By-election by-laws causing concern
By Hannah Larking
News Editor
October 29, 2008
 The recent UWSA by-election has resulted in allegations of corruption toward the UWSA, leaving many students frustrated with what they are calling a disregard for electoral procedures.
During a council meeting, Viva Dadwal resigned from her position on the Electoral Monitoring Committee (EMC) when an email she sent out expressing her concern for the UWSA council’s lack of morality and quality in the recent election, was “not considered.”
In the email addressed to her fellow council members, Dadwal asked that they consider a boundary: “I would like council to think about what they feel is unacceptable in an election; that is, what would cross the line to the point that they would feel the integrity of the election was being compromised.”
“We have yet to maintain a standard or quality level that we may [use to] judge these qualifications by … we need to establish the rules before we start judging what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour,” Dadwal added.
In a Facebook group created the day after the by-election ended, students outlined several bylaws and policies that they accused the UWSA of breaking; many of them assumed that the newly developed Lance oversight board would be considered a part of the UWSA, but some of them just referred to election procedures in general. One example of these complaints included not permitting a 48-hour period after the conclusion of the election before the results of the election were ratified.
This lax approach to dealing with bylaws and policies has frustrated several students, including Robert Woodrich, who ran for a position on the Lance oversight board. “How would we feel if our municipal, provincial or federal elected officials decided that it was okay to follow some of the rules and fine to trample upon others? If such creativity can be applied to governing documents, then what is the point of pretending to follow said governing documents at all?” Woodrich said.
“All I can say is that I expect my elected officials to respect governing documents and to uphold the democratic process to the best of their ability. If this isn’t happening, then I would suggest that it is the job of citizens and of the press to do something about it.”
Tiffany Gooch, president of the UWSA, acknowledges these allegations, saying that a memo bearing similar claims is currently circulating campus. “[The memo discusses] possible bylaw violations throughout the election [that can be divided into] three general categories,” Gooch explained.
“One of them is the notification of the by-election. There is an accusation that [the by-election] wasn’t widely advertised … The second is that students were able to run for two UWSA positions… and [students] were contesting [the fact that current UWSA members were allowed to sit on the Lance oversight board]… lastly that the policy for the Lance oversight board wasn’t sent through council.”
While last year, over 500 students signed a petition asking the UWSA to implement a board to oversee certain aspects of The Lance, only seven students ran for a position on the board. Of the five students elected for the positions, three have held or currently hold a seat in the student government, and the remaining two are volunteers for the UWSA.
These individuals are generally the subject of a great bulk of the Lance’s news material, and they will be presiding over the Lance’s financial and operational processes. While the elected officials maintain that they intend to remain unmoved from the newspaper’s editorial content while performing their duties on the oversight board, this may not be entirely accountable.
“It’s a fear that I have, and I think that anyone who respects democracy would have, that the UWSA would have control over how the Lance operates,” Gooch said.
“As much as you can state that having financial and operational control doesn’t equal editorial control – I would argue against that. If you have the ability to hire the editor-in-chief, then you very much have control over the editorial content of the paper.”
Yet still, even after acknowledging this conflict of interest, Gooch said that for this year at least, UWSA members would still be allowed to hold a seat on the Lance oversight committee.
Ryan Osterberg, one of the five candidates elected to the Lance oversight board, and also this past year’s arts and social science representative on UWSA council, said that he thinks there is always a potential for bias. “I think we have to just trust the professionalism of people,” he said.
“I encourage students to look past this,” Osterberg added. “The most important part of the election occurred: the candidates who wanted to run and who met the criteria to run—got to run, there was an election campaign, but most importantly, students got to vote.”
And while many students do agree that it is important for them to be able to vote, what many consider to be even more important than that is ensuring that the voting procedure is done right.
Woodrich, a non-UWSA member who lost a seat on the Lance oversight committee by three votes to a UWSA member, agrees that a conflict of interest is possible—and that could pose a problem.
“The UWSA is a corporation with $324,212 of capital, an operating budget of $976,378, total revenue of $4,967,435, total assets of $3,139,110 and investments—property and otherwise—totaling $5,250,265,” Woodrich said. “The UWSA also controls something called UNIWIN Student Pub Inc., which had a gross revenue of $427,705—all [of these] totals are from 2007, which is the most up-to-date information provided on the UWSA’s website. Considering the vast sums of money at stake here, let alone the job of representing roughly 15,000 full-time undergraduate students, I believe that those who have been elected to represent University of Windsor students on the UWSA board of governors, council, executive or senate have a very important job to do.”
“That said, it is the press’s role—among others—to monitor their respective community’s government officials. Locally, this would mean that the Lance is supposed to monitor the Graduate Student Society (GSS), the Organization of Part-Time University Students (OPUS) and the UWSA. If the very same government officials who are the focus of the press control the press’s finances, it would be my view that a conflict of interest is possible,” he added.
Regarding this conflict, Gooch said that any student could be written about in the newspaper, and be on the board—posing the same conflict. However, the likelihood is much less.
Gooch said that whether or not the bylaws and policies that students had outlined actually were broken would depend on whether or not the Lance oversight board was going to be considered a separate entity from the Lance. At a council meeting on Oct. 23, it was announced that because the board came as a result of a referendum, it bypassed all UWSA bylaws and policies, allowing the board to make its own rules.
Regarding the accusations of a lack of advertising, Gooch explained that UWSA communications coordinator, Spencer Dingle, comprised a report listing all of the ways that the UWSA had made an effort to notify students, including three mass emails and over 80 posters across campus. “In the end,” Gooch said, “it was definitely widely advertised.” Still, according to Osterberg, just over 700 of the over 14,000 full-time students eligible, actually cast a vote—which is less than six per cent.
“I think that to say that it wasn’t as widely advertised as in the past, is really just saying that in the past we did a little bit too much tree-killing,” Gooch said, explaining the drastic cut during the campaign from thousands to less than 100 posters.
Many students are also alleging that the way that the tentative policies for the Lance oversight board were written was wrong. “I, in conjunction with Ryan Rogers [editor-in-chief] had a few meetings over the summer and wrote up some draft policies, that we believed would be ratified by the board once they were in existence,” Gooch said.
“I thought we were doing a service because it seemed equal: part UWSA and the Lance,” she explained. “But also I was just in it because I’m experienced writing policies.”
These draft policies outlined very fundamental elements, such as how often the new board would meet. “If [council] were to have created and approved the policies of the Lance oversight board, then there would have been no involvement from the Lance at all, and it would have been imposed from the UWSA to the Lance,” Gooch said.
The Lance oversight committee members will be meeting officially for the first time within the next few weeks, and at that point, more policies and bylaws will be formed.
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