"It's the new SUB's fault!"
The AMS is months behind on posting minutes from Council meetings online and blamed the delay on -- are you ready for this? -- the new SUB. That’s right, folks. While the AMS minutes are something that, quite possibly, only we, Sheldon Goldfarb and the Councillors themselves care very much about, it’s still a good idea to post them for ease of reference. There’s this little thing called code, after all.
But putting all that aside, can we talk about the new SUB excuse for a second? There are only so many times you can use the ‘the-new-SUB-made-me-do-it’ line successfully without sounding like you’re grasping at straws to hide your own incompetence. Things are naturally busier with the new SUB, but considering the number of people that the AMS employs, you would think that one of them would be able to set aside 10 minutes every two weeks to repost something on the internet.
BDS, bureaucracy and not taking a stance
Although much of UBC's student population has been largely unaware of the goings-on of the past few weeks, the BDS movement has played a significant role in campus politics (and The Ubyssey's opinions section). Student groups on all sides of the debate have run major campaigns trying to convince uninformed or undecided students how to vote in the referendum that occurred over the course of the past week. Regardless of your stance on the issue of BDS itself, we think that most would agree that the process by which the referendum was held is subject to considerable critique.
Even accounting for the campaigns run by student groups, the referendum was poorly publicized -- as reflected by the large numbers of students who (still) have no idea what BDS is. We aren't saying that the AMS should be devoting massive amounts of resources into promoting referendums, but including a little more information and context in the first email they sent out would have been helpful.
We are critical of the AMS, however, in the stance that they took on the issue -- or rather, the lack of a stance. Though the notion of our student society taking a stance in general is an altogether different issue, we strongly believe that if you're going to take a stance you should actually take a stance. "Anything but yes" basically equates to the AMS taking the position of 'we want to say no but don't actually want to say no because it might make us look bad.'
We understand, of course, that BDS (and the Israel-Palestine debate in general) is a highly controversial and convoluted subject and that for many people, taking a stance is a difficult decision to make. Some of our editors believe that in taking the stance that it did, the AMS may have attempting to avoid creating a hostile campus environment to those who were in favour of BDS -- which is also understandable. The majority of us, however, view the "anything but yes" position as an attempt at sugarcoating a "vote no" stance and avoiding taking a public stance on a major geopolitical issue.
Sexual assault reporting discrepancies
Campus security has included RCMP sexual assault reporting in their annual Campus Security Report and the statistics show a massive discrepancy between the number of sexual assaults reported to the RCMP versus those reported to Campus Security. The statistics were included in the report at the recommendation of the Campus Safety Working Group, which was established after a series of sexual assaults on campus in late 2013.
There is no doubt that this is a positive change. But the timing of the development is suspect.
A CBC investigation in January pointed out the discrepancy to the administration. VP Students Louise Cowin told the CBC that it raised the question as to why the RCMP data hadn’t been included previously?
We can’t help but agree. The report shows RCMP sexual assault reporting data as far back as 2009. When it comes to campus safety and security, why did it take a public outcry regarding sexual assault for the administration to reach out to the RCMP detachment located right here on campus?