Brian Platt

Fatal fire, river rescue linked

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Dec 12, 2012
The Winnipeg Free Press

SELKIRK — A 51-year-old woman died in a house fire here Monday and a few hours later, her nephew drove his truck into the frigid Red River at Lockport but survived the crash.

RCMP did not release the name of the victim of the blaze, but neighbours and relatives identified the woman as Gloria Sanderson. The fire, which engulfed the house’s front porch around 10:30 p.m., also took the life of her black Labrador dog.

Gloria’s husband, Allan Sanderson, was working a night shift when the fire broke out at the home on Taylor Avenue. Selkirk RCMP said there were no other injuries and no neighbouring homes were damaged.

The provincial fire commissioner’s office is investigating the cause of the fire.

Then, around 5 a.m. Tuesday in Lockport, a vehicle left the road, went down the riverbank and headed along ice before it hit open water near the dam.

The driver, a 40-year-old Selkirk man, scrambled from the vehicle and was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Relatives said he is Sanderson’s nephew.

RCMP would only say there might be a link between the two incidents.

The vehicle remained under water near the dam Tuesday.

Const. Paul Human, a spokesman for Selkirk RCMP, said there is always open water near the dam because of the powerful current, adding the vehicle might have been swept farther north beneath the ice.

RCMP have not ruled out alcohol as a factor in the mishap on the river, Human said.

“It could have ended horribly,” Human said. “Imagine being immersed in the water, the shock of the impact.”

Police said it’s believed the driver was the only person inside when the truck started to sink.

“I’m feeling 75 per cent sure he was alone, and I’m going for 100 per cent,” Human said. “The underwater recovery team has been there, and it’s too dangerous for a recovery.”

Late Monday night in Selkirk, John Johnson smelled smoke and went outside to see bright orange flames leaping from the front porch of a home two doors down the street.

Witnesses who watched from the street said the fire department arrived quickly and soon had the fire under control.

Family members say Sanderson was likely overcome by smoke. She came from a large family of four brothers and five sisters and is survived by two children and two grandchildren.

“She was a very enjoyable person, a funny person, on her good days,” said Sandra Hohne, Sanderson’s sister. “She had two grandsons that she adored very much. She was quite close to her family.”

Sanderson worked for many years as a housekeeper for Manitoba Housing and then for the Betel Personal Care Home in Selkirk.

She would have turned 52 on Dec. 22.

“She liked to sing karaoke, she even won awards for it,” said Melvin Langlois, another of the woman’s nephews. “(She) had a voice similar to Loretta Lynn.”

— with files from Nick Martin

Is Quebec better at holding student demonstrations?

Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

May 28, 2012
The Canadian Press

When a six-year tuition freeze was lifted in British Columbia in 2002, causing tuition at most universities to double over the next three years, a group of 50 students spent a night camping in the University of British Columbia administration offices while a few hundred protested outside.

Then the group stormed the student union’s executive offices to demand the resignation of the union’s president, Kristen Harvey.

They were angry at the student union’s lack of protesting: Harvey’s efforts had been largely focused on holding consultations with university and government officials.

The protests at UBC fizzled out quickly. During the next school term, the board of governors made room for 300 students to come speak at a meeting where new tuition raises were being passed. Barely 40 showed up.

Today, after nearly four months of unrelenting protests by an assortment of Quebec student groups over plans to hike tuition fees in the province, student leaders in the rest of Canada are only now beginning to hold solidarity events.

UBC’s tepid reaction to the 2002 tuition hikes is not an anomaly. According to many current and former student politicians from across the country, student groups outside Quebec are simply incapable of holding widespread and sustained demonstrations, regardless of the issue.

“The student movement in English Canada has gone on a different trajectory since the 1960s,” says Duncan Wojtaszek, the executive director of the Council of Alberta University Students, an umbrella organization for Alberta student unions.

“I think it could make a good go of a day-long event, or even a couple days long…but it’s difficult for us to imagine 100 days culminating in a 100,000-plus march.”

This is partly caused by promises made during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, Wojtaszek says, where education reforms famously created free or very cheap tuition. When a provincial government elsewhere in Canada raises tuition fees, there isn’t a sense of violating a sacred social contract.

But anglophone student groups also tend to be highly-centralized and focused on operating student services, including businesses like pubs and cafes. Decisions are made by elected representatives at a broad, diverse council.

In Quebec, the student groups are often smaller and intensely political. They frequently hold general assemblies where any student in the department or faculty can come to vote on issues.

This grassroots element generates the energy and stamina in Quebec’s student protests that is missing everywhere else.

“The departmental councils have so much power 1/8at francophone schools 3/8. I think that that’s really the big difference,” says Joey Coleman, who spent four years blogging about student politics for Maclean’s and The Globe and Mail.

“When we’re talking about student strikes, we’re talking about faculties. We’re not talking about an entire school.”

Coleman says the requirements of running businesses — such as hiring permanent staff and maintaining a hierarchical management structure — centralize power, weakening the faculty and department associations.

In contrast, at the public colleges in Quebec, often known by the acronym CEGEPs, the schools themselves run many of the student services, leaving the students with little need to organize into one large student union.

Their efforts are then centred on the faculty associations.

“These associations are largely political, and mobilization-oriented. They’re the ones who are leading the push in the strike,” says Joel Pedneault, vice president of external affairs at the McGill University student union, where relatively few student groups have voted to strike.

“They don’t really provide the kind of services to members that large student associations would. It allows them to be very autonomous in the kind of political action that they do.”

CEGEP faculty associations are run largely through direct democracy at general assemblies, a process that has been entrenched through the frequency of student unrest in the province — there were large student protests in 1996 and 2005 — and by the heated politics of sovereignty.

Student general assemblies are often chaotic, but they generate a large amount of enthusiasm for their projects. This is key for the protest movement.

When student associations in the rest of Canada try to organize protests, the decision-making is often done by small, representative groups who then try to motivate their constituencies in a top-down fashion.

The results are often underwhelming, says Coleman.

“They have a hard time drawing out students for rallies that are planned months in advance.”

The Canadian Federation of Students, which has most of its strength in Ontario, still puts a lot of emphasis on organizing protests.

But the student unions in English Canada that aren’t CFS members focus more on intricate policy discussions and voter drives than on street demonstrations.

During the April provincial election in Alberta, Wojtaszek’s organization signed up 12,000 students to voting lists and spent election day trying to get them all to the polls.

The plan is to build up credible electoral pressure to bring on policy-makers.

“That’s the hope, that they recognize we aren’t some marginal interest group, but we’re really the group that put them in office,” says Wojtaszek.

Spencer Keys, who was UBC’s student union president in 2005 and has since worked for the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, says in his experience, there are a lot of student leaders who are willing to have the complicated policy debate over how education should be funded.

Keys says there were very mixed views at UBC during the time when B.C. tuition was rising quickly.

“On one hand, prices were going up. On the other hand, people were seeing the effects of an unfunded tuition freeze…People saw there being a real quality impact on the institution.”

Once that debate happens, the question remains of how to most effectively influence policy-makers.

But for better or worse, students in English Canada likely don’t have the option of taking over the streets, says Keys.

“Nobody outside Quebec currently has the ability to do the kind of sustained action that you’re seeing there. Full stop.”

Finding Morgan Freeman

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

May 3, 2012
The Canadian Press

A catastrophic hard drive failure has led a pair of film school students on an epic odyssey to convince Hollywood icon Morgan Freeman to narrate their project.

Just a week before his graduation project deadline, Ian MacDougall knew he had to do something drastic.

His hard drive had crashed, taking seven months of work on his short film with it. It would be impossible to do over that work in seven days.

MacDougall remembered an idea that Mackenzie Warner, his classmate at Simon Fraser University, had told him about last year: Wouldn’t it be great to make a documentary about getting Morgan Freeman to narrate a documentary?

“I called him and I said, ‘Mack, my hard drive crashed, I need a new film. You remember that idea you came up with? I’m willing to max out my Visa to pay for this trip. I think it’s a crazy idea, but I think we can do it.’”

Freeman’s narrative skills are, of course, legendary. His voice has guided everything from “The Shawshank Redemption” to “March of the Penguins,” from CBS News to Visa commercials. Freeman’s distinctive ability to sound both authoritative and humble, both stirring and soothing, has made him perhaps the most famous narrator in the world.

The students had a week to track him down.

Internet research told them that Freeman splits his time between New York City and Charleston, Mississippi.

They debated whether it would be better to go to Los Angeles to find Freeman’s agent.

But then MacDougall received an excited phone call from his sister. She had just discovered that in two days, Freeman would be the MC at a blues concert in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

MacDougall and Warner purchased $150 VIP tickets to the concert, booked flights to Memphis and packed their camera equipment to document the journey.

Things got off to a good start. A man on their flight was going to the same concert, and offered them a ride to Clarksdale. A hotel owner in town heard their story and gave them a steep discount.

As the evening of Saturday, April 28 arrived, MacDougall and Warner prepared themselves for the big pitch. They weren’t allowed to film in the concert venue, so they duct-taped microphone equipment under their clothes to capture audio.

But the event was jam-packed, everyone was lined up to speak to Freeman.

By the time the students made it to the front, they were barely able to get five words in before getting shuffled away.

Not only had they failed to get Freeman’s participation, MacDougall and Warner were also aware they had let down the thousands of people who had started following the project on Facebook and Twitter. Radio stations were calling for interviews.

“It was extremely disheartening,” said Warner. They were tired and broke, and were questioning what their film would even be about if Freeman didn’t participate.

Over the next two days they interviewed Clarksdale residents and heard stories about Freeman, who co-owned a blues bar in the town called the Ground Zero Blues Club. They met people who had moved to Clarksdale from around the world just to be in the heart of blues country.

“The film became more about the people we’ve met and the experience we’ve had,” said MacDougall.

Then they met a couple from Hong Kong who said they had just eaten with Freeman an hour ago at Ground Zero. MacDougall and Warner looked at each other, shocked. Freeman was still in town!

They grabbed their camera equipment and took off running. But Freeman was gone, and this time for good: he had left for Louisiana, to another blues festival.

The students received one final stroke of luck. Bill Luckett, who co-owns the bar with Freeman, heard their story and agreed to call Freeman on his cell phone and make the pitch.

MacDougall and Warner watched, holding their breath.

The answer? Freeman chuckled, and said they’d have to talk to his agent before he could commit to anything.

MacDougall and Warner returned home Wednesday night to a crowd of friends and supporters at the Vancouver International Airport. They have 24 hours to edit their short film for the student film festival, which plays Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

They still hope to get Freeman’s participation in narrating the documentary about finding him.

In the end, the two students racked up about $5000 in bills during their pursuit of Freeman.

But they may not have to worry about paying it off: their Facebook group is 7000 strong and growing, and they have already raised over $2000 in donations.

So why has their project attracted so much attention and support?

“This is just two people with very limited resources realizing that once they united with a larger group of people, anything can happen,” said Warner. “And with social media…everyone’s living this as we’re living this.”

For MacDougall, who had put in 7 months of work on a fictional short film that will never be seen, he now has a graduation project with a very large audience.

“You know, it’s almost like that hard drive crash was a bit of blessing.”

The problem with Bountiful

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

May 2012
The United Church Observer

By all accounts, Bountiful is a beautiful place. Nestled in the Creston Valley of southeast British Columbia, just north of the Idaho border, it is home to about 1,000 people. Aside from the nearby town of Creston, Bountiful is isolated — and that’s how the residents prefer it. It may be the most controversial community in Canada.

