“How would you make UMSU more accountable to students?”

All three candidates for UMSU president were given a chance to respond to this question — and here's what they would do to make UMSU more accountable to you.

Pierce Cairns

Regressive Conservatives

“How would you make UMSU more accountable to students?”

I would do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Year after year around election time we hear the same mindless droning of greater accountability and greater transparency to the students. Regardless of whether or not steps toward this end are taken by the elected executive, the students simply do not care. With voter turn-out an abysmal low, it only follows that student interest in the government is similarly low. While any democratically elected government needs to be accountable to the people it represents, the case with UMSU is like the boy who cried wolf: we keep hearing about improving accountability like there is some sort of imminent risk to the public. But the wolf is dead. It has been for years.

Students are free to attend general meetings. The doors of UMSU are open to anyone, and information flows freely like urine from an inebriated Agriculture student. Accountability is not even a concern. The real problem with UMSU is the politicians themselves. And bless their hearts, they generally act with what they perceive to be the student interests in mind, but no one seems to notice when they take cushy CFS jobs afterward. One could call it turning a blind eye; but frankly, students face the other direction right from the start.

So, while accountability itself is a pleasant buzz word to throw around, honesty and integrity are what students should be looking for. It is unfortunate but true that student politics at UMSU has become nothing more than a series of buzzwords — accountability, tuition freeze, diversity, community — these are all things that sound great but are repeated to the point of utter uselessness. If I may take Shakespeare out of context, buzzwords like accountability are “tale[s] told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But enough criticism of our semantic state of affairs. The accountability process should be proactive; it happens during the election cycle, when my platform and those of my adversaries are laid out for the voting public. It is at this point that we are accountable to students, and students are accountable to the union. Thus, it is not a question of how to make UMSU more accountable to students; it is of how to make students more accountable to UMSU. This is a symbiotic and synergistic relationship. When students accept their responsibilities and become accountable to UMSU by participating in the election process, it requires the candidates to become accountable as well. By increasing this aspect of student involvement, it will serve to create a stronger sense of accountability at the appropriate time: during the electoral process.

With this in mind, it is important to remember the point of electing a president: the president is the head of the students’ union, one who serves as a figurehead of the public trust. A president must possess both honesty and integrity. There is a very good reason that every decision we make is not held as a referendum; the president is elected by students to make decisions on their behalf. Students have the opportunity — have always had the opportunity — to ensure accountability by attending council meetings.

The president is the judge, jury, and executioner of the UMSU council. When students elect a president, they know that. The real question is: who do you want holding the axe?

Pierce Cairns is a third-year Pharmacy student and the Regressive Conservative candidate for UMSU president.

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Jonathon Sopotiuk

Students United

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”

— John Stuart Mill

When I was asked by the Manitoban to submit a piece on UMSU’s accountability to students, I certainly didn’t expect to be quoting John Stuart Mill. However, his thoughts on accountability help start the discussion of how UMSU can constantly push the bar higher in answering to students.

Students are busy people.  Between classes, studying, working, and maintaining networks of family and friends, it is hard to find time for anything else.  Knowing that students are so busy, it worries me that there is little collective memory at the University of Manitoba today of what UMSU used to be like. Many students may not even realize that other slates in this election want to turn back the clock for UMSU and the University of Manitoba. I don’t want to go back to the bad old days of UMSU, with resumé-stacking executives awarding themselves gold rings at students’ expense and an UMSU with closed doors and no accountability.

I have heard and read some of the awful truth: just five years ago, UMSU was unaccountable, despised and irrelevant:

— UMSU had a closed-door policy. You couldn’t even see the UMSU president without an appointment, let alone walk into the UMSU offices.

— UMSU used to provide very little budget information to its council, let alone to students. They spent your UMSU fees with impunity: they sold themselves UMSU goods at cut prices, bought themselves thousands of dollars in “class rings” and sunk tens of thousands of dollars into renovating spaces that few students had access to.

— UMSU used to lobby government to raise tuition fees.

— The UMSU executive used to be more than half unelected and, thus, unaccountable to you.

Now, all five UMSU executive members are elected.

