The Board of Directors abolished the board’s new Board Accountability Policy, designed to keep members active and informed participants.
Vansh Malhotra (he/him) // Contributor
Taylore Laurence (She/Her) // Contributor
Last year, the Capilano Students Union Governance Committee took initiative, and recommended appointing five executive portfolio critics to “create a mechanism by which the organization’s elected student leadership can benefit from constructive criticism, alternate perspectives, and reasoned critiques for the work of the executive student portfolios.” The critics would keep the Board of Directors accountable by advising and monitoring their choices, but they would not have voting powers. The committee also suggested creating an Alumni Advisory Committee (AAC) that, among other responsibilities, would appoint the critics. The motion worked its way up to the board of directors, and on May 17, the board approved the Alumni Advisory Committee. It was decided that the president would appoint three former students, and the executive director would appoint the other three. At the next meeting, on May 31, on the last meeting of the term, the critic position too.
Yet, less than five months later, while the Alumni Advisory Committee was reviewing applications to select the critics, the CSU President Angad Brar, motioned to repeal the Board Accountability policy. The motion‘s rationale offered few convincing arguments, since no tangible evidence was presented to sustain the claim: “critics are not required as everything is going great and everyone is working towards their goals to achieve for this year.” Brar elaborated more in an interview: the critics, according to him, would be nothing more than “blocks” that impede the newly elected board to do its job. Their selection, too, would be biased.
Niko Williamson, the Courier’s News Beat Reporter, brought up some issues with Brar’s motion. First of all, she explained Brar made this decision without any recommendations from committee members or the staff. This is corroborated by Sukh Sohl, the vice president of finance. She said that, until the last board meeting, that she had never been a part of a conversation regarding abolishing the critic: “I just got an informal call phone call from the president. He said this decision is happening.” Shruti Karthikeyan, the Fine and Applied Arts Representative, also stated that she feels there was communication discrepancy and the decision was not made with much consideration. Secondly, Williamson pointed out that the division of responsibility between the president and the executive director makes the selection process of the members of AAC unbiased. Plus, there is no conflict of interest: only former student leaders, who can’t be involved anymore in other committees, can become AAC members.
On October 4th, Capilano Student’s Union Board of Directors met to decide if they would repeal the Board Accountability policy and abolish the executive critic portfolio positions. At the time of writing, the results have not been published: but Williamson observed the meeting. The motion passed with a vote of 13-5.
Brar and the board members that supported his motion think that the critic role is an interference in the independent functioning of the board. To the members that voted against abolishing this role, the critic position is worth trying as a measure to add diversity of perspectives in CSU’s decisions. It’s impossible to decide who is correct – we never got to seehow a critic actually would have worked in practice. Sohl summarized the situation quite well “we could have tried it and then concluded whether it was an [effective] approach or not.” But, the Critic Executive role died before it could make its first step.