Day 4 - Calm Before the Storm

Ok so today was the day where all the motions were brought to the BC delegates, and the constituencies. I started out in the Part-time, and Mature Students Constituency. We were discussing motions for the reps to speak about at the committee meetings later on. I believe we spoke on 3 motions. The first motion was to pass a policy on the privatization of the BBA in Business administration. I did not no much about this motion but the committee as a whole spoke out for this motion against the privatization. Now is the interesting part. We began by discussing the disabilities rep on the national executive. Everyone, including the disabilities constituent in the room did not want this motion to pass, as they did not want the national executive to grow and larger and it would not present solidarity and make it more complicated to hold votes and inform the new rep of decisions made between meetings. I was completely in favour of the motion. Having an individual represent the disability population would drastically increase the voice on the national executive of the CFS, and help properly represent students across Canada, and provide even more of a voice, and opinon into several different motions. Overall the constituency voted against this policy.

Next was the best debate ever. The CFS has developed a policy that basically condemns votes from occurring online at any point in the future, a 2/3 vote would have to occur in favors of repealing the policy.Hahahaha. As I pulled the motion for discussion I motivated. I used examples of fraudulent paper voting cases including the RAF era where the ballot stuffing was caught my Steve Lee at the Richmond campus (nice to know the story of the hole in the roof on richmond campus). I also included the point were Co-op and distance ed, as well as part-time student have a challenge of getting to the school to vote in the election as many work, and do not have the time, whereas an online vote would allow everyone free access to the democratic process.

The same discussion was brought up in BC Delegates. I brought up the SFSS dropping of the ballot box which has lead to several void votes. On top of this I stated that regardless of the system used to vote fraud will always be evident and should be mitigated, an technology will allow use to ensure easy protection of the "Sanctity" of the vote during the election process. BC said that this system was not accessible and much like an early Ipod. As it is still early for online voting technology there are kinks that must be worked out, and we cannot use the system because the kinks may compromise our intentions. Honestly, without trial and error the kinks won't be worked out, and the system won't evolve to its full potential. The BC Delegates voted to recommend defeat of this motion to the committees.

The next discussion involved motion 13. Nimmi mentioned she was placing an amendment to the motion but would not mention what it was, other than a change in grammatical sense. This started debate on the Certify, and De-certify there wasn't much debate until our External spoke using a few extreme example to demonstrate his point which cause the room to have a mass panic. The delegates took this motion way out of proportion and began attacking our delegates, and opinions. During the discussion it was decided to hold onto a recommendation as we were unsure of the amendment.

I will write a part 2 as soon as possible, which will discuss the motions as OSD, and how they will be referred. It is going on 3:40am and I am beginning
to get tired and have to leave again for U of O in a matter of hours.

Please email me for any questions.