Bountiful’s inhabitants belong to two feuding Mormon fundamentalist sects, both of which practise polygamy. In 1990, the RCMP began to investigate allegations from former residents of incest, sexual abuse and trafficking of teenage brides.

Despite the openly polygamous nature of the community, officials hesitated to press charges. Legal experts warned that any attempts to enforce Canada’s century-old polygamy ban would be struck down as a violation of the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But in 2008, Wally Oppal, the B.C. attorney general at the time, resolved to charge two Bountiful men, Winston Blackmore and Jim Oler, with polygamy, the first such charges in Canada in over half a century. However, the special prosecutor Oppal appointed to handle the file recommended against charging the men until it could be proven that the polygamy ban, section 293 of Canada’s Criminal Code, didn’t violate the Charter. A second appointee recommended the same. Oppal then found a third special prosecutor, who agreed to press charges. But in September 2009, the B.C. Supreme Court threw out the case on the grounds that Oppal was not allowed to cycle through prosecutors in such a manner.

By this time, the province had a new attorney general, Michael de Jong, who decided to determine the polygamy ban’s constitutionality once and for all. He asked the B.C. Supreme Court to hold a reference hearing.

After a year of testimony and deliberation, Chief Justice Robert Bauman released a 335-page ruling last November that upheld the ban. “I have concluded that this case is essentially about harm,” Bauman said. “This includes harm to women, to children, to society and to the institution of monogamous marriage.” In Bauman’s opinion, that harm was enough to justify limiting Charter freedoms.

Some hailed the decision as a victory for women’s rights, while others felt it was a needless restraint on individual freedoms. If Canada had lifted its ban on polygamy, it would have become the first country in the developed world to do so. Yet the ban’s critics point out that many of the harms we associate with polygamy are already illegal, making a polygamy ban unnecessary. Furthermore, it is legal to live and have sexual relations with as many people as we want; why should it be illegal to formalize such relationships?

For their part, Bountiful community leaders insist there is nothing wrong with their lifestyle, and the allegations by activists, investigators and former residents are baseless.

Ultimately, the debate comes down to whether or not polygamy is an inherently harmful practice. Is it possible to imagine a healthy polygamous relationship? As everyone waits for the attorney general’s next move on Bountiful, the issue continues to simmer.

Daphne Bramham is a long-time Vancouver Sun columnist. In 2004, she had been writing a series of columns about human trafficking, mostly from Asia into North America. After one column, she received an e-mail from one of her readers asking, “Why don’t you ever do anything about Bountiful?”

Since then, Bramham has likely written more words about Bountiful than anyone else in the country, including more than 100 columns and a book in 2008. She supports the ban on polygamy but knows better than anyone that the situation is still a long way from being resolved. “It becomes so complicated to deal with this that governments get paralyzed by it,” Bramham says. “They say, ‘Well, these people seem to be happy, so let’s just leave them be.’”

A group of breakaway Mormon polygamists first arrived in southern Alberta from the United States in 1887, as the mainstream Mormon church was preparing to ban polygamy among its members. Canada’s ban, introduced in 1890, was largely a reaction to this group’s arrival.

The idea was to keep quiet and stay out of trouble, but the Alberta Mormons prospered to the point where one of their members, John Blackmore, became the member of Parliament for Lethbridge in 1935. Although Blackmore did not practise polygamy himself, he spoke out against the ban in Parliament and helped get references to Mormons removed from section 293.

In the 1940s, a few of the polygamist leaders decided to find a more secluded place to settle in. They eventually put down roots in B.C.’s Creston Valley and called their settlement Bountiful.

Sometime in the late 1950s, Bountiful’s polygamists aligned with the Arizona-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), another breakaway polygamist sect. Over the years, this relationship has allegedly involved the movement of young female members across the border in both directions to marry powerful men in other communities.

A decade ago, a leadership schism took place in Bountiful. Today it is split between those who follow Winston Blackmore (grandson of the former Lethbridge MP) and those who follow FLDS’s American leadership. Blackmore currently has more than 20 wives and over 100 children.

Ever since the polygamists arrived in Canada, politicians have mostly left them alone. But in 1990, the RCMP started paying serious attention to claims of widespread abuse in Bountiful.

One of the most prominent Bountiful apostates was Debbie Palmer, who had married a 58-year-old man when she was 15. She left the community in 1988 after one of her daughters said she had been sexually abused. In 1992, three Bountiful men were convicted of sexual abuse, mostly due to Palmer’s testimony.

Over the course of the Supreme Court reference hearing in 2010-11, experts and apostate members put forward reams of testimony about the harms of Bountiful’s polygamist practices. This included allegations of domestic violence, sexual abuse, forced marriage and increased infant mortality in the community.

“I find it somewhat shocking that charges haven’t been laid yet, based on the evidence that has come out during the reference case,” says Bramham. Despite the polygamy ban’s apparent constitutionality, she would actually prefer to see community leaders arraigned for other alleged offences. “The polygamy part of it, for me,” she says, “has always been a way into a story that’s about abuse in a community.”

So why is the polygamy ban important? And why haven’t Bountiful’s leaders been charged with other crimes? “It’s difficult to get witnesses, and that’s a legitimate fear by prosecutors,” says Bramham. Bountiful, as with all FLDS communities, is extremely resistant to outsiders. Those who do speak out are expelled and lose all contact with the community’s members. “What upholding the ban does is that it gives police a tool to go into a community like Bountiful and look for these things.”

A good argument may exist for a polygamy ban, says University of Victoria political science professor Emmett Macfarlane, but he’s unconvinced by Justice Bauman’s ruling. “My main problem with the reference decision was the conclusion that polygamy is inherently harmful,” says Macfarlane, who specializes in public policy and analyzed the decision for Maclean’s. “Not that it’s harmful in particular contexts, or that it’s likely to lead to abuse, but that we cannot imagine a healthy polygamy relationship. To be frank, I don’t buy that.”

Aside from polygamists themselves, the most consistent opposition to the polygamy ban comes from those who view section 293 as a fundamental violation of individual freedom. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association took part in the reference hearing, urging the judge to strike down the ban as unconstitutional. “The key for us is consent,” said Robert Holmes, the BCCLA president at the time. “If three or more adults wish to live in a conjugal relationship, we don’t think it’s the proper role of government to tell them they should go to jail for it.”

Macfarlane agrees that in a closed community like Bountiful, polygamy causes obvious and serious problems. But a ban on polygamy means that nobody, anywhere, is ever allowed to solemnize a relationship with more than one person. “You run into the problem of criminalizing something that may not always be harmful. From an individual rights perspective, it’s highly problematic,” he says.

One complicating aspect of this debate is the role of religion. It is fairly clear that Canada’s original ban on polygamy did not come from a desire to protect women; in 1890, marital rape was not considered a crime and wouldn’t be for many decades afterward. Instead, the ban was due to prejudice against Mormons who were increasingly immigrating to Canada from the United States.

Winston Blackmore reportedly keeps a framed copy of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on his wall, because of what he regards as its concrete protection of his religious right to practise plural marriage. Other immigrant communities also have sects who engage in polygamy.

“Our multicultural society has given [Bountiful leaders] a language that gives them protection,” says Bramham. She notes that Blackmore also appropriates the “distinct society” language used by Quebec and Aboriginal nationalists.

Yet those in Macfarlane’s camp prefer to view this debate outside the frame of religious freedom. “I don’t know how someone has the right to practise polygamy on religious grounds but not as an agnostic or atheist,” he says. “It shouldn’t always be about religion freedom. There may be other sections of the Charter that it might be fruitful to pursue [in defence of polygamy], including freedom of expression.”

But in light of the evidence known about Bountiful, Macfarlane stops short of giving full-throated support to striking down the ban. “I don’t feel that the state should be compelled to [officially] recognize polygamous relationships. I wouldn’t go that far,” he says. “The very gendered dimensions of these communities, as well as the harm that implicates the children, is why I personally find this such a difficult question.”

After the reference ruling upheld the polygamy ban, Peter Wilson was appointed in January as a special prosecutor to handle the Bountiful case. In late March, B.C.’s attorney general gave Wilson a mandate to consider polygamy charges.

This is good news for Bramham, who hopes Wilson will at least move forward on sexual abuse and forced marriage charges, but she remains wary. “There still is a lack of will, not among the police, but among the political and judicial class,” she says. “It has been a perfect storm of people minding their own business.”

Whether one is for or against the polygamy ban, what unites everyone in this debate is frustration over the government’s continuing inability to take any meaningful action to protect Bountiful’s residents — particularly the women and children. Bramham has scorn for the timid politicians who have let the situation fester. “If we can’t deal with a small community who are breaking the law, what does that mean?”

Thunderbirds vs Thundernerds: Baseball. (Ubyssey video)

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Thunderbirds vs Thundernerds: Baseball. (Ubyssey video)

Is UBC’s new biomass power plant a looming biomess?

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

March 1, 2012
The Ubyssey

UBC is a month away from opening a $27 million biomass power plant with Nexterra Systems Corp., a local green-tech company. Two of Nexterra’s American projects have ended in failure. Is UBC headed down the same path?

ON OCTOBER 9, 2011, South Carolina’s largest newspaper published a lengthy exposé on an alternative energy power plant at the University of South Carolina (USC).

The plant, which used biomass gasification technology, had been racked by explosions and malfunctions. In March 2011, only four years after opening, it had to be closed down completely. USC is now waiting to recoup its $20 million investment.

UBC is about to open a $27 million biomass power plant in partnership with Nexterra Systems Corp., the same company that supplied the technology to the USC power plant.

Nexterra is a Vancouver-based company that has been lauded in the Canadian media as an international pioneer in alternative energy solutions—but no Canadian media outlet has reported on the USC disaster. And that’s not the only problem Nexterra has had with American universities.

Last June, Nexterra made headlines for signing a $16 million contract with the University of Montana (UM) for a biomass power plant. “This is our fourth university project and it represents a significant milestone as we expand into the higher educational market across North America,” said Jonathan Rhone, the company’s CEO at the time, in an article in The Province.

By December 2011, the UM project had been scrapped by the university. According to the local media, the project met its demise due to concerns over “financial viability, fuel supply, increased pollution and the deteriorating [public] discourse.”

Out of the four university projects mentioned by Rhone in the Province article, two have turned out to be fiascos. The other two are both in British Columbia. One of them, the UBC project, is set to come online in April. At this time, the only successful Nexterra university power plant is at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George.

Nexterra also has a handful of smaller biomass power plants operating at non-university locations, including at a Kruger Products factory in New Westminster. These plants seem to have avoided the university plants’ problems.

For two years, UBC officials have been touting their almost-completed Nexterra power plant, located between the Totem Park and Marine Drive residences, in press releases and newspaper op-eds as an example of UBC’s commitment to being a global leader in green technology. In his town hall last October, President Stephen Toope praised the Nexterra project at length, calling it a complete “winner” for the university.

But considering the problems with the American plants, is the UBC project as trustworthy as we’ve been told? Will it prove to be a success following the UNBC model, or is it a looming financial catastrophe?

• • •

WHEN THE UNIVERSITY of South Carolina officially opened its biomass power plant in December 2007, USC officials were brimming with excitement. According to The State, the South Carolina newspaper that published the exposé on the plant, officials called it “the cat’s meow.”

Biomass technology takes in organic material and turns it into energy. Nexterra has focused on developing biomass gasification systems that take in wood byproduct and turn it into a synthetic gas that can be used to generate heat or electricity.

