Point of Inquiry is a column written by AMS Columnist Quyen Schroeder about our student union’s governance and policies. It seeks to analyze the AMS with a critical — but constructive — eye.
Quyen Schroeder (they/she) is a fourth-year student studying English language and computer science, and they’ve been a committed observer of almost all AMS Council meetings since February 2023. She also ran as “Barry ‘Bee’ Buzzword” in the 2025 AMS Presidential election. They can be reached at q.schroeder@ubyssey.ca.
During last Wednesday’s Council meeting, AMS Council set the date for the society’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), scheduling it for October 22 at 6 pm. The meeting will be hosted virtually and is expected to last around an hour.
At the AGM, our union presents updates on the society’s finances, holds a town hall for students to ask questions and occasionally proposes motions or bylaw changes on which students can vote. But in order for the motions and bylaw changes brought to an AGM to be voted on, the meeting needs to meet a quorum — a specific number of members in attendance.
Quorum for the AMS is one per cent of the union’s membership, equal to about 600 students. At Council, AMS President Riley Huntley indicated a desire to reach this. Likely behind the push for quorum is the executives’ plan to bring forward bylaw changes — though specifics have not yet been disclosed publicly.
(I ran as joke candidate Barry ‘Bee’ Buzzword against Huntley in the 2025/26 AMS Presidential election.)
In the past half-century, turnout for these AGMs has been exceedingly low. Rarely have they met quorum. The AGM in 2014 was the first to reach quorum in four decades. At that meeting, students voted to have the AMS officially oppose both housing and tuition fee increases — as well as organize student protests against those fee increases.
Since then, only two AGMs have met quorum: in 2020 and again in 2022. In 2020, students voted to remove the AMS’s student court and pass a records policy that would allow the AMS to keep some documents private. In 2022, students approved motions that set the AMS’s position of support for CUPE 2278 and directed the union to call on UBC for food security funding.
(From January 2024 to April 2025, I worked as a teaching assistant at UBC, during which time I was represented by CUPE 2278.)
At both of these meetings, the AMS offered significant incentives for student attendance — $4,000 in 2020 and $5,000 in 2022. Certainly, the monetary incentive brought out students who might not have otherwise tuned in to the AGM — but they haven’t always worked. In 2021, the AMS also offered a $4,000 incentive, but just shy of three hundred students showed up — half what was needed for quorum.
In light of this, it’s worth considering why a student (like you!) would attend the AGM — even if the AMS doesn’t offer monetary incentives as it has in previous quorum-reaching years. Given the time investment is only an hour, I think your attendance will be rewarded regardless of AMS giveaways.
If you engage with AMS governance, or think you might during the year — as an activist, for example — the AGM will provide a baseline understanding of our union. Jumping straight into a regularly scheduled Council meeting is difficult. By attending the AGM, at the very least you’ll be hearing a presentation about our student union’s finances and a report about what our union has been up to and plans to do this year.
If you plan to directly engage AMS Council later in the year, the AGM will make you more familiar with the scope of the union’s advocacy. Your attendance will ultimately make for a more productive discourse, creating a less toxic culture of advocacy and increasing the odds your proposals will be considered.
Among the strongest reasons for you to go to the AGM is that there will be motions and by-laws up for a vote. You'll be able to exercise the same right to vote as you do during the AMS elections in February. In fact, your presence and vote are often more powerful during AGMs. In the annual AMS elections, a referendum requires eight per cent of the student body to vote in favour of the referendum for it to pass. Even if every voter is in favour of a referendum item, if only seven per cent of the student body votes, the referendum fails. At an AGM, however, because only one per cent of the student body needs to attend the AGM for it to reach quorum, motions and bylaw changes can pass with only a couple of hundred votes, as opposed to thousands.
Finally, AGMs are often accompanied by town halls, where students are invited to ask questions of the AMS executive and Council. This can be a chance for you to learn about the AMS’s justification for a decision or to let them know what matters to you.
If none of these reasons were persuasive, go to the AGM to see the result of Council officially directing Huntley to wear a costume during the meeting. (Actual considerations included a minion from the Despicable Me franchise and a sexy nurse).
Regardless of how many students attend the AGM, their experience and avenues for participation are decided by the AMS. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the AGM was held in person. While moving the AGM to Zoom may make it more accessible and lower the barrier to entry, I would have still liked to see this year’s AGM by hybrid with an in-person component — despite the increased logistical complexity that would have entailed. With this year’s Trek for Transit, the AMS is working towards building a culture and community of students fighting together to improve our campus. I think there would have been a power in having hundreds of students in a room, an energy that would have set us up for the year ahead.
I hope that the executive and councilors do not shy away from difficult questions during the town hall. In previous years, the AMS has avoided addressing student complaints at the AGM. In 2022, then-AMS President Eshana Bhangu ended the meeting before the town hall began, citing a loss of quorum despite the AGMs of previous years running the town hall even without it.
Students having a voice — beyond just in a metaphorical sense — is a critical part of this engagement process. In years past, during the town hall portion of AGMs, students were directed to privately submit questions using Zoom’s Q&A feature. This creates an adversarial divide where students are not active participants in their union but rather are reduced to silent observers. Further, the inherent privacy of these messages allows the AMS to pick and choose which questions to answer, ignoring constituents who asked particularly thorny questions.
I’d like students to have the option to speak directly in the meeting — on mic, with their voice. This would prevent the AMS from ignoring constituents. Even questions they choose not to answer — or answer evasively — are heard by everyone in the meeting, allowing students and councillors to know what matters to each other and revealing the union’s perspective.
I understand — from the AMS and councillors' perspective — there are reasons why doing this may not be desirable. In recent years, a few students speaking at Council have made intentionally hurtful statements directed at specific councillors, creating a genuine concern for the safety of our elected representatives. However, given that the AGM is online, I doubt this would be an issue, and the prospect of it being an issue is itself not enough to overrule constituents’ rights to receive answers from their elected representatives. Students and councillors will be physically separated, and meeting moderators will have the ability to mute disruptive speakers; our politicians shouldn’t shy away from their constituents under the guise of safety.
I’ll also take this moment to note that if the AMS is using Zoom for the AGM — as they have in years past and continue to do during biweekly Council meetings — it is possible to invite participants in a Zoom Webinar to speak. Students being unable to speak during the AGM is not a technical limitation but rather an intentional decision on behalf of the organizers.
Even should the AMS feel it is not appropriate to allow students to hear each other’s questions being asked, all participants should have access to the questions asked, the number of students in the meeting and result breakdowns for any votes or polls conducted. As students participating in our union, we deserve to feel connected to each other — not separated and siloed.
I hope you’ll join the AGM on the evening of October 22. While the AMS has yet to reveal what motions they’ll be bringing to the meeting, it’ll cost just an hour of your evening to leave your mark on our union’s direction. That’s a pretty good deal.
This is an opinion essay, and a part of a regular column. It reflects the columnist's views and does not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
