Special General Meeting Successful

(For pictures of the SGM and links to blog entries from other attendees, please see this comprehensive blog entry on Joey Coleman's blog. Paulman Chan has a bunch of photos on Flickr, as does Aleszcz. Chris Demwell has an excellent bird's-eye view photo of the SGM.)

It was a cold, blustery day yesterday on Burnaby Mountain, but that did not stop around 750 students from assembling in Convocation Mall for a Special General Meeting of the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS). Patrice Pratt was appointed Chairperson pro tem, and over the next three hours, students voted to impeach seven directors of the SFSS and to amend the By-Laws in two places to give increased autonomy to graduate students within the organization. The results of the votes on impeachment were as follows:

Director's name	Position	In favour	Against	Abstain
Shawn Hunsdale	President	724	6	13
Margo Dunnet	External Relations Officer	613	14	61
Wei Li	Internal Relations Officer	573	20	45
Glyn Lewis	Member Services Officer	607	22	3
Vanessa Kelly	Treasurer	597	10	30
Marion Pollock	At-Large Representative	492	20	57
Erica Halpern	At-Large Representative	382	60	155

The votes on the amendments in support of graduate student autonomy (note: not independence) were near-unanimous.

I am told that somewhere between 40 and 60 people attended the Annual General Meeting (AGM) taking place in the East Gym, including SFSS staff (who were all required to attend the AGM if they were working at that time) and a number of family members of "G7" directors, who were there to offer moral support.

Some random thoughts before I go to bed:

• Instead of presenting arguments against impeachment, the handful of opponents of the impeachment motions in the hall resorted to a host of procedural tactics to try and prevent the meeting from taking place. One student raised a Point of Order, claiming that the Special General Meeting was invalid; the Chair ruled that point not in order, citing the legal letter [PDF] that SDU's lawyer wrote to the lawyer for the SFSS on that subject. Another student attempted to amend the agenda to add an unrelated matter (relating to residence students), preventing the assembly from dealing with the business that drew everybody to the meeting in the first place. Still another student unsuccessfully moved to eliminate all constraints on debate, potentially allowing a single fillibusterer to discuss Hamlet, etc.
  
  
• The most comical event of the meeting would have had to have been when an anti-impeachment student tried to move to take the vote on the impeachment questions by roll call. That is to say, this student wanted the Chair to record, one by one, each of the 600+ assembled students' name and vote on the motion - a process that would take, by a conservative estimate, three hours per vote. The Chair announced that a vote would be taken on whether to adopt this change in the voting procedure; at this, Margo Dunnet raised a Point of Order, claiming that a roll call vote must be taken on the request of a single member. It took me great pleasure to cite the relevent provisions in Roberts Rules of Order, which clearly specify that a roll call vote shall be taken on a majority vote of the assembly :-).
  
  
• That said, some of the opponents of the impeachment motions gave some actual arguments. One student objected to the general meeting impeaching directors over a human resources' decision (i.e. firing Hattie Aitken), a decision that, according to the Collective Agreement, must be kept confidential, thus preventing the G7 from effectively defending themselves. (This student did not note that these directors had, through their Member's Update and classroom speaking, doing exactly such defenses.) Another student claimed that Students for a Democratic University's (SDU) actions were mere political posturing to remove their ideological opponents and set themselves up for a return to power in the subsequent by-election.

• The AGM apparently ended early, and several of the G7 and their supporters made their way to the SGM to participate in the debate. (Shawn Hunsdale was apparently unable to produce his SFU ID card, and so the registration desk was unable to verify his student status (or otherwise!) in our brand-new registration system. [By the way: THANKS Computing Science Grads for programming that system! It worked spectacularly and efficiently.])
  
  
• One controversial issue was the time limits on debate. At the beginning of the meeting, we voted on a set of Special Rules of Order that provided that (1) each speaker would be limited to 3 minutes, (2) debate on each *motion* would be limited to 16 minutes, and (3) speakers would alternate between supporters and opponents of each motion. When the "G7" entered the room, they immediately complained that these limits were preventing debate, etc. Even worse, there was one student who kept calling the question after just two speakers had spoken (one for, one against), other than the initial debate on impeaching Shawn Hunsdale. I was very much opposed to this latter suppression of debate, but SGM members thought otherwise, consistently voting around 75% in favour of calling the question on each impeachment motion. Patrice Pratt told me that the assembly had every right to decide that they had heard enough debate on the issues over the past several weeks, an argument that I can understand, if uneasily. (Or perhaps the assembly didn't want the meeting to last beyond three hours [which is how long it lasted] in the cold.)
  
  
• I left my place at the front table (where I had been serving as parliamentarian to the Chair) specifically to vote against the motion to impeach Erica Halpern. The vote totals show that impeaching her was far from unanimous. My reasoning (which extended back to August, when I was part of the minority of SDU that opposed adding her name to the list of impeachees) is as follows: Erica was not part of the Labour Committee that conspired to fire Hattie; and she abstained on many of the By-Law-defying, process-ignoring decisions that followed. Now, I certainly have no intention of voting for her in any future election; however, I remain unconvinced that Erica's actions warranted a measure so grave as impeachment.
  
  
• The G7 aren't giving up! Some non-impeached directors approached the G7 after the vote, asking them of their position on the SGM. They were quite clear: the SGM is invalid, and the G7 are staying right where they are, exercising full control over the property, finances, and staff of the Simon Fraser Student Society. SDU is preparing a petition to the courts, and about a dozen of us have been tasked by our lawyer with writing affidavits in support of this petition. I will update this blog with any new information on the latest stage in this saga as it becomes information.
  
  
• I and several other organizers of the SGM were wearing radio headsets so that we could communicate with each other during the meeting. But we were not the only ones wearing headsets! Indeed, I could see quite the contingent of mysterious individuals wearing headsets rushing around the meeting, and I overheard one of them attempting to persuade an SFU student to attend the AGM instead of the SGM. However, interestingly enough, most of them (as far as I could tell) did not enter the meeting area, remaining on the outskirts during the entire meeting. (The meeting area was fenced off, and one could only enter the meeting at one of the registration desks, provided that one provided proof that one was an SFU student.)
  
  
• Oh, so cold! I was just wearing a fleece jacket over my shirt, which was entirely unsufficient to prevent me from shivering through the entire meeting....
  
  
• MANY THANKS to all our volunteers! This event could not have been organized without all your help. Security volunteers, registration clerks, vote counters, runners, computer system techs, AV tech, Secretary, Chair, promoters, and many more all worked together, some contributing many hours of their own time, to make this meeting a well-organized success. Particular thanks go to Josephine Wong for coordinating the entire operation. In fact, Patrice Pratt and our lawyer told me that this was, by far, the most well-organized of any 'insurgent' volunteer-organized general meeting that they had ever attended.
  

And now, to start working on a midterm assignment due this Friday....