In other words, Nexterra converts wood chips, tree trimmings and bark into a substitute for natural gas and other fossil fuels.

The USC biomass plant was built by Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI), a Fortune 500 company with a large energy services division. According to The State, there was no competitive bidding process for the construction of the plant; it came as part a comprehensive JCI bid to provide energy services to the university. JCI had never built a biomass plant to the scale of what was promised to USC.

“We were a young company,” says Mike Scott, who replaced Rhone as Nexterra’s CEO in October 2011. “At the time, Johnson Controls was only willing to have us do a very, very small part of that project.”

JCI used Nexterra’s technology to build the power plant, but according to Scott, the plant’s fuel handling system, boiler, emission control equipment, turbine, water treatment system, controls and the building itself were managed by other groups. Nexterra only supplied the gasification system.

“Unfortunately, that project had a number of challenges,” says Scott.

On June 28, 2009, an explosion in the USC biomass plant blasted a metal panel 60 feet in the air. Documents obtained by The State showed that USC officials described the accident as “potentially lethal.”

“An irrevocable catastrophe may have occurred if a worker or visitor had been in this location,” wrote Thomas Quasney, USC’s associate vice-president for facilities, in an email obtained by The State.

In total, The State obtained 1800 pages of documents about the USC biomass plant in its investigation, much of it through freedom of information requests.

The documents showed that the plant had been shut down more than three dozen times in its four-year lifespan. In one two-year period, the plant was only operational on 98 out of 534 days.

According to The State, “the [June 28] blast underscored what some USC officials privately grumbled about for years: That the plant has been a $20 million disaster, a money pit that was poorly planned and built by a company [JCI] that had never constructed such a cutting-edge ‘green energy’ power plant before.”

In March 2011, the USC biomass plant was shuttered. Fortunately for the university, their contract with JCI guaranteed $2 million per year in energy savings over what USC’s natural gas heating system would have cost. This means that USC will eventually be able to recoup their $20 million investment in the biomass plant.

“It was a bad plant, but a good contract,” said USC’s chief financial officer, Ed Walton, in an interview with The State.

• • •

BRENT SAUDER SAYS he is not worried about what the USC revelations might mean for UBC’s Nexterra plant.

Sauder is the director of strategic partnerships for the UBC Sustainability Initiative. His job is to create partnerships between UBC and third parties to advance UBC’s goals in sustainability and environmental technology.

“The situation [in South Carolina] is that Nexterra only supplied components of the system and somebody else welded them all together,” says Sauder. “The failures occurred in the integration part, not in the component supply.”

At UBC, in contrast, Nexterra is essentially responsible for the whole plant. UBC staff are being trained to eventually take it over, but unlike at USC, there is no intermediary company between Nexterra and the university. However, this also means that there is no performance contract that would refund the cost if the plant fails.

Scott says that Nexterra quickly learned its lesson from what happened at USC.

“When we looked at doing the next project with Johnson Controls…we insisted, and Johnson Controls agreed, that Nexterra should actually provide everything around the system. The scope of our supply increased around six-fold,” says Scott.

This project was at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory—the department’s largest laboratory in the United States and a premier nuclear research site.

“Fortunately, this has resulted in a successful project,” says Scott. “We’ve just completed the performance tests, and as you can imagine…that project underwent an enormous amount of scrutiny after the [USC] challenges.”

But Nexterra still features the USC project on its website with no mention that the plant has been shut down for nearly a year. In Nexterra’s press releases, the most recent of which is dated October 12, 2011, the company’s description says that Nexterra “has successfully supplied commercial gasification systems for projects at the US Department of Energy, University of South Carolina, Dockside Green, Kruger Products, the University of Northern BC and Tolko Industries.”

Why is Nexterra using a failed power plant in its public relations without stating the project’s problems?

“That’s a fair comment,” says Scott. “But it was a commercial success for us, we delivered the system, the plant did run…Our hope and expectation is that we will have the opportunity to go back and fix it for Johnson Controls. With the success we’re having at Oak Ridge National Labs, we hope [we can go back and fix it.]

“We’re not hiding from any of it, and we don’t mean for it to be a representation. Some would say that if we didn’t have it there, that we were trying to hide from the problems. I understand the criticism, but I think you’ll find if you talk to our customers that we’ve been as forthright as possible.”

As it turned out, the full scale of the USC plant’s problems came to light just as another Nexterra project was falling under heavy criticism in Missoula, Montana.

• • •

WHEN THE $16 MILLION University of Montana biomass plant was announced in June, the press coverage portrayed it as a breakthrough for Nexterra.

“After installing systems at the University of BC, the University of Northern BC, and the University of South Carolina, company president Jonathan Rhone sees the Missoula campus contract as a potential stepping stone into a giant North American market,” said a Province article on June 3, 2011.

Shortly after The State published its report on the USC disaster, Missoula’s newspaper, The Missoulian, began a careful examination of the project. The paper’s correspondent on the story was Chelsi Moi.

“I think [the university’s] presentation is what made it controversial,” says Moi. “When they first presented the project, they made it look like a win-win, in-the-bag, great project.”

But when a few environmental groups started pushing the university on some of their claims, particularly around air quality and carbon emissions, university officials had to do some backtracking.

“Missoula’s in a valley,” says Moi, “and has had historically poor air quality. Even a couple of years ago, we were deemed an air stagnation zone, and were forced to clean up our act.”

One of the results was that most city residents were no longer allowed to have wood fireplaces—which is why a large wood-fueled power plant at the university raised ire.

The high carbon emissions and particulate matter released by burning wood are some of the biggest problems that biomass companies have worked to solve. Nexterra claims that its plants have made huge strides in this regard.

Public consultations grew contentious between Missoula residents and university officials. At one point the university was forced to apologize after its vice-president of finance and administration said that project opponents were engaged in “low-level eco-terrorism.”

In November, a letter signed by 45 concerned residents—including members of UM’s heating plant staff—asked the university’s Board of Regents to reconsider the project.

“The regents made a decision based on information that was not current,” said one of the letter-writers, John Snively, as quoted by The Missoulian. “It’s clear the university doesn’t want to hear from us. The people who are making the decisions at the university don’t feel we have the technical expertise or have valid reasons for interceding in this, never mind that it will cost us all more money and create more pollution.”

But Scott notes that Nexterra obtained all the permits it needed from health authorities to build the plant.

“I think there was a couple of action groups that were opposed to the project,” says Scott, “and they continued to challenge the administration on the basis of emissions…but the administration had a hard time getting out the message that the system they were proposing is the cleanest biomass system that you can get. The state authorities recognized that it would be the cleanest biomass system in the state of Montana.”

One of the action groups opposed to the biomass plant was the Wildwest Institute, an organization focused on forest and wildlife issues. Its executive director, Matthew Koehler, led the charge on challenging the university’s claims about the benefits of the project.

“We had started raising questions about this for about nine months, and we were all but ignored by the university and the press,” says Koehler. “And then we found a bunch of stuff in open-record searches…and you know, it didn’t require too much sleuthing. It just required critical thinking skills to pore through documents.”

Koehler has been a dedicated skeptic of biomass power plants for years. He says he would support small-scale biomass in some instances, but essentially objects to the idea of, as he puts it, “cutting down forests and then burning them to solve global climate change.”

To this, biomass proponents argue that most biomass projects only involve burning the wood industry’s byproduct that would otherwise be waste. Yet Koehler was able to find problems in UM’s plans for fuel supply.

“UM had made this claim that they were going to get this fuel for [a certain price], and then they put out this bid, and nobody bid,” says Koehler. “And then…the university was saying the fuel dealers were going to have to chip [wood] offsite and truck in the fuel, about three chip trucks full a day.” But fuel dealers did not have the storage space to be able to guarantee a steady flow of chip supply.

“So then at the last minute, the university said, ‘Well, we’ll just invest a quarter of a million dollars and chip on site,’” says Koehler. “Okay, so we’re going to run an industrial wood-chipper in the middle of campus?”

On December 2, 2011, UM suspended the biomass project indefinitely. The official reason was that natural gas prices had fallen so far that it was no longer in the university’s financial interests to install an expensive biomass power plant.

“They’ve said that they will revisit the project again in 2012,” says Scott. “If natural gas prices don’t increase, or there’s not a change in the economic and green imperatives for the university, then I think it will be on hold until there’s a change. It’s just unfortunate that the macro energy environment turned on us. I think it would have been a fantastic project.”

• • •

THERE ARE MANY significant differences between the plant being installed at UBC and the failed projects at USC and UM.

Perhaps the most important is that UBC is less focused on biomass as a potentially cheaper alternative to natural gas, and more on the research and development aspect of the facility. As with USC, the biomass project at UM had an energy services company building the plant as part of an energy supply contract to the university. At UBC, the plant will be entirely university-operated.

“With biomass, here was an opportunity to try something new,” said Sauder, UBC Sustainability Initiative’s director of strategic partnerships. “And it could contribute to the heat and power as required by the university, and use technology grown in British Columbia.”

The UBC plant will include a laboratory onsite and university researchers will conduct extensive research with the technology.

UBC was also greatly helped by government subsidies and grants; about 70 per cent of the plant’s $27 million capital cost is covered by these funds.

The biomass plant being built at UBC is a new generation of Nexterra’s technology. “In the first generation of our systems, we took that syngas [the synthetic gas produced from the wood fuel] and burned it to produce steam,” says Scott. “That gas in its untreated form isn’t suitable for firing into internal combustion engines. And so what we’ve done…is developed a system for cleaning up the gas to make it suitable.”

Nexterra’s system at UBC will be able to fire that synthetic gas into an engine developed by General Electric. The engine will then be capable of producing heat and electricity for the campus.

“The system at UBC will be first of its kind built by us,” says Scott. “There have been a number of failed attempts, mostly in Europe, to do what we’re trying to do. Many of those projects in Europe have not met the commercial requirements of a combined heat and gas system. But we’ve done nearly 3000 hours of testing at our product development centre in Kamloops…and the UBC project will be the first commercial-scale demonstration of this technology.”

Two of the major criticisms of the UM project were air quality and fuel supply; both of those appear to be comprehensively addressed at UBC.

The plant has received a Metro Vancouver air quality management permit, but Sauder says the air quality restrictions will go above and beyond the district requirements. The university will have researchers on site monitoring the emissions continuously. Sauder also authored a 78-page environmental assessment.

“The strictest [air quality standards] we could find in the US is the San Joaquin Valley, and we’re going to be stricter than that,” says Sauder.

Scott also points to the success of the UNBC biomass plant, where third-party studies concluded in August 2011 that the plant’s emission quality was “as good as, or better than, natural gas.”

The UBC plant’s fuel supply will come from a Langley-based company, Cloverdale Fuel, that specializes in “wood byproducts brokering and transport.” Cloverdale already supplies a Nexterra biomass plant at a Kruger Products mill in New Westminster.

The City of Vancouver has signed a memorandum of understanding to provide 5000 tonnes of municipal tree trimmings annually to the UBC fuel supply. Sauder estimates this will cover about 20 per cent of the fuel; the rest will come from Cloverdale’s suppliers. The fuel will be prepared at Cloverdale according to UBC-ordered standards, and then trucked to the university in two to three truckloads per day.

Jens Wieting, the forests and climate campaigner for Sierra Club BC, says that there is a lot of local supply for wood waste right now, though he cautions that this may change when pine beetle-damaged wood is used up.

