punditry.ca — uncovering DSU elections

News of Wednesday’s marathon Council meeting didn’t take long in making its way to me in Saskatoon, thanks to Twitter. For obvious reasons, I was not at the meeting, so my remarks on the course of events that took place will be necessarily brief. What follows will be presented in two posts. Part I is a DSU history lesson. Part II is a “how to” guide.

This Week in Council Chambers

In short, the procedures set out in the DSU Constitution for commencing a referendum were not followed. Specifically, the notice period required for these motions is two weeks (not days or hours – weeks, as in a fortnight) and a BONUS POINT* goes to the reader who can name the other flaw in the timing of these motions! By calling emergency meetings of both the Board of Operations and the Elections Committee, Council managed to cram a two-week process into an evening, albeit a rather long one. I will leave it to those who were in the room to elaborate on why this might have happened and move on to why what happened is troubling.

A DSU History Lesson

Cast your minds back to the year 2007, a year many, including myself, joined Facebook and none of us knew who Lady Gaga was. That year, I coordinated a levy campaign for DalOUT. As a result of this experience, I became keenly aware of a lack of regulation regarding referenda in the constitution. Regulations as to how to initiate a referendum or plebiscite (kudos to you who know the difference) and rules governing a referendum campaign were either unclear (because everything was written with an eye to candidates) or absent entirely.

Sufficed to say, an ad-hoc committee of Council to be known as the Referendum Review Committee was created at some point in the months that followed. The committee existed for two years and was chaired by successive VPs (Education), Tara Gault and Mark Coffin. The first year, we wrote By-Law XIV, which outlines the procedure for initiating a referendum. The following year, we re-drafted the campaign rules to clarify how they apply to referenda and created “campaign registration.” Of concern presently is the former of these matters.

A referendum question must undergo what may seem an overly rigorous period of review by three bodies within the Union: Council, the Board of Operations (hereafter “the Board”), and the Elections Committee (EC). The function of each body in this respect, as I see it, is as follows:

All-mighty Council refers the proposed wording to the Board and EC. The Board, ever conscious of the long-term health of the Union, ensures, for example, that a “positive” or non-status quo outcome is not illegal (i.e. “Any outgoing DSU President shall be sacrificially killed by the incoming executive.”) and would not financially cripple the DSU (i.e. “I support the distribution of the DSU’s current operating budget to the John Hillman Super PAC.”) The EC uses their knowledge of the constitution’s election regulations and previous referenda (based on former CRO reports) to assess the validity of the question (more on that in Part II.) Then, because the Board and EC both report to Council, Council makes a final determination on the wording (though most of the work should have been done by this point) and votes on whether the question will be put to the student body.

There are several reasons for this rigmarole. I believe (based on both the intention of the regulation and personal experience) the primary reason is that matters of referendum question wording require a certain amount of consideration and reflection. I know of no better example of this than the multiple rewordings of the DAGS question pondered by the Board last year. This point is strengthened when one considers the question was based on original wording composed by Eric Snow, someone who has more than a little insight into these sorts of things. The Loaded Ladle question was also reworked repeatedly.

This reason is what one might call the “spirit” of the law, as opposed to the “letter” of the law discussed above. In the case of this week’s meeting, both the spirit and the letter of the law were bent, if not broken. Admittedly, due to my involvement in drafting the procedures, I take this whole thing a bit personally, but I think anyone else who has contributed to the ongoing efforts to improve the DSU’s governing documents likely feels the same way, as should the members of Council, part of whose job it is to uphold the integrity of these documents.

After the countless hours (though I suppose if I consulted my old agendas I could get a rough estimate) the Referendum Review Committee put into (re-)writing the procedures for referenda, the least Council could do is take more than a relative few minutes to essentially decide it’s better to break the rules than to inconvenience student societies.

Stay tuned for Part II.

* A “bonus point” consists of this pundit’s respect.