Glendon Online

Proof that one vote does make a difference

Last night at 6pm a general meeting of the Glendon College Student Union was held in the Senate chamber, the items on the agenda of the meeting were four motions put forth in a petition brought forward by the Students For Good Government, and since they are too long for me to describe here and the fact that all but two were discussed during the course of this meeting it is easier to just refer you all to the full list on the S.F.G.G page found here.

(The other motions will be on the agenda in another general meeting scheduled for Tuesday March 15th at 12:00 PM in the Senate chamber and all students are welcome to go and bring their sessional cards to vote).

Of those motions approved at this meeting two were approved. The first resolution was to drop the pending litigation against York University. The second resolution concerned the impeachment of Ron Fietkou, and Vanessa Stepnowski of their respective roles as the president, and Vice president of the Glendon College Student Union.

After a good amount of debating some of the issues such as whether or not the lawyers representing the G.C.S.U were working pro-bono and some concerns made by students about the flow of communication between students and council concerning the lawsuit. At the end of this discussion when it came time to vote on the issue the majority consensus was to dismiss the lawsuit against York University.

The second resolution took roughly the same amount of time to pass as the first one, if not longer as there was a concern addressed by the speaker on whether such an act was constitutional to do so. The speaker put forwards his own personal interpretation that this act was not constitutional. The students present during the meeting nonetheless voted to overrule the speaker and decided to agree in their interpretation of the constitution that it was valid to impeach executive members during a general meeting.

Before the vote took place however since the president was on the speakers list he was allotted a certain amount of time to state his position on the issue and to plead his case and Mr. Fietkou made a number of valid points. The end result though was that the motion to impeach was passed by the student body that was present during the meeting.

Overall the duration of the meeting was very much time consuming, and it was roughly 12:00 am when the meeting adjourned. The speaker of the meeting managed to keep order and a good degree of neutrality during the meeting, despite a few disruptions that were caused during the meeting.

On the other side of things the proceedings were very often delayed by numerous small but nonetheless time consuming technicalities such as role call, and calls for quorum (for those of you who don't know the meaning of quorum, essentially it is the minimum number of members present for a meeting to take place) in this case the number was determined to be at 110 people.

There were numerous occasions where time was spent in trying to establish and re-establish quorum, and on one particular occasion at around 11:30 PM two members had left the meeting calling quorum on the way out, there were a number of councilors who were absent from the senate chamber during voting time as well as some being present but choosing to abstain from the voting. By the end of the night there were many people relieved that the meeting was over with and that they were able to successfully pass the aforementioned resolutions.

posted by Sam @ 2:07 AM