“At some point there is a big risk of…not having resources in the future,” says Wieting. “Because of the pine beetle and the increasing number of forest fires, and lack of reforestation, we have to expect that there will be less timber available in the near future. That’s a concern for any project. A very careful study is required in terms of long term supply.”

The biomass plant itself used cross-laminated timber in its construction, a low-carbon alternative for steel and concrete. “It will be the first industrial building in North America built with cross-laminated timber,” says Sauder.

“I’m quite proud of what we’re doing,” says Scott. “It’s made-in-BC technology that the university is taking a leadership role on, and I’m quite happy that we’re taking biomass energy to the next level. I’m confident it’s going to work.”

• • •

IF UBC’S BIOMASS plant works as well as the university and Nexterra are promising, it will be a mutually beneficial project. Nexterra gets to test and develop its technology at a commercial scale, UBC researchers get first-hand experience with experimental clean energy production, and the campus will have up to six per cent of its electricity and 25 per cent of its heating steam produced by the project.

But biomass skeptics find it hard to trust these claims. The slick presentations given by universities and company executives often ignore any risks of the project.

“It’s like the Simpsons episode from a few years ago, when the monorail salesman came to Springfield,” says Koehler. “[University executives] generally know jack squat about biomass. But they go to some conference and they get the presentation, and they go ‘Oh wow, that’s neat.’”

Furthermore, the media often can’t be relied on for critical coverage; most articles on biomass technology are indistinguishable from company press releases.

Koehler worries about the reliance the biomass industry has on the vast quantities of money governments have made available for alternative energy projects.

“This biomass stuff cannot pencil out without massive subsidies,” says Koehler. “But biomass proponents seem to be very much true believers in their cause, and they freak out whenever anyone wants to question the economics or the environmental impact of their project.”

Not all environmental groups are of the same mind about biomass. In Nova Scotia, the Ecology Action Network has organized protests against government plans to ramp up biomass production for the electricity grid, out of concern for depleted forest ecosystems. But in BC, there has been very little pushback against biomass.

The Sierra Club, for example, takes a cautious line but generally supports biomass. “The key questions are: what type of biomass [fuel]? And where does it come from? Is it local, or does it need to be shipped in from far away?” says Wieting. “Waste is generally better than something grown specifically for the use of biomass.”

Wieting also encourages caution over claims of carbon neutrality with wood biomass plants, because it depends heavily on how fast the removed trees grow back.

UBC officials, for now, are excited about the project’s potential and eager to discuss it. In the past two years numerous op-eds have appeared in the Vancouver Sun by UBC professors and executives, extolling UBC’s commitment to clean technology and highlighting the Nexterra project in particular.

“This is the university as a leader,” says Sauder. “People see these goals for sustainability…and they say, ‘Well that’s cool, but how are we going to get there?’ To have the tools to demonstrate the path forward is very important. It’s a neat opportunity for UBC to show how to do these things at a city scale.”

The plant is slated to open in April.

Photo courtesy of Nexterra

The AMS puts a little imagination to work

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

February 16, 2012
The Ubyssey

The AMS has made national headlines over the past couple of weeks, including stories in The Toronto Star, The Huffington Post and The Province. Considering the AMS’s recent history, this would normally mean I’d be writing a column that starts with a recap of a hilarious and embarrassing scandal that has swamped our student union.

But this time the buzz is good: the AMS is planning a microbrewery for the new SUB. According to President Jeremy McElroy and VP Finance Elin Tayyar, it would be the first brewery operated by a student union anywhere in the world.

If we are to believe the feasibility report that the AMS commissioned, the brewery will potentially make an annual profit of somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million. It would also provide students with a cheaper source of alcohol at the AMS’s bars, and possibly give beer gardens a local source for their kegs.

This all seems too good to be true, and to a certain extent, it probably is. I’ll be surprised if the brewery ever makes that much profit. But examined within the larger context of the AMS’s ambitions, it doesn’t really matter whether the brewery makes wads of cash, breaks even or is a modest money-loser.

At the February 8 AMS Council meeting, Tayyar laid out a plan to have the AMS form a company to manage all of the society’s business operations. That company would have a more stable and knowledgeable (but still student-controlled) board of directors, and would focus on making the AMS’s businesses as efficient and profitable as possible. Those profits would then flow back to the AMS to be put into student services.

The main reasons for this plan are practical. The AMS’s business profits have been falling for years, and they’ve also received unwelcome attention from the Canada Revenue Agency for being a non-profit society with high levels of business income.

But think for a moment about the path the AMS is embarking on. In a few years, it will have a brand new $103 million building—which brings along brand new facilities for all of its businesses. Its bars, which currently sit empty on most nights, will likely be much fuller and will now be selling pitcher after pitcher of AMS-produced beer. This is growing into quite the commercial empire.

A decade from now, when these business profits are combined with the interest produced from the AMS’s endowment fund, a substantial portion of the AMS budget will be independent from student fees. The AMS will be able to keep its student fees among the lowest in Canada while increasing student service levels. It’s brilliant.

The real question is: why are no other student unions doing this? For one thing, they tend to be suspicious of relinquishing control over their business operations; the result is that student politicians with little business sense maintain their food outlets as poorly-run money pits. The AMS has always been smartly focused on giving elected students the final word on business operations, but mostly letting professional staff take care of the details.

The other reason, though, is that other student unions simply haven’t dreamt as ambitiously about what they’re capable of with a bit of longterm planning. For this, the AMS deserves a lot of credit.

A student union in crisis: How did the Kwantlen Student Association become such a mess?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

February 1, 2012
The Ubyssey

All student unions have scandals. It’s what happens when politically inexperienced young people gain power over millions of dollars. Few elections occur without squabbles, and personal attacks are common at student council meetings.

But when it comes to scandals, no student union in the country holds a candle to the Kwantlen Student Association.

The KSA has seen a gauntlet of court cases, boycotts, firings and security incidents in the past decade, but 2011 brought an almost unfathomable level of dysfunction and deceit.

Imagine a student union that was suing five of its former directors and staff for alleged mismanagement of $2 million in student fees.

Then imagine the sister and cousin of one of the accused were elected as directors to that student union’s executive without revealing to voters that they were relatives.

Next, imagine that the new directors removed the lawyers in charge of the case, were exposed by the campus newspaper for their family connections—causing one of them to resign—and then still terminated the lawsuit before it reached a conclusion.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

On November 30, Kwantlen students held a Special General Meeting (SGM) at which the entire executive board and 13 councillors in total were unanimously impeached. The meeting was interrupted by a pulled fire alarm and was monitored by RCMP and campus security.

Now, as the interim executive starts its term, one of the ousted directors has filed a petition to the BC Supreme Court, alleging that the SGM was illegitimately convened.

Lawsuits are nothing new to this student union. In the past year, the KSA has been involved in at least five separate BC Supreme Court cases and racked up well over $250,000 in legal fees (the AMS, with a budget five times the KSA’s size, has spent just over $20,000 in the same period). It has fired its general manager, banned councillors from its offices and been in multiple disputes with the university administration and the campus newspaper.

But to really get a sense of how this student union ended up this way, and to understand the reasons why, one needs to start at the beginning.

You might want to make sure you’re sitting down before reading on.

The trouble begins

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) is a decentralized school, spread over four urban campuses in Surrey, Richmond, Cloverdale and Langley. It has a student population of roughly 18,000, and the KSA takes in more than $3 million per year in student fees.

The KSA Council has 19 voting positions, including an Executive Board made up of five elected directors. The KSA president, however, is not elected by students. Council appoints one of its own members to this position, which primarily consists of being the public spokesperson of the society.

The Kwantlen campus newspaper is called The Runner. As with many universities, but especially with smaller ones, the circles of student politics and student journalism overlap at KPU. This year, The Runner’s news editor is Matt DiMera, who was an unsuccessful candidate in the February 2011 KSA election. Although his recent political candidacy raised some controversy, DiMera went on to win two national student journalism awards for his coverage of the KSA.

Many of the details below come from stories from The Runner, though the student union’s tribulations have been covered in many major media outlets.

The bulk of the KSA’s troubles began in May 2005, when Aaron Takhar became the KSA’s director of finance as part of the “Reduce All Fees” (RAF) slate. Takhar was then appointed as chairperson of the board (the chairperson runs KSA Council meetings unless a speaker is appointed, which is not usually the case).

That September, the KSA held an SGM that featured $13,000 in prizes, including an $8000 tropical vacation. A 200-page document containing sweeping bylaw changes was voted in. The number of elected student representatives was halved and the remaining ones had their terms doubled to two years. Four elected students were expelled from Council. By January 2006, the Executive Board’s pay had been increased by 130 per cent.

Takhar did not run for re-election in 2006. He was instead hired as an “executive advisor.”

In August 2006, documents were filed in the BC Supreme Court that sought to overturn the results of the September 2005 special meeting, reinstate the expelled students and declare the most recent election null and void. The documents were filed by the four students who had been expelled from Council.

Instead of fighting in court, Takhar and the rest of the RAF agreed to a new election.

Forensic analysis

The October 2006 election saw the expelled students take power, and they immediately went to work.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm, was commissioned to do a forensic audit on Takhar’s reign. The auditors recovered thousands of deleted emails and pored over financial documents. The results were explosive.

The audit reported that nearly $150,000 of student funds had been paid out without supporting documents. This included $67,000 paid to a consulting firm called AST Ventures, which Aaron Takhar later confirmed to Maclean’s that he was the sole director of upon incorporation. (AST are also Aaron Takhar’s initials).

Furthermore, the audit showed that during that time, the society gave out $620,000 in loans that “appear high-risk,” many of which were unsecured. Another $200,000 loan was given from a fund that was supposed to be used only for KSA health and dental expenses.

The report goes on to include many details about election manipulation and missing financial documents. The audit’s allegations have not been proven in court.

In August 2008, the KSA sued Takhar and four other members of the RAF party. The press release accused the five members of “fraud, embezzlement and mismanagement,” though the actual BC Supreme Court case would only address “wrongful transactions” and “breach of fiduciary duty.”

Calm before the storm

The KSA then stayed relatively quiet until spring 2011—though it should be clarified what “relatively quiet” means for the KSA.

In March 2008, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) sued the KSA over procedures for a proposed referendum, and won. Next year, the KSA sued the provincial wing of the CFS over representation on CFS-BC’s board, and won.

A boycott of KSA Council began on September 30, 2010, by Council members who supported recently ousted chairperson Reena Bali. Council was unable to meet quorum for almost four months, which delayed important decisions on the U-Pass and a new student union building.

In February 2011, just before the results were announced for the February 2011 election, the KSA’s general manager, Desmond Rodenbour, was fired “with cause.” The decision to fire Rodenbour was debated publicly at an open Council meeting, and then voted on. It was based primarily on a management audit commissioned in January.

Six months later, Rodenbour sued the KSA for wrongful dismissal. But by that point, the society had much bigger problems to deal with.

Chaos reigns

On February 14, 2011, the results of the KSA election were announced. Among the winners were Justine Franson, the new director of operations, and Nina Sandhu, the new director of finance.

It would eventually be revealed by The Runner that Franson was Aaron Takhar’s sister and Sandhu was Takhar’s cousin (Sandhu also uses the last name Kaur). This had not been disclosed to voters.

Months later, a KSA lawyer stated that Franson and Sandhu informed Council of their conflict at the first Council meeting, but there are no minutes publicly available that show this happened.

