Open Seating
Committees Struggle to Find Student Members at Meeting
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When the Concordia Student Union Council met on Oct. 12, they managed to fill four empty student-at-large committee seats. However, five more positions remained unfilled, as not a single student has submitted themselves for consideration.
The student-at-large seats provide a level of student oversight for the various committees. Chris Webster was named to both the Finance and Policy Reform committees, while Dylan Oberont and Gabrielle Brais Harvey were named to Sustainability and External Campaigns, respectively.
That leaves vacancies on the Clubs & Space, Appointments, Events, Loyola and Ad Hoc Committees on equity and student space, respectively.
“It’s pretty standard that committees aren’t always full all the time, and certainly not at the start of the year,” said CSU President Lex Gill.
“The committees that have been really active have been filled, like external and campaigns, for example. Things like Loyola and appointments that are a bit more ambiguous—it’s difficult to find students that want to get involved.”
Gill said that the CSU plans to put up posters advertising the empty positions, and noted that the vacancies are posted on the their official website. She expressed hope that people will step forward by the time of the CSU’s November meeting.
The committees are still able to function as, due to the bylaws of the CSU, quorum for a committee meeting is half of all active members.
Besides the appointment of the new committee members, Council was given a presentation by lawyer and Concordia professor Patrice Blais, who had been working in recent months on changes to the bylaws of the CSU.
Most of the changes had been approved in June, but some had been sent to the Policy Reform committee for further review, particularly the section that dealt with removing a member of Council or the president or VPs from office.
“The recommendation of the policy committee is that the members should be able to carry out an impeachment process against a member of the executive or a member of council,” said Blais.
He then outlined a procedure that would involve Council being presented with a petition calling for the resignation signed by 2,500 students in the case of an executive, with differing numbers for councillors from different faculties.
That would be followed by a special general meeting at which students would be able to vote on whether to impeach or not.
“[The process has been] already decided in principle. It was a question of how many signatures you’d need on the petition,” said Gill, adding that the number couldn’t have been decided before the CSU acquired statistics on the proportion of students in each faculty.
The changes won’t be officially ratified until students vote on them at a referendum, which was announced will take place from Nov. 22 to 24.
Other than voting on whether or not to accept the bylaw revisions, students will also vote on fee levy increase requests from the Frigo Vert and CJLO, as well as filling open councillor seats on Council, which had seen the resignation of four members since the beginning of the year.
There are two vacant positions for representatives of independent students, as well as two for the John Molson School of Business.
