Cro connected to UMSU Execs
‘The elections are about students’: Brown
TESSA VANDERHART STAFF
UMSU president Garry Sran sat on the selection committee to re-hire chief returning officer Caitlin Brown despite his own candidacy, calling into question Brown’s ability to administer the election objectively.
Brown also served as CRO for the 2006 UMSU general election when Sran was first elected, hired in November 2005 by a selection committee that included then-UMSU president Amanda Aziz. The two had been involved at the same time with the Canadian Federation of Students- Manitoba and the Canadian Congress of Student Associations (CCSA), by way of Brown’s election to the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association (UWSA).
“When I was hired on council for the last two years, I had told them that I was an executive at U of W for the last two years,” Brown said.
She was elected UWSA vicepresident (student services) for 2004- 05. In February 2004, Brown was elected the women’s representative of the Canadian Federation of Students- Manitoba. CFS-MB elected Aziz 2005-06 Manitoba national executive representative at its general meeting in February 2005.
Brown resigned from her position on the CFS-MB executive after six months, citing a busy schedule.
Brown also served as CFS-MB representative to the Winnipeg Labour Council in 2005-06, as reported in the council’s September 2005 minutes.
In 2005, Brown transferred from the University of Winnipeg to the University of Manitoba, taking a course in women’s studies to complete her bachelor’s degree in film and theatre from the U of W.
“My involvement here has been as CRO,” Brown said.
UMSU bylaw 700 part 5 states that the “The following people are not eligible to be appointed CRO: a. a Council Member, including the Executive; b. an executive member of any Student Association; c. a student member of the Board of Governors; and d. any employee of the Union.” Conflicts of interest are dealt with in bylaw 1005 — after a formal complaint has been registered, those involved will be asked by the Elections Discipline and Interpretation (EDIE) board if they are in a conflict of interest.
The CRO is hired every December by the UMSU selection committee, comprised of the chair of UMSU council, three council members chosen by the selection committee, two students-at-large chosen by the selection committee, and the UMSU president in non-voting capacity. When Brown was first hired in December 2005, UMSU president Aziz (whose campaign chair in 2005 was Garry Sran) sat on the hiring committee.
Sran sat on the selection committee to hire Brown as CRO for the upcoming general election. He is currently running for re-election, uncontested.
“I was on the CRO selection committee, which is mandated by the bylaws,” Sran said.
However, he said, all of the “qualified” applications for CRO were submitted to council.
“Council is actually the body that approved Caitlin Brown for CRO,” he said.
At its Nov. 16 meeting, she answered questions from councilors, Brown was unanimously approved as CRO by UMSU council.
Brown is currently listed as one of three directors of the Canadian Academic Roundtable (CART), a national conference of students’ union vice-presidents (academic). CART was incorporated in 2004, and Brown has been officially listed as a director in 2005 and 2006, according to Corporations Canada.
CART is a subsidiary of the CCSA, a national students’ union conference. Aziz is a director of the CCSA, and the corporation was originally registered to her home address.
“As far as I’m aware, my involvement ended in 2004,” said Brown. She said she had assumed that CART has been inactive since then — when UWSA and UMSU held a conference in 2004 — because she hasn’t been involved.
She denied personally knowing Jeremy Salter, who is listed as a director of both CART and CCSA.
Salter, currently the general manager of the York Federation of Students, was the chairperson of CART for three years. Salter served as president of the Ryerson Continuing Education Students’ Association (CESAR) for 2005-06, and was hired as the CRO for York University students’ union elections in March 2006.
Formal complaints were levelled against Salter by 2006 YSF presidential candidate Michael Landry — who was disqualified and received a $600 fine for allegedly offering to buy beers in exchange for votes — according to Ryerson students’ newspaper the Eyeopener, on March 21, 2006. Landry told the Eyeopener that Salter “made it very difficult” for him to campaign against the incumbents, also alleging that they received help in their campaigns from Ryerson and York students’ union executives.
“I don’t understand what you mean by a conflict of interest: I was hired to do a job, and I also have another job. The two are unrelated, for two separate companies,” Salter said.
Salter was involved with CART until 2004, when the CCSA attempted to hold its last conference.
He added that although the perception of having an unbiased CRO is important, serving as a CRO with ongoing or past political involvement is not technically a conflict of interest.
“If someone’s not in a conflict of interest, they’re not in a conflict of interest. You should gauge how they perform in their job, right? So, the elections at York ran smoothly. The students voted; the people that got the most votes, won.”
During the 2006 UMSU general election, CRO rulings prohibited presidential candidate Patrick Smith from campaigning on the first and last days of the election because of complaints levelled against his twocandidate slate. Smith, who received 25 per cent of the total vote, recalled being frustrated about delays in rulings on complaints his slate filed against Sran.
“I know she delayed as much as she could, but she didn’t break the bylaws,” Smith said.
There were no formal complaints made to the EDIE board, which oversees the CRO and election. “It was like, what’s the point? Unless you can run an entire slate, you don’t have a chance,” said Ryan Smith.
“UMSU is a clique. I felt like Caitlin was a part of that . . . it didn’t feel like it was unbiased.”
In the 2005-06 election, Brown introduced a system of electronic voting, which also reduced the number of polling stations from one in every faculty and college to 10 in total. Polling stations were not located in the Drake building, home to the Asper School of Business, or the engineering complex, polling stations that in 2003, 2004, and 2005 voted against Aziz’s candidacy (she was UMSU president from 2004-06).
Brown said that one polling station would be located in the Drake building, and another in University Centre near the entrance to the Engineering II tunnels, for the 2007 general election.
“I want to reiterate that the elections are not about me,” Brown said. “The council is accountable to students. There were no complaints last year. The elections are about students.”