The new councillors took office on April 1, 2011. On that day, the Executive Board told the KSA’s lawyers to “cease all activity pertaining to the RAF case until further notice.” Franson was made “the sole liaison with KSA legal counsel.” The minutes showed that the motion had been moved by Sandhu.

Within the first month and a half, the KSA Council banned one of its councillors from being in the KSA offices, raised executive work hours by ten per week, gave executives a 40 per cent pay increase and banned all recording devices from Council meetings.

On July 29, The Runner dropped the bombshell that both Franson and Sandhu were related to Takhar. The Surrey Leader later confirmed their report.

The Runner was unable to get any of the Executive Board to comment on the revelations, and at one point RCMP officers were called to force Runner reporters to leave the KSA office area.

Shortly after, Runner reporters began visiting houses, using the addresses submitted by KSA executives to the BC Corporate Registry. At the address given for Justine Franson, its habitants knew Franson but said she had never lived there. When they visited Aaron Takhar’s house, Runner reporters said that Sandhu answered the door and then shut it immediately. Sandhu told The Ubyssey that this never happened.

As outrage grew and major media outlets picked up the story, KSA President Sean Bassi released a statement on the KSA’s website. It said that Franson and Sandhu “understand the appearance of a possible conflict.” The statement went on to say that, “both have, and continue to abstain from any decisions pertaining to the civil actions against former directors.”

However, the minutes from the April 1 Executive Board meeting clearly show that Sandhu moved the motion to cease legal activity and that Franson was made the sole legal liaison.

Franson resigned on August 13 and refused to speak with the media.

The final step

August ended with the news that Rodenbour was suing for wrongful dismissal. On September 1, the KSA sued a website called “KSA Truth,” which was printing rumours and allegations about the KSA.

On September 16, university administrators put a halt to the KSA’s planned by-elections, citing clear interference in the chief returning officer’s duties by elected KSA officials. The by-elections had included a referendum question which would combine many of the special student fees into one general fee, giving the KSA significantly more freedom with its funding.

Five days later, KPU’s Board of Governors officially halted progress on a new student union building because of the “disputes” within the KSA.

A month later, KSA Council held a closed-door meeting at which they officially terminated the lawsuit against Aaron Takhar and the other RAF members. It was justified as a cost-saving measure. “We’ve heard [the students’] concerns,” said Bassi in a statement, “and we’ve listened.”

The Runner ran an editorial with the all-caps title, “OUTRAGE.”

The students fight back

On October 21, the KSA sued the student newspaper at Simon Fraser University over an article published about the turmoil. In the meantime, Kwantlen students began collecting names on a petition in attempt to force the KSA executives out of office.

Christopher Girodat, a student senator who was the Executive Board’s most persistent opponent on Council, presented a 277-signature petition to Council that, according to the KSA’s bylaws, mandated an SGM. The meeting was intended to impeach 13 councillors and prevent them from running in future elections.

In his report to Council on November 18, Bassi addressed the petition. “The majority of students do not think an SGM at this time is beneficial, meaningful, or necessary. In fact, my discussions with some students who were misled into signing the petition has led me to believe that there were sleazy tactics used to obtain signatures.”

An SGM was conducted at the Surrey campus at 2pm on November 30. Sandhu alleges that this meeting was not properly convened, but the BC Supreme Court has yet to rule on this.

KSA bylaws stipulate that an SGM needs 250 people in attendance, and votes need 75 per cent in favour to pass.

After a few interruptions, including a pulled fire alarm and a “noxious substance” released in a hallway, the impeachment question was passed with 352 students in favour and zero against. Bylaw changes were also passed.

Five transitional Executive Board members were appointed without pay and instructed to hire a general manager and hold an election as soon as possible. However, the court has barred the Executive Board from doing this until it settles the question of whether the SGM was legitimate.

The day after the SGM, the impeached Executive Board members were given letters by campus security on university letterhead and instructed to leave the campus, according to The Runner.

On December 5, a protest was held against the new executives and the university administration. The protest was led by Aaron Takhar himself.

What went wrong?

It will still be weeks, possibly months, until the KSA’s affairs reach any kind of normalcy.

Jonathan Tweedale, the lawyer representing Nina Sandhu, has argued in court that under the KSA’s bylaws and the Society Act, Christopher Girodat and the rest of the petition leaders did not have the authority to convene the SGM on their own.

Sandhu referred most questions about her time as director of finance to Tweedale, but Tweedale is focused on the case at hand. “The press has focused on the substantive dispute between the incumbent director group and the critics of the incumbent director group,” said Tweedale, “but that very interesting dispute is not an issue that is going to be resolved in the court [with the current case], that’s an issue for the society’s members to determine.”

While the question of the SGM’s legitimacy is being settled, there is another one worth asking: how did this student union become such a mess? And could something like this happen to any university?

Girodat, the senator who helped organize the petition to hold the AGM, was interviewed by The Ubyssey before the SGM impeached the 13 councillors. “The friendship issue is probably at the height of the problem. Two thirds of Council are very good friends with each other. At Council meetings we have all of these directors having pre-meetings in the executive office, so they know exactly what’s going to happen and how they’re going to vote and everything.”

“If you look back at past minutes,” said Jennifer Campbell, who is serving with Girodat on the interim Executive Board, “there’s pretty much four of us who would oppose, and everyone else was always in favour.” But Campbell also pointed out that slates are banned in the KSA, and there’s no proof that the like-minded councillors had coordinated ahead of the election.

Girodat argued that the KSA Council structure makes it easy for majorities to push an agenda through. The Council is made up of representatives from the four campuses, not from different faculties.

“I think in terms of making it so you have more diversity of opinion on Council, and a broader range of student voices, faculty representation could be one way to do that,” said Girodat.

The society is also particularly ripe for being targeted by political blocs.

“The KSA is sort of an anomaly,” said Matt DiMera, The Runner’s news editor. “There’s lots of schools where it would be really easy to take over your student union, but they don’t have any money. But the KSA actually has a decent-sized budget for being a small student union.”

What compounds this problem is the difficulty of enforcing the Society Act when rules are broken.

Matt Todd, the 2010 director of external affairs, pointed out that any violation of the Society Act requires going through civil court to address. But launching a civil lawsuit is often prohibitively expensive if you’re not able to access the student union’s legal funds.

Jeff Groat, the coordinating editor of The Runner, said that councillors are also often unable to express real dissent on Council. When a speaker is appointed, meetings are run according to a neutral set of rules. But over the past year, and in many other years, the meetings have been chaired by a member of the Executive Board—in this case, it was Sandhu.

In the end, the SGM was the only real option for students who were furious at what they saw happening. Yet it’s still unresolved whether they managed to do this in a legal way.

Campbell has hopes that the KSA will rebound eventually. “I think we’re very unique in that we have four different campuses, and four different populations where views can come together and see what works best for the whole of the student population.

“If the right people are in power, they can work together and make it thrive.”

Photo courtesy of The Runner

Leaders in training: how UBC’s student development is changing student politics

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

January 22, 2012
The Ubyssey

On January 25, there will be a birthday party at the Centre for Student Involvement (CSI).

The party is for the CSI itself. That day will mark the two-year anniversary of the university’s signature project under the realm of “student development.”

The definition of student development depends on who you ask. Most faculties have their own student development officers, each of whom has slightly different priorities. On the whole, though, it involves providing students with opportunities and resources to make them feel supported and encouraged during their time at UBC.

Today the CSI has grown into the staging grounds for most of the major events you see at UBC throughout year, including the Imagine Day orientations, Terry Talks and the Student Leadership Conference (SLC). It also hosts a steady flow of meetings, workshops and minglers for smaller student groups.

The idea of the CSI came up a decade ago in the office of Brian Sullivan, who was Vice President Students at the time. “It was driven by requests by students for access to certain kinds of services,” says Janet Teasdale, the senior director for student development and services. “There were quite active groups of students that were saying ‘we don’t have a place to access resources.’”

“One of the things that Brian felt strongly about was supporting student leadership, and supporting peers helping peers, students helping students,” Teasdale says.

After many years of planning, the centre was designed by a group mostly consisting of UBC alumni. Located in Brock Hall, it is characterized by plushy chairs, open workshop space and entire walls made of whiteboards.

The concept of university-funded student development programming isn’t new. UBC has sponsored programs such as Residence Life, Go Global and Counselling Services for many years. The office of the VP Students has been around since 1999, with Sullivan as its first holder.

But the CSI is different. For the first time in its history, UBC is providing a well-resourced physical space devoted entirely to producing student-centered events. The department that runs the CSI has an annual budget of just under $1 million, which includes at least 9 full-time staff and a myriad of programs in partnership with other university departments.

But if the CSI is doing all of this programming for students, where does that leave the student union and its affiliated clubs and constituencies?

As more and more students get their first taste of leadership training and event organization through the university administration, the effect it has on our student government in coming years could be huge.

Overlapping mandates, different perspectives

When boiled down to its essentials, the CSI is simply a work space for students and university departments to use for their projects.

Margot Bell, the associate director for student development and the de facto manager of the CSI, says that with its prominent location in Brock Hall, the centre also acts as an entry point into university life for new students.

“It really is about that storefront, for lack of a better word,” says Bell. “What we try to do is act as that coaching and referral place for students to really understand the landscape.” Sometimes this means referring students to the AMS or undergraduate constituencies. Other times it draws students to programs based out of the CSI, the biggest of which are the SLC, Imagine Day orientations and CLASS (the Conference on Learning And Academic Student Success.)

When asked whether an overlap exists between the mandates of the CSI and the AMS, the first thing anyone involved with the CSI will tell you is that the two entities work as a complement to each other. Actually, the first thing they will do when asked is scrunch their face, because it’s not something they think is much of a concern.

“I don’t see it as, oh, if you don’t want to be there, come here. It’s not even close to that, philosophically,” says Bell. “There’s so much opportunity to work to the mutual purpose of improving student life on campus. We just come at it from different perspectives.”

“It’s very important to have both,” says Tanya Shum, who got her start in the CSI working as an Imagine Day group leader. Today she is an elected executive in the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS). “They both offer services to students, and are all about getting students involved in the community.”

Yet the CSI operates as an alternative to the AMS in some significant ways. Perhaps the most important difference is in institutional leadership.

In student politics, new leadership comes in almost every year, depending on who wins the election. And as anyone who goes through a student election knows, the best candidate doesn’t always get the job. This means that the AMS, and every club and undergraduate council on campus, goes through cycles of good leadership and bad.

Sometimes very bad.

The CSI, meanwhile, hires staff who stay on the job for years. “[The staff] tends to be students who were really engaged in their day,” says Bell, “Often a mentor, or a leadership program they were involved in, really made a difference to their experience, and they essentially want to give that back to the community.”

This gives the CSI a level of consistency and professionalism that a student union, based on its democratic structure, will never be able to match. But it also gives the CSI a different atmosphere.

“In the CSI there’s student development officers who oversee the projects, so you get support there,” says Shum. “They have an idea of where they want things to go, they can make sure things go in the way that the CSI would like it. In the AUS there’s also support, but it’s in a different way. It’s more student support in one and staff support in the other. It’s just two different ways to learn, I think, and I really appreciate both ways.”

“The opportunities are different,” says Teasdale. Students who work on programs such as the Student Leadership Conference are working within a framework that has certain bounds.

