Big Changes (Might) Happen in the Student Union
By Connor Simpson
If you follow any of your student councillors on Twitter, you should be at least vaguely aware that Sunday’s council meeting was exciting (for a change). There sure was a lot of hullaballoo on the internet! The week leading up to it had students speaking out on Facebook and asking all sorts of questions. They all seemed jazzed with the result, and there was even some “electricity” surrounding the meeting, so we’ve decided to explain what exactly went down. Some of it is important (some of it’s not).
Last week a collection of students (and some councillors) decided to start a Facebook campaign advocating that the Student Union’s budget be made available to the public, or at least accessible to UPEI students. There was a call-to-arms Facebook status being copied and pasted around UPEI students walls that gathered a few likes and comments of support. It read:
$700 of your dollars will go to the UPEISU over four years. Do you think that the SU budget should be accessible to the students and be able to see how they’re spending your money? Post this if you are concerned about SU finances.
The rub: the budget was already available to any curious UPEI student who was curious enough to actually ask to see it. If you were to go to the VP Finance’s office, whoever was acting in the position would gladly walk you through it. There were vague plans for accessibility to come up in an SU meeting before this people’s revolution (we’re told), but the Facebook campaign pushed it to the forefront of everyone’s mind. (That some councillors posted this to their status without knowing the official policy is…)
ANYWAYS, the subject was eventually broached at the meeting on Sunday evening, and… not much is changing? Going forward the VP finance is going to prepare the budget in a pretty, pie chart-y display for everyone so it’s not just a bunch of boring line items that only auditors can read. It’s still only available to UPEI students, though it’ll be through your UPEI login, so the place where you register for classes, etc OR OR OR it’ll be available on the SU website using your campus ID and login. There’s no defined date for when the budget will arrive, but it should be soon.
“It’s taking longer than I expected,” says VP Finance Emma McPhail. Once she finishes the report, it will be brought to council for approval and eventually be made available in its more easily retrievable new home.
Other things that came up: President Rob Livingstone proposed trimming some fat from the SU’s hips. He put forth a change to SU legislation limiting the number of student reps for Science, Arts and Business be cut from five per faculty to two. To editorialize for a moment, this is a good thing. The bloated number of reps for each faculty often leads to only two (or fewer) doing the job expected of them while the others bugger off on Facebook during meetings, or don’t go at all, or only go for the minimum amount of time required to not get impeached.
“We had difficulty filling the required positions,” President Rob Livingstone explained. “Too many were being put up for impeachment, and the responsibilities of the position were being spread too thin so we weren’t getting an effective commitment out of the people elected.”
Rather than pass an official reduction from five to two, Union reps discussed leaving the legislation open for future university growth. The official SU policy states right now that the number of councillors per faculty is set a 1:200 students enrolled ratio. So the concern of the council was setting a strong-arm limit of two councillors per faculty wouldn’t leave room for the EXPLODING ENROLLMENT RATES AT THE FOURTH BEST UNIVERSITY IN CANADA. The topic was sent to the SU’s policy committee for further research to conclude the best course of action.
Also, in a follow up to our piece on ticket scalping: at the discretion of the VP activities, advanced sales for big events at the wave may be limited to UPEI students for the first day available, and there’s going to be a three ticket per person limit. After the first day sales, tickets will be open to the public (aka Holland College students). To repeat: this is at the discretion of the VP activities, and it’s only meant for big, blockbuster events like Halloween Pub, or likely something like Mother Mother or the forthcoming Beach Blast.
[Correction: An earlier version said the budget was going to be presented with a collection of beautiful, easy to understand, complimentary coloured pie charts. We’ve been informed this is not true. It will be an ugly Excel file full of line-itemed numbers that only the most dedicated accounting majors will understand. Sorry for the confusion.]
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