[GSA Council] Nov 1 Council Packet

Sat Oct 31 16:01:39 PDT 2015

Dear councillors,

I’m writing this email to address the issue related to the motion about the
Graduate Independent Student Association (GISA) registration and
allocation.

This week we received the registration form, the by-laws, the minutes and
the attendance sheet of GISA’s first meeting. It was noted that, according
to their by-laws, they didn’t have quorum for their meeting. There were
only 8 student signatures on the attendance sheet and their quorum is “1%
or 10 whichever is the highest”. The actual membership of GISA is 91
members, which means their quorum is 10.

In normal circumstances, the meeting could not have started at all and any
decision taken would have been invalid since they didn’t have quorum.

But the tricky part in this case is that the association was created by
this very meeting and had no by-laws until it adopted it during this
meeting. So the meeting could be opened because they had no quorum, in
other word quorum did not exist at the time but once they adopted their
by-laws they created a new quorum. At that time they did amend the by-laws
but they never changed the quorum nor did they specify that it wouldn’t
take effect immediately. This means that any decision taken after the
adoption of the by-laws were taken with no quorum, this includes the
elections.

The argument presented to me by Keroles is that according to his version of
Robert’s rule (the versions I found on the web doesn’t say the same thing)
quorum is deemed maintained if nobody (the member or the chair) calls for
it. The problem is that the very same article takes into account that you
started the meeting with quorum, which is not the case; quorum didn’t exist
at the start of this meeting. So to me, this doesn’t apply.

But then this is not the real issue because when GSA analyse the
registration documents, we can clearly see that they didn’t have quorum
when they did the election. So we are asked to sign paper when we have
tangible proof that the by-laws were not respected. In that respect we have
to keep in mind that the Council adopted the following motion:

*“Motion CO-20151004-14*

BIFT the Funding Committee at least revise the Departmental Allocation
policy to mandate Association’s that receive funding should respect their
bylaws by October Regular Council.

*Moved:* Nirmal

*Seconded:*Mathilde

*For:* Carolina Aponte (FA), Aria Azami (ENCS), Vivek Khatri (ENCS),
Keroles Riad (Indi), Sapandeep Randhawa (ENCS), Mathilde Ngo Mbom (JMSB),
Ashley Michel (JMSB)

*Against: *--

*Abstention:* Pempho Kamwendo (A&S), Stephi Stavropoulos (A&S), Rahul Kumar
(ENCS), Nirmal Desai (ENCS), Julie Arrowsmith (A&S)

*Adopted*”

Now this whole thing, it’s not about Keroles or Alex, it’s about GSA
respecting it’s own rules and policies, it’s about the best interest
of GSA *and
*GISA members. There is, I think, a really simple solution to all this,
it’s to gather GISA’s member in a GA that would respect GISA’s by-laws
(quorum and call-out) and simply ask them to confirm or not the decisions
taken.

As for the Allocation application, I checked it as I usually do for other
association and there are 2 issues that should be resolved before it is
being approved.

1- They have to provide a bank statement or in the case of the opening of a
new bank account or internal account a proof that said account exist. This
also means the form is incomplete since it does not provide any bank
account name or Internal bank account name and number.

2- The expenses line of the budget must be more detailed than that, we did
ask other association in previous year to clarify and detail more their
budget.

I informed Keroles of those issues before sending this email.

All the best,

David

2015-10-30 16:45 GMT-04:00 gretchen k <gbayou at gmail.com>:

> Hello Councillors--
>
> I have updated your Packet for the Nov 1 meeting.
>
> Please be reminded, *the early November Council Meeting will take place
> from 6pm-9pm on Sunday, Nov. 1st, at the GSA House.*
>
> Your Council Packet for Sunday's meeting (11.01.2015) is in the Council
> Archive:
> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ja994irrvoxo952/AABOrrdDnHi0maXvYpxnLIdca?dl=0
>
> And attached here.
>
> Note: If you are unable to attend this Council meeting, you must send
> regrets to Aurup at <coordinator at gsaconcordia.ca>. Otherwise, you are
> required to be present on Sunday by 5:30PM to sign-in for the council
> meeting and therefore qualify for an honorarium (see Article 5.17, GSA
> Bylaws).
>
> --gretchen
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gsaconcordia mailing list
> Gsaconcordia at lists.resist.ca
> https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gsaconcordia
>
>
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