“The bounds, for example, around our commitment to intercultural learning, our commitment to equitable environments, our commitment to student life that addresses significant barriers to student participation—that’s unwavering. And it may not be in the AMS. Now it may be, I’m not saying that it’s not [all the time]. But certain commitments are not going to disappear in the work that students do in the CSI.”

There is a flow that is developing between the CSI and the AMS. CSI programming establishes an environment, based on certain principles, for students to grow their leadership skills in. Those students then apply that experience to other areas of interest—which, for many, includes student government.

“Student development is more of cultivating leaders and people who haven’t been involved,” says Shum, “and then student politics is more the voice of the students.”

Taking on the university

Of course, CSI programs exist for their own sake, not simply for training student politicians. But it is undeniable that the CSI is now providing a steady stream of candidates into student societies.

This year, one of the candidates for the AMS presidency is Alyssa Koehn. Unlike her two opponents, Koehn has never sat on AMS Council, though she has coordinated AMS programs such as Firstweek. Koehn’s main involvement on campus has been through UBC-sponsored programs, including Residence Life and UBC Rec. Most recently she was co-chair of the massive Student Leadership Conference that took place on January 15. The SLC is a flagship program of the CSI.

Candidates who have come up through the CSI will be especially well-versed in how the university works, which is advantageous in AMS election races. But student unions often see themselves as tasked with pushing back against policies and practices of the university administration. Sometimes this involves outright antagonism.

When the CSI first came into existence in January 2010, the outgoing AMS president was Blake Frederick, who had attempted to file a legal complaint to the United Nations over tuition costs. In 2008, the VP External was arrested in protests over a proposed underground bus loop. The compendium of AMS executives involved in anti-university activism is lengthy and well-documented.

(This isn’t a hard and fast rule, obviously; Frederick’s successor as president was Bijan Ahmadian, whose closeness to the administration was such that he had even worked as a research assistant to President Toope before winning the election.)

If future AMS executives are increasingly likely to come out of UBC’s student development, will our student union be less likely to challenge the university?

“There’s definitely a worry there, because they are coming up through university stewardship,” says Gordon Katic, who was a coordinator for this year’s Terry Talks—now based out of the CSI.

“That was a very big worry of mine, especially when I started. But in my experience, the CSI has been a place that has nurtured critical engagement. Certainly I’ve been controversial, but I haven’t had any pushback or anything like that. I’ve had nothing but support.”

Earlier this month, The Ubyssey accused the SLC of cheerleading for the university. The conference’s marketing was based around their keynote speaker, Neil Pasricha, who wrote “The Book of Awesome.” The SLC’s marketing campaign was thus called “UBC is Awesome,” and consisted of naming things around campus and declaring them awesome.

“Chan Centre. Awesome.” “Building sand castles at Wreck Beach. Awesome.” “Free tutoring. Awesome.” “CIRS building. Awesome.”

Our January 9 editorial argued that the conference “shouldn’t be about promoting the alleged awesomeness of UBC,” and called the campaign “insipid, uncritical boosterism.” (I edit the opinions page, but didn’t write that editorial.)

SLC organizers responded that the campaign was only about their keynote speaker, and said we were missing the point.

“I agreed with you guys that it was completely insipid,” says Katic. But he notes that the SLC gave its best presentation award to a workshop entirely about challenging UBC’s administration. “So they’re certainly not stifling critical engagement with the university.”

A matter of personality

If Janet Teasdale is right, then the CSI is firmly supportive of constructive disagreement with the university—but done in a certain way.

“Some students want to change this place,” says Teasdale, “Some of them want to change it through elected office, and others want to change it through direct engagement with the university. And that’s what [the CSI] is. This is changing the university on behalf of students, through direct and purposeful engagement with the university.”

Andrew Carne has viewed the situation from both sides of the divide. Between stints as an AMS councillor, he worked for Campus and Community Planning, UBC’s land use planning department. Yet nobody would accuse Carne of biting his tongue when criticizing the university.

“I think it allowed me to be more critical in a way,” he says of having worked for UBC. “I saw from the inside, and saw [that sometimes] the problems were as bad as we actually thought they were.”

“I would say on the whole that the concern is a little bit overblown. I think it comes down to what kind of person, as to whether or not they’re going to think for themselves or whether they’re just going to take in what’s fed to them.”

Katic agrees with that. “As with anything, it all depends on the people involved. They have to be brave enough to see critically.”

For her part at the CSI, Bell stays focused on what she sees as the centre’s core mission. “I would hope that students can make their choices and that as an institution, we provide that real continuum of opportunities. Some that will stay out of the political realm, some that will be in the political realm.

“A university wouldn’t function without its student government. You need students to really push and work with the university. It’s up to students to choose where they want to lead, essentially.”

Photo credit: Alexandra Downing/The Ubyssey

The more elections madness, the better

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

January 18, 2012
The Ubyssey

Whenever a student union election is underway, the question arises of how serious we should treat it.

The reason that question arises is because there are always a few stern-faced observers wagging their fingers at everyone else, saying things like “the candidates are behaving shamefully!” and “why can’t we focus on policy?” and “this is why turnout is so low!”

The high-minded scolders say these things because student union elections are always filled with joke candidates, pranks, personal attacks and anonymous slander (this year we already have an anonymous blog devoted to mocking Sean Cregten’s Kiwi heritage through poorly-doctored photos.) In turn, the student media eggs this on by paying so much attention to it.

Thus, the scolders say, student politics is a joke to most students and that’s why turnout and engagement is so low.

But that whole narrative is wrong, and also annoying. For one thing, a huge number of UBC students just want to attend classes and hang out with friends. They don’t notice when candidates do silly things, because they aren’t paying attention anyway. Nothing you do is going to make them give a rat’s ass about the student union. Sorry.

But I, for one, love the ridiculous stunts and plotlines that pop up during elections. And it’s not like they’re unique to student politics—just look at the Republican race!

To be a good politician means you have to be able to handle the crazy things that happen during a campaign better than your opponents. This is part of the test. If you can’t handle it, you probably won’t be very good in office either, where you’ll be faced with all kinds of crazy things and asked to deal with them reasonably.

But what sets a student union election apart is also what makes it more enjoyable: most of this is done with a sense of humour. We have joke candidates who run on platforms of glitter and beer. We have blogs that photoshop the hell out of everything and bring in internet memes. We have election events that are basically just excuses to drink cheap alcohol and dance.

Not all of the elections madness is going to be friendly, but that’s okay. If you can’t take a punch, politics isn’t right for you anyway.

When the shenanigans turn really mean-spirited, as they did last year, it doesn’t single out student politics; it just makes them the exact same as every other kind of politics in the world. Nobody wants that to happen, or at least shouldn’t.

Here’s the thing: the zaniness isn’t just inevitable, it’s necessary! It’s what gives student politics some flavour. Without it, it’s just a bunch of folks running for relatively mundane positions where most of their work will take place behind the scenes.

None of this is to say that student politics doesn’t matter. The AMS is a huge organization responsible for millions of dollars and hundreds of employees. We want qualified and intelligent people to win—but again, part of being a good politician is getting above the fray, or at least managing it in a decent way.

So bring it on, I say. Attack each other, draw up posters and pamphlets, tease the joke candidates and mock the serious candidates who deserve it. But do it all with a smile, and keep things in perspective. You only get to be a student politician for so long, and then you move on from campus and the world becomes a lot less fun.

The Ubyssey weekly show for December 5, 2011: History time with...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The Ubyssey weekly show for December 5, 2011: History time with Brian Platt

Fortress UBC

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

December 5, 2011
The Ubyssey

As the terminus of two transcontinental railroads and a major seaport, Vancouver was a clear target for any Japanese attack on coastal North American cities.

When Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7, 1941, an attack on the harbours in BC became a frighteningly real possibility.

The main base for Vancouver’s defence was located at UBC—right in the spot where the Museum of Anthropology now stands. It was called Point Grey Fort.

“Today it sounds pretty loopy that we thought the Japanese posed a serious threat to this coast, but they really did,” says Peter Moogk, a professor emeritus with UBC’s history department and the curator and archivist of the 15th Field Artillery Regiment Museum.

“During the war, the Japanese were torpedoing ships in the mouth of the Juan de Fuca Strait and off the Columbia River. Submarines occasionally surfaced and shelled Fort Stevens in Oregon and also Estevan Point on Vancouver Island.”

Point Grey Fort was manned with 250 soldiers and logistics personnel throughout the war. Three six-inch calibre anti-ship guns were stationed there, along with several anti-aircraft gun sites and an independent power supply.

Down on the water’s edge, two searchlight towers communicated with a three-level battery observation tower at the top of the cliff.

Any ship entering Vancouver’s harbour had to first stop in an examination area to pass visual inspection; the main worry was that a boat laden with explosives would get past the First Narrows and into the inner harbour, where the shipyards and docks were. If a boat failed to follow security protocol—which happened on a few occasions—a shot would be fired in front of it to force the boat to halt.

It’s all a bit hard to imagine now, given the beautiful and serene backdrop of the city. Had the Japanese ever tried an attack, it’s also doubtful our relatively sparse defences would have been able to put up much of a fight. Yet, for a few years during the war, UBC’s land was considered key to Vancouver’s safety.

The military history of campus

The endowment land that the university sits on has its origin as a military reserve. In the 1860s, British authorities determined that the tip of the Point Grey peninsula should be set aside for strategic defence of the harbour.

“Most of the major parks in Greater Vancouver trace their origin back to military reserves, rather than nature-minded politicians who are glad to take credit for it,” says Moogk. “Stanley Park, Point Atkinson, Point Grey, Central Park in Burnaby, for example. But it was never used [for military purposes] before 1914.”

In WWI, German naval forces based in China were considered a possible threat, so a few temporary gun batteries were set up around Vancouver. As during WWII, Point Grey Fort was built up as the largest base.

In 1920, the federal government surrendered the military reserve land on Point Grey to the provincial government in exchange for the Chilcotin military reserve, located near Williams Lake, BC. In the 1930s, as the threat of war loomed, defences were once again built at what was now the UBC campus.

Defending Vancouver

During WWII, soldiers rotated through Point Grey Fort on a regular basis as part of their training.

“Most of the people at Point Grey Fort were army,” says Moogk. “But there would be a variety of trades. There’d be military engineers to maintain the engines of the power generators and to run the searchlights, and artillery people to fire the guns. And then there’d be transport personnel, and there was a little hospital there.

“One of the war’s first casualties, at least for the Pacific Coast, was a young recruit who was shot by accident at the guard house.”

There were three circular emplacements built to hold the anti-ship guns. Underneath each gun was an underground magazine protected from enemy shelling by a thick concrete pad. A tunnel connected all the magazines with the command post.

In the battery observation tower, soldiers scanned the harbour entrance with binoculars that were attached to rotating bases. “The soldier in the tower would survey the area, and the searchlights were coordinated automatically to move with the binoculars,” says Moogk. “The people who controlled the guns would be sent the angles of fire and the other data automatically from the battery observation post.”

The searchlight towers were built so as to be parallel with high tide. “If you bounced the beam across the surface of the water, anything that was projecting out of the water would become instantly visible, even a periscope,” says Moogk.

“The shortcoming of the defences around Vancouver was the assumption that the principle attack would come from surface vessels,” says Moogk. In fact, it was far more likely an attack would come from submarines or airplanes. The Japanese had even developed aircraft-carrying submarines; the planes had folding wings and tails and were transported in waterproof hangars. One of these planes bombed Oregon during the war.

