Every few weeks, your student government spends a Wednesday night meeting talking about a bunch of things. In most cases, what we talk about won’t affect a student’s day-to-day activity, but there are always a few tidbits that might interest you. Here’s what to watch out for in the upcoming AMS Council meeting on August 19, 2015:
An extremely short agenda
This meeting has a very short agenda. This is both due to August being a quieter period for universities, and many items being brought into the new "consent agenda" section. That said, a three-page agenda is still very short for any AMS Council meeting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the biggest fan of long meetings, but one does question whether we’re really discussing these issues fully when meetings go this fast; either we’re doing our jobs so well and everyone is so informed that no discussion is needed, or we need to do our jobs slightly better.
Executive Code Changes
The Code of Procedures of the AMS is a big document that has hundreds of pages, outlining how we are supposed to work as a student government. A big chunk of that code is dedicated duties of the executives, and that piece of code is not updated often. This leads to an interesting scenario where, for example, the Vice President, Admin is supposed to be in charge of the Whistler Lodge, but we already sold the Whistler lodge last year. This round of code changes to executive duties will hopefully bring duties as spelled out in code to be more in line with what the Executives actually do and what we want them to be doing.
Federal Election Campaigns
The Federal Elections are coming up, and historically speaking, youth has had a very bad track record of coming out and voting (38.8 per cent for 18-24 year olds, as opposed to 75.1 per cent of 65-74 years olds, according to an Elections Canada report.) There will be a presentation on Wednesday from the AMS VP External Office to encourage students to vote. It will be interesting to see and discuss whether AMS will be (or should be) taking a stance on specific issues (like post-secondary education funding) in the upcoming Federal Elections.
Viet Vu is a fifth-year Economics major, AMS Councillor and current chair of the Oversight Committee. His views are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Alma Mater Society or the Vancouver School of Economics Undergraduate Society.