Students United has an action plan for maintaining the gains in accountability that have been made over the past few years:

— Keep the open-door policy and hold UMSU open houses: UMSU space is your space. Walk into the office, see what’s going on, ask questions, give UMSU your ideas.

— Maintain and improve UMSU budget consultations.

— Treat the UMSU council like the democratic decision-making body it should be.

— Keep an elected UMSU executive.

— Keep reporting to students, in person and online.

Students United is not satisfied with the status quo.  We will work for UMSU to meet its full potential with:

— UMSU Vision! TVs around campuses providing both UMSU and university updates.

— A new UMSU website that is dynamic interactive.

— More UMSU open houses and public forums on hot topics.

— A review of all UMSU fees to ensure they are still relevant and work for their intended purpose of serving students.

— Work with the new university president to get students more involved in campus decisions.

— More detailed reporting on lobbying efforts with all levels of government and the U of M.

“Causing evil to others” is clearly not one of the objectives Students United has for UMSU.  We are committed to keeping up and expanding the new tradition of UMSU accountability. One major goal of Students United is to get students involved with our students’ union so that UMSU is more accountable to members.  Students pay significant membership fees into UMSU, and the UMSU executive needs remember this when making decisions.  I strongly urge students to bring forward to Students United your concerns and ideas and to get out to vote. UMSU’s accountability policies and practices are only as good as students make them!

I have a hard time believing that UMSU council has a mandate from the students these days, given the turnout at elections and lack of quorum at the general meetings. And once in office, recent councils have simply not done enough to engage the students that they were elected to represent! Jonathan Sopotiuk is a second-year University 1 student and the Students United caniddate for president.

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Troy Unrau

Clean Slate

It is a travesty that we have some departments on spring break during the UMSU elections and that these students do not get a real opportunity to vote. This applies equally to distance ed. students or those that are otherwise unavailable or ignored during UMSU elections. UMSU elections are (outside of the Manitoban) poorly advertised and almost invisible to thousands of students. Part of this is due to the small budget that the CRO gets to run the elections, but it is also a problem with some internal culture within UMSU.

The first thing that I’d bring in is online voting to improve turnout.

Voter turnout is key to giving UMSU council a mandate, and given a single-digit voter turnout last year, I find it offensive that the current UMSU council believes that it properly represents the students. The recent high for voter turnout is 18 per cent, in 2005, which was mostly related to the CFS referendum. Even the CFS with their huge PR machine running at full steam can only gather an 18 per cent voter turnout!

Online elections will help, and while there are details of implementation to work out, this will help to lower the barrier to voters, allowing money that is currently spent on paying for poll clerks to be better spent on marketing the vote itself.

Additionally, we can reuse this online-voting infrastructure to bring forward referenda on important topics more frequently throughout the year. Right now, a council cannot really do anything major while serving their one-year term should these changes require a referendum in order to be implemented. Allowing mid-term referenda would permit UMSU to actually bring forward some major changes while they are still in office — changes that can be implemented right away without having to wait on the next year’s council.

There is another mechanism which is already in place to permit students to pass motions: UMSU general meetings. With a meeting turnout of only a few hundred students, motions could be passed, and the will of the students can be imposed upon the council. The problem is that the councils of past really haven’t wanted students to be able to do this; so, due to poor advertising, the turnout has failed to meet the required quorum. These meetings of late have been nothing more than information sessions for those few students who are already “in the know.” I find these general meetings to be terribly important for accountability and, if in office, I can assure that these meetings will meet quorum. I am willing to implement a number of measures to ensure this, such as voting by proxy (within reason), online streaming of the meetings with live Internet voting on motions, or whatever it takes to make these meetings a valid tool that works towards UMSU council accountability.

Lastly, UMSU budgets used to be available in their entirety to all students, via the website or otherwise. This last council did a very poor job with this, posting no more than two pie charts on the website. I like pie! I’d like a budget more! There are reserved UMSU bulletin boards around campus that ought to see all internal UMSU information published for all members to see, and students will start seeing UMSU internal information on these boards in my first week in office. There is more to UMSU than a poster with head-shots of the council members.

Troy Unrau is a fourth-year geophysics student and the Clean Slte candidate for UMSU president.

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