Bizarrely, the Japanese also sent incendiary bombs by hydrogen balloons launched from the home islands. The balloons would ride the stratospheric currents across the Pacific Ocean and were timed to descend over the North American coast. The intention was to start forest fires and create a general panic, and although some did in fact hit BC, hardly anyone knew about it—partly because the Canadian government kept it secret, but also because the balloons weren’t very effective.

A museum replaces the fort

When the war ended, Point Grey Fort was slowly dismantled. The guns were shipped off to European NATO allies with a greater need to defend waterways. At the end of the 40s, the fort was used by UBC for overflow student housing, and students would sometimes hold parties in the tunnels.

When the new Museum of Anthropology was planned in the 70s, it was quickly apparent that the gun emplacements were going to cause a problem.

Under the design by architect Arthur Erickson, the No. 2 gun emplacement was going to be right in the middle of the new building.

Bill Reid’s sculpture of the Haida creation myth, Raven and the First Men, was going to be a centrepiece of the new museum.

“I suggested to Bill that he plan his work for the gun mount itself,” writes Erickson in the book Objects and Expressions: Celebrating the Collections at the Museum of Anthropology. “The gun turret, the symbol of war, base for destruction, was to be vanquished by his haunting portrayal of Creation.”

Meanwhile, Moogk took action to protect the other gun emplacements outside the museum.

“When they were starting to build the new Museum of Anthropology, I went wandering out there. They had started to clear the site, and I saw these bunkers, concrete structures and gun positions,” says Moogk.

“And I talked to some people and I said, ‘Oh, this is interesting. It’s part of the history of the campus.’ But then I was up here one time and I heard these explosions going on. They were dynamiting as much as they could. But because we’re dealing with, in some cases, metre-thick reinforced concrete, all of it couldn’t be gotten rid of.”

Moogk wrote an opinion piece for The Vancouver Sun calling for the site to be saved, and now it is maintained by the 15th Field Artillery Regiment Museum.

Today, along with the restored gun emplacements beside the museum, the searchlight towers can still be seen down below on Tower Beach.

On the pathway down, the remains of a powerhouse for the fort can also be found.

The searchlight towers have been spraypainted in bright colours and the entrances have been welded over with sheet metal. “During the summers the nudists were using them as latrines,” Moogk explains.

Seventy years after the Pearl Harbour attacks created a real fear that Vancouver might be attacked, only a small part of what Erickson dubbed our “dubious defence effort” can still be seen. Yet it’s a significant part of the university’s history that few students know about today. Thanks to the effort of Moogk, the 15th Field Artillery Regiment and the staff at the Museum of Anthropology who helped save the site, that history is still accessible to those who are looking for it.

Photo courtesy Public Archives of Canada

November 28, 2011The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 4

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:01:00 -0500

November 28, 2011
The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 4

Keep an eye on those crafty engineers

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

November 27, 2011
The Ubyssey

If the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) screws up, you can’t sue them.

Well, you sort of could, in a roundabout way. But you’d have to sue the AMS, because the EUS isn’t a legal entity. As with the undergraduate societies of Arts, Commerce, Science and so on, the EUS is essentially just a branch of the AMS, the student union that all UBC students are automatic members of.

The EUS would like to change this. They’d like you to be able to sue them.

That’s not the reason they’re thinking about incorporating as an independent society, but it would be one of the consequences. Currently, all of their money is managed by the AMS staff, all large expenditures must be signed off on by AMS executives and any negotiations with external organizations must have the blessing of the AMS. Operating as an independent society—while still maintaining AMS membership— would allow the EUS to take control of their own affairs. (Disclosure: I was the Arts Undergraduate Society president last year.)

Last year, the engineers were infuriated when, without any warning, then-AMS President Bijan Ahmadian instructed UBC Food Services to stop negotiating with the EUS over food outlets in the new engineering student space. Although the EUS may have been thinking about going independent for a while, I suspect that this is where things really got started. So if Bijan wants to add to his legacy, he can likely claim driving the engineers to independence.

Should the EUS go forward with incorporation, they will have to put it as a referendum to their members next term. I’m sure the referendum would pass; people generally like to think of their faculty as important and competent enough to be independent.

On one hand, I think it’s great that the engineers are trying to take their organization to the next level. They’re one of the few student societies with a real identity, and they have a very high level of commitment from their elected members of council. But I also seriously question whether this would be worth the trouble.

The Commerce Undergraduate Society (CUS), which takes in close to a million dollars annually and produces glossy financial statements in that freakishly slick way that annoys all non-commerce students, has considered incorporation before but has always decided against it because of the risks involved. Being part of such a large student union has real benefits: they can take advantage of the insurance coverage, and their money is protected against fraud by the professional AMS staff.

The Graduate Student Society (GSS) was incorporated as an independent society in order to take control of their own student building—essentially the same motivation as the EUS. But the GSS also has their own staff hired to manage the society’s finances and administration; is the EUS really ready to take on all that expense?

And of course, The Ubyssey is incorporated (we got tired of being told by AMS councillors what we were allowed to print)—but again, we have our own business office to manage the finances.

At any rate, the CUS and everyone else will be watching the engineers closely. If they decide to go independent, this could really affect the shape of student government at UBC.

Andrew Coyne: the pundit who won't be typecast

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

November 26, 2011
The Ubyssey

“I’ll tell you a funny story. I think I can tell you this story.”

So begins Andrew Coyne, the national editor of Maclean’s magazine, when asked about being threatened with a lawsuit by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff in 2005.

“The first I heard about it was on the front page of The Globe and Mail,” says Coyne. According to the story, Tim Murphy was going to sue him and the National Post.

This came in the wake of the so-called Grewal tape scandal, when Murphy had been recorded in vague discussions about what it would hypothetically take for Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal to cross over to Paul Martin’s Liberals.

Soon after the story appeared, Coyne got two offers of legal representation. The first was from Warren Kinsella, the fiercely competitive Chrétien strategist who despised everyone around Martin. A year earlier, Kinsella had threatened to sue Coyne over a previous column. “Well, Warren,” responded Coyne, “I do think we’d be setting legal history to have counsel that would be defending me in one case, suing me in another.” (Kinsella never did sue him.)

Coyne’s second offer came from Ezra Levant, the conservative firebrand and current Sun News anchor, who leapt at the chance to get the Liberals in a courtroom.

“Talk about your dream team!” says Coyne. “To go into court, to be sued by the prime minister’s chief of staff, and to have Warren Kinsella and Ezra Levant as your lawyers—I think would have made the O.J. trial look like a routine proceeding.”

Alas, it never came to be. “I can only guess that cooler heads prevailed,” Coyne says with a laugh. “Because [Murphy] didn’t have a legal leg to stand on.”

Stories like this set Coyne apart as a political commentator. His enemies and allies shift from topic to topic, depending on the issue at stake. Leftist activists label him as a heartless neoliberal economist and trigger-happy neoconservative hawk. Dogmatic rightwingers are infuriated when Coyne turns his deadly aim on the Conservatives. In September, after having endorsed the ill-fated Liberals in the spring election, he wrote a moving tribute to Jack Layton’s courage and dignity.

At 50 years old, Coyne has written columns for almost every major Canadian newspaper and holds a regular spot on CBC’s At Issue panel. Provocative, combative and witty, and known for a commanding use of economic statistics, Coyne has become the dean of Canadian pundits.

Yet despite his prominence and popularity, his political constituency may be smaller than any other columnist. No other Canadian writer has such an iconoclastic collection of views. Coyne is pro-monarchy, pro-gay marriage, pro-Iraq war and pro-Kyoto Protocol. He rails against government spending and argues that the arts, including the CBC, shouldn’t be publicly subsidized. He wants the decriminalization of polygamy (but opposes the practice) and a parliamentary debate on Canada’s lack of abortion laws (but is pro-choice).*

You may disagree with him, but don’t expect to win an argument. Coyne’s intellect, memory and polite charm make him a formidable debater on almost any given topic, as UBC witnessed on November 5. He was here to give a speech on democracy and freedom, hosted by the Vancouver Institute and sponsored by the BC Civil Liberties Association.

Coyne warmly accepted an interview request from The Ubyssey and sat down the next morning for a long conversation over breakfast.

“If he used that word around my daughter, I’d come and beat him up.”

Andrew Coyne can be described in many ways.

Son of James Elliott Coyne, a Bank of Canada Governor who fought Diefenbaker’s economic policies, stubbornly resisted attempts to be fired and then resigned on his own terms. Cousin of Deborah Coyne, a constitutional lawyer who led opposition against the Meech Lake Accord and bore a child with Pierre Trudeau. Proud inventor of the widely-used moniker “Adscam” for the 2004 scandal that ultimately brought down the Liberals. Champion of the right to say “cunt.”

That last one may need to be explained.

It should be noted that Coyne has likely never even used the word himself. “I value politeness and decorum,” he says, “and I try to cut back my swearing because I think it’s a silly thing to do.” Yet his commitment to free speech almost got him fired as editor of the University of Manitoba student newspaper.

Coyne was 19 when he was editor of The Manitoban. At the time, it had a section called “Messaging” that allowed students to pay 25 cents to get a few lines in the paper. One student decided to satirize the prominent evangelical group Campus Crusade for Christ.

“Their not particularly clever or funny way of doing it,” says Coyne, “was Campus Crusade for…you can pick another word that starts with ‘C.’

“And so they put this ad in, and some prudent employee of the paper had taken it out. And I had put it back in, feeling this was offensive to the spirit of free speech or something. I’m sure there was some kind of high-minded reason for it.”

And then came what Coyne calls an example of how a few determined people can build something up into a fever. Outraged, a group of students decided Coyne had to be fired as editor. Soon the Winnipeg Free Presshad written a column on the subject, which was sent out nationally on the Canadian Press wire. Then the local talk radio station, CJOB, devoted a two-hour call-in show to Coyne’s actions.

“They had truck drivers calling in saying, ‘If he ever used that word around my daughter I’d come and beat him up.’ And I’m listening to this two hours of character assassination, and I grabbed my roommate and I said, ‘Phone him up! Say something nice about me!’ Which he dutifully did. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference.”

Eventually Coyne was called before the publication board of the newspaper and came within a vote of being fired. This was the beginning of his journalism career.

He spent a couple summers working typewriters at the Winnipeg Sun, but was unable to follow in his father’s footsteps by winning a Rhodes scholarship (“a clerical error,” he assures us). After a stint at the London School of Economics, Coyne worked a connection he had with the son of the editor of the Financial Post to get a job as an editorial writer.

When the Financial Post started publishing daily, up from weekly, Coyne was given his own column. Then he got another job writing editorials at The Globe and Mail, which also turned into a column. And then a job as a columnist at the Southam newspaper chain. And then a job at the brand new National Post.

“It was an absolutely amazing time,” Coyne says of joining the nascent Post. “To be part of a start-up of anything is fun, and the start-up of a newspaper is so special because it rarely happens in today’s age.

“The first couple years at the Post were as much fun as a body could have. They had hired all of these incredibly talented people who were putting out this amazing paper every day. We had hired all of these sharp, shrewd Brits who had been working in newspapers all their lives. I look back on it with enormous fondness. We were good, and we knew it.”

Today, working for Maclean’s, his title is national editor but he mostly writes. “I wouldn’t exaggerate my editorial role. They mostly hired me for the writing.”

The Canadian “New Right”

In 1995, This Magazine, a Toronto publication born of the 60s left, was being edited by Naomi Klein. That summer they did an issue profiling the “New Right” in Canada, which pegged Coyne along with David Frum, Michael Coren and Ken Whyte.

