SGM is bogus
Margo Dunnet, SFSS External Relations Officer
A common question on students’ lips these days is, “Why are the Annual General Meeting and the Special General Meeting at the same time?” This is a completely valid question and I would like to clarify how these two meetings came to be scheduled at the exact same time, on the exact same day.
There was a meeting of Forum scheduled for September. Glyn Lewis, the SFSS’ member services officer, is the person who calls these meetings, and a couple of days prior to holding the meeting he put a call out to see whether or not people would be able to attend. The meeting needed 16 ratified representatives in order to achieve quorum, that being the number of ratified representatives needed to conduct business. Only 12 people responded by the evening before the meeting and Glyn was forced to temporarily cancel the meeting until later in the semester when more representatives would be available. A meeting of Forum costs hundreds of dollars for catering with hundreds more spent on audio/visual equipment. It is not unusual for Forum not to meet quorum.
When the meeting was cancelled, certain members of Students for a Democratic University decided that they did not want to follow the society’s bylaws and wanted to hold the meeting anyway. They gathered in Forum Chambers and even though they did not have quorum, proceeded to conduct business as if they were the real Forum.
To be clear, only the chair of Forum can call a Forum meeting. The reason there is a chair, such as Glyn Lewis is for Forum, is so that a meeting is properly called, and everyone is notified of its existence. This ensures a measure of accountability because students’ elected representatives are legally bound to uphold democracy and transparency whereas this rogue group of students, led by Titus Gregory, are not.
These members of SDU went through the motions of having a meeting and scheduled a Special General Meeting for October 25, 2006 at 2:30 p.m. Two days later we held our Board of Directors meeting and at this meeting we had to set a time for the Annual General Meeting. This meeting is required by law to be held before October 31. Members of the SDU slate, like Titus Gregory and Jan Gunn, know this because they used to be on the Board of Directors. They knew when they scheduled this invalid SGM that we were going to have to hold our AGM that very same week.
Glyn made the decision to give SDU exactly what they wanted and hold the AGM, which is a valid meeting, at the exact time they wanted the meeting to be. For months, Bryan Jones and SDU have been saying that the Board will call the AGM at the most obscure, difficult time to discourage students from attending and holding them accountable. They said we would hold it on a Sunday at 10:00 p.m. in Kamloops in order to ensure that it would not be quorate — quorum being 500 people. As the SGM is invalid, we believed that holding the AGM at the best time to get quorum would solve the problem of accountability. It would be the best avenue for open communication.
If SDU had accepted our offer, then they could have put motions to impeach the seven directors on the agenda for the Annual General Meeting. When the Board of Directors publicly announced the meeting time for the AGM, many members of SDU were in the audience. They had plenty of notice to put forward an impeachment motion, an entire week in fact. If they had put those motions forward we would have been discussing them at the AGM on October 25 in the East Gym, but instead they chose not to.
More to the point, if the SDU slate really wanted to uphold democracy, why did they refuse to allow the AGM to be held in the most popular area of campus, Convocation Mall? First they held a bogus Forum meeting and now a bogus SGM.
The student society has consulted our lawyer and he has indicated, through a written letter to SDU, that their Forum meeting is invalid. They continue with their planning anyway. I encourage all students to stand up for their student society and come out to the only valid meeting on Wednesday, the Annual General Meeting.