I wrote a column a while ago predicting this year’s AMS election was going to be an uninteresting, indifferent affair. I based my prediction on what I’ve seen at this school over the last three years.
That was before the elections actually took place. The nastiness that marked that entire miserable three weeks made my predictions look downright tame by comparison—that was before my colleagues and myself spent 36 straight hours at the Journal covering one of the dirtiest election campaigns I’ve ever seen.
You know who probably had the least awkward, depressing time out of all the Journal crowd during those three days of stupidity? The reporters we sent to cover the EngSoc elections.
A lot of engineers at this school are jackasses—borderline alcoholics who like to yell, paint themselves purple and yell some more. That being said, if the AMS used half the common sense engineers do in running their student society, there would have been far fewer debacles this year.
Jim Morrison was genuinely upset on election night that his friend had to lose—the two candidates for EngSoc presidency sincerely respected each other. Compare that with the venomous circus that was this year’s AMS election. This year’s elections quickly deteriorated into a shoving match between a bunch of spoiled brats who, by the end of it, thought they could get away with cheating.
Next year, I’m spending election night at EngSoc.
The reason I’m an especially big fan of the engineers these days is partially due to their decision to abstain from voting on the AMS Queen’s Centre fee recommendation at the AMS Annual General Meeting last week.
For those of you who don’t know, the AMS voted in favour of a recommendation to establish a mandatory student fee to help pay the students’ share of the Queen’s Centre. There’s no doubt we need to ante up some cash for this building, since we’ll be using it a lot and all.
The thing is, proposed fees usually go to this thing called a referendum, and students get to vote on whether they want those fees to or not. The Queen’s Centre fee recommendation—which will probably end up being in the triple figures—was instead brought up at the Annual General Meeting, where the istration managed to ram it through.
The argument against this assessment is, of course, that students did get to vote on the Queen’s Centre fee—any member of the AMS is entitled to a vote at the meeting. The problem with that is there are lots of things AMS are entitled to.
You know what would happen if everyone who was entitled to a copy of the Undergraduate Review tried to pick one up? They’d quickly find out that the Review’s print run is based on the (accurate) assumption that most students don’t know the magazine exists in the first place.
Taking an important fee proposal to the Annual General Meeting is a good way of holding a democratic student vote in the same way a back page ad in a single issue of the Journal is a good way of informing students of an exam timetable change.
Democracy hasn’t been too kind to Team KGJ this year—they went ahead and took over CFRC, only to find out students didn’t want to pay the $3 mandatory fee that came along with it.
I can see why they’d want to a fee that could end up being a hundred times as large as CFRC’s at the Annual General Meeting—where maybe 100 people came to vote—instead of at referendum, where the numbers start to look dangerous.
But unless future executives understand that democracy isn’t something you can just by- when the outcome is just too important to leave to chance, the AMS’ reputation will continue to take a beating every time students are informed that they’ve just okayed another initiative they’ve never even heard of.
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