to make. This led among other things to a Code change that forbids Council, Resource Groups, and Constituencies to make donations unless a referendum has okayed them.
The fact that we had scandals in consecutive Novembers led some people to think we always have scandals in November, but there hasn’t been one the last two years, and we’ve made it through 20 days of November this year, so we may be safe.
One indirect result of the UNgate scandal was that Council introduced the PAR system of bonuses for Executives in 2011. PAR stood for Performance Accountability Restriction; the emphasis was on restricting the amount of the bonuses. But this year we have changed PAR to PAI, making it a Performance Accountability Incentive, more to encourage good work instead of punishing bad.
Still on the Executives, the ones we elect next January will be very special – well, every year’s Executives are special, but this time the Executives we elect will be serving the longest term ever, and this is because of a referendum we passed just this past January to change the turnover date for Executives from late February [calendar?] to May 1.
The turnover change takes effect in 2015, so the Execs elected in January will take office as usual at the end of February 2014, but will then serve 14 months until May 1, 2015. Let’s hope they don’t look like this by the end. [Picture of tired looking Executives, or anybody.]
Last January’s referendum also gave voting rights for the first time to our representatives from Regent College and VST. Regent and VST affiliated themselves with the AMS back in the 90’s, and we gave them non-voting seats on Council, but we couldn’t give them voting seats because our bylaws specify who can have a voting seat, and Regent and VST as affiliated institutions don’t qualify. Or didn’t until we amended the bylaws this year.
We’d actually tried to give voting rights to Regent in the 90’s, but that referendum failed: another case of vote, vote again. And for another example, the referendum last January succeeded in entrenching our new Endowment Fund in our bylaws after a similar referendum in January 2012 had failed.
We’ll see what happens next January, when I think we’ll be asking students to give us permission to sell the Whistler Lodge. When we asked this in the 2012 referendum, it failed.
We sometimes hold our referendums in January at the same time as the Executive elections, but we don’t have to do them then. We held a referendum in March 2011, which approved an increase in the U-Pass fee and also approved some fee changes.
Fee changes have to go to referendum, as do amendments to the bylaws and constitution – well, bylaw amendments could also go to a general meeting if it met quorum, but we haven’t met quorum for years and years: I think this was the last time [pic of Roman senate]. We did, however, just lower quorum in our most recent referendum, so who knows? Maybe sometime in the distant future we will be able to gather enough bodies together … [pic of some futuristic meeting?]
I will very briefly mention our constitution, bylaws, and Code. If you want to look at these documents, you can find them on our website at http://www.ams.ubc.ca/studentsociety/code-constitution/ [screen shot]
You can find all our governing documents there, the constitution that explains who we are and what our goals are; the bylaws, which define membership, lay out the basic structure of the AMS (Council, SAC, etc.), and Code of Procedure, which goes into more detail than the bylaws. There are also the External and Internal Policies. And other stuff too.
If all this seems too much, you can always check out the Student Council Handbook [front page of hdbk], which explains thing without legalese.
And that is a brief summary of recent events, referendums, code and bylaws.