“More than anything else, the New Right is about the meta-morphosis of rebellion,” wrote Klein in the issue’s introduction. “From Preston Manning’s populist posturing to Neil Bissoondath’s attack on multiculturalism, it is clear that if you want to adopt the persona of an iconoclast, the place to do it these days is on the right.”

Coyne was profiled by a young Doug Saunders, who today works as the Europe bureau chief for The Globe and Mail. The profile was titled “For Andrew Coyne, downsizing the nation and stripping workers of their rights isn’t a necessary evil, it’s a damn good idea.”

You can guess its tenor.

Yet, amidst Saunders’ contempt for Coyne’s deficit-slashing prescriptions, one detects admiration. He notes that Coyne likes to ask deep, even revolutionary questions about why our government works the way it does. Saunders challenges his readers: “Why isn’t that question being asked by anyone on the left?”

Frum has a theory for why these four writers were included in the issue, despite the significant ideological differences between them. “We had a very common generational experience. The people in that group all became adults during the Trudeau years, during the terrible economic crisis of 1982-83, a singularly deep recession in Canada. We had grown up facing a common set of political, economic, cultural problems. And we had reacted to them in much the same way.”

“You really do see a generational imprint on groups of people,” Frum says. “We came of age during the crisis, a failure of the statist model.”

More than anything else, it’s Coyne’s economic advice that has caused him to be sequestered as a rightwing pundit. “It’s an occupational hazard in this business,” says Coyne, “because people are always going to want to pigeonhole you, whether they’re for you or against you.

“I’ll confess to being a conservative on deficits. Yeah, I’m a hawk.”

But anyone who reads Coyne closely, particularly on politics, will see the futility in trying to typecast him. “I say only one-quarter jokingly, I am a conservative liberal socialist libertarian, or whatever order you want to put those words,” Coyne says. “Each of the traditions has something to teach us. Why would you want to cut yourself off from the nugget of wisdom that might be in each of those traditions?”

Coyne’s influence, particularly among conservatives, rocketed upward in 2004 when the sponsorship scandal hit the Liberal Party. Coyne had started keeping a blog on his website. “I couldn’t not write about this,” he says. “And it’s amazing how fast these things can pick up, you know, once you start linking to things, they start linking to you. And the whole multiplier thing kicks in pretty rapidly.”

Soon Coyne had one of the highest-traffic political blogs in the country, and his comment section had become an incubator for rightwing activism.

“They weren’t really there to read me, they were there to read each other. I was just a convenor. And it shows you this network effect, that, you know, the buyers are there because the sellers are there, and the sellers are there because the buyers are there. It’s the same idea, right? It became a place where you could gather and discuss these things.”

Yet before long he had to shut down the comments section completely. He returned from a weekend trip to find a long comment thread about gay conspiracy theories and guesses at which former prime ministers were gay. “I just looked at this and went, ‘Oh, Christ.’ I’m a big free speecher, but at some point it starts to reflect on me.”

When asked whether his blog would have been as popular if he was covering a Conservative scandal rather than a Liberal one, Coyne demurs. But as soon as Harper became prime minister, many of Coyne’s devotees ditched him over his attacks on the Conservative Party. “Those are the people to whom I have been a constant disappointment. And I often get them emailing me or posting things saying, ‘I used to think you were okay, but now I think you’re just a complete idiot.’”

At the time of writing, his blog can’t be found anymore. The site has been hijacked by anti-Israel activists (who have hit Coyne’s Twitter and email accounts before) and links to a propaganda site. “Yeah, I have to block off some time to deal with that,” he sighs.

“It’s the same values you look for in a friend.”

Today Coyne writes for one of the few examples of a major media outlet making bucket-loads of money. Coyne credits Maclean’s publisher and editor Ken Whyte—one his co-stars in the “New Right”—for guiding the magazine with a steady hand. “Ken has a real understanding of both a commitment to substance and quality, and an understanding that you’ve gotta sell it. He’s always had a little P.T. Barnum to him, and I think that’s a big part of his success.”

Coyne’s thoughts on journalism, as with almost every subject he weighs in on, are informed by his economic philosophy.

“I think you get the most vigorous, not only journalism but literature, when you have a commercial relationship between the writer and the reader. The reader doesn’t owe you the time to read your column. What you want is, readers willingly parting with their money because they’re just so eager to read what you have to write.”

A few writers and editors inspired Coyne during his time in grad school in London. “Michael Kinsley had an enormous influence on me. Just in terms of his sense of humour, and I generally agreed with his political take. But I also liked the way he was unpredictable. When he was editing Harper’s, in the early 80s, it’s the best magazine I’ve ever seen. You wanted to read every article, literally. It just had that sense of what will grab and hold people’s attention.”

Samuel Brittan at the Financial Times and Ferdinand Mount at The Spectator were also must-reads for Coyne. Brittan, because “he was very free market but also had a strong sense of the particular social obligations of the state.” Mount, because “he was such pleasant company to read.”

“As a columnist you’re asking people to spend time with you,” says Coyne, “and a big part of writing is to make that time pleasurable. And it’s more or less the same values that you look for in a friend. You’re not going to spend time with someone who is hectoring you or lecturing you, or is angry, or is always just flippant.”

James Coyne, his father, is still alive and well at 101 years old. “He’s a moral and intellectual hero to me,” says Coyne. His father was more of an economic nationalist than Coyne himself has ever been, but for the most part, their views are very similar—especially around inflation and free market economics. “I’m sure that must have been partly because of the conversations we had around the dinner table.”

Coyne is very active on Twitter, where his quirky humour shines through; he periodically retweets Paris Hilton and recently composed a Kim Kardashian poem that was retweeted by Salman Rushdie.

“It’s kind of like a public notebook,” he says. “You’re throwing thoughts out there and seeing how people react. Or just putting them down so that you put them down somewhere. It’s more like a collaborative conversational thing.”

It also allows readers to express their frustrations whenever Coyne takes another unpopular position.

Ten years after the “New Right” issue, Andrew Potter was blogging for This Magazine in 2004 and decided to grade the pundits. He gave Coyne a B+, calling him “consistently the smartest writer on constitutional issues.” But, as with so many readers over the years, a few things held Coyne back in Potter’s estimation; in this case, it was “his inexplicable support for Bush.”

Since then, Potter has been a colleague of Coyne’s at Maclean’s and is now the editor of the Ottawa Citizen.

“What makes Andrew Coyne so valuable to Canadian public commentary is that he has never lost his capacity to be angered by the behaviour of those in power,” says Potter. “Most pundits—myself included—quickly accept that politics is the way it is, and will probably never change. But Coyne is relentless in his desire to flag inconsistencies, to expose political pandering, and to rage against political bad faith. His refusal to be cynical is his greatest asset.”

And so the same thing that can make Coyne so hard to get behind—his ruthless pursuit of principle, regardless of the political climate—is also what makes him indispensable to our national discourse.

“I wanted to be Andrew Coyne when I grew up,” says Potter. “I still do.”

(Photo: Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey)

The Senate shouldn't hide their work

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

November 20, 2011
The Ubyssey

Last Wednesday, the UBC Senate voted to give special degrees to Japanese-Canadian students who, during World War II, were kicked out of university due to the forced internment of all Japanese-Canadians. Yet we can’t tell you what the deliberations were like, or whether there was any significant dissent, or even the details of the vote. That’s because all of the proceedings on this matter were done behind closed doors.

According to Senate procedures, the Tributes Committee’s work is generally done in camera. This is for the entirely sensible reason that when honourary degrees are considered for specific people, senators need to be able to discuss the issue honestly but in private to avoid harming that person’s reputation.

But that doesn’t apply in this case. No personal reputations were at stake; it was simply a debate over a policy decision of great interest to all Canadians with a sense of history and justice.

I’ve talked to a few senators who were involved with this, and two things are clear. One, there was no pressing reason why this debate had to be sealed from public view. Two, the Tributes Committee handled the issue in a very thoughtful and responsible manner and came to the right answer in the end—which to me only reinforces the first point.

The main justification for secrecy was that due to fear of public backlash over their comments, it was better to shield senators from observers. To which I say: tough beans. You’re on the senate of a public institution. People may get upset over your stance on some things. Deal with it.

But even if you accept the argument that this was a particularly sensitive topic, it’s a dangerous habit to allow public bodies to get away with. It’s the same argument used by the Gage South Working Group to keep their meetings protected from public scrutiny. When the options were presented last week for what to do with the bus loop area, we have to take their word for it that any options left off the table were “unviable.” If that’s really true, then why weren’t we allowed to see the work? What’s the harm?

I’m not one of those dopes who think that all information should be public all the time. Wikileaks, to take the obvious example, actually hurt the cause of transparency with its indiscriminate document dumps. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and violating that privacy can prevent public institutions from functioning effectively.

But the default position for public institutions must be that their work is open and transparent, unless there are strong justifications to do otherwise. That people might be afraid to speak up is a weak excuse, except perhaps in a few extreme cases.

In the 1970s, Svend Robinson, the former NDP Member of Parliament, was a student member of the UBC Board of Governors. He got so mad at the board’s penchant for going in camera that he’d drop off those secret minutes at The Ubyssey’s office.

I don’t expect current Board of Governors and Senate members to start leaking minutes, but I do wish they would do more to combat needless secrecy. Transparency builds respect for the university and allows dissent to be seen in full. Most importantly, it ensures everyone can truly be held to account for their words and actions.

November 16, 2011The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 3

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

November 16, 2011
The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 3

Wesbrook residents express outrage at UBC's land use plan

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

November 6, 2011
The Ubyssey

Wesbrook residents voiced strong opposition to additional residential development in south campus last week, as UBC held their last open house for the South Campus Neighbourhood Plan.

On November 1, Joe Stott, director for Campus and Community Planning (CCP), stood at the front of the commons room in MBA House for 90 minutes while campus residents lambasted him.

Residents addressed the “unsafe” traffic circle at 16th Avenue and Wesbrook Mall, but the touchiest issue was the updated land use plan that will expand the south campus population to 12,000.

Residents who moved there in 2005 were told to expect less than 5000.

The amendments to the Wesbrook neighbourhood came after the university cancelled plans to put housing on the UBC Farm in 2008. The Board of Governors then instructed CCP to transfer that planned housing density to a different area of campus.

Kathy Griffiths was one resident who attended the meeting. “I just came more as an observer, but I found it so offensive in some ways, that I had to speak up,” she said.

“I think these people who have bought in here, it’s a bait and switch.”

Stott clarified that the amendments do not actually increase the density of Wesbrook Place, as they have expanded the amount of land being built on. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy the residents.

“Well, I’m not surprised,” Stott said when asked about the unfriendly crowd. “I’ve faced angry rooms in the past.”

The session was meant to be a question and answer format, but the residents were outraged when they learned that nobody from the Board of Governors—the governing body that makes UBC’s land use decisions in conjunction with the province—was present.

Stott tried to reassure them that the process would ensure their concerns would be heard.

“There’s feedback forms here to fill out. Each one of our open house events has been supported by a 10-day comment period online,” said Stott. “We’re undertaking a process that was requested by the Board of Governors, and we’re going to report back to them on what happened.”

“I was surprised at the anger of the audience, I hadn’t quite expected that,” said Thomas Beyer, a newly-elected director of the University Neighbourhood Association.

“But a lot of people really see it as too dense and too hasty a development. And I think we have a chance to build a world-class community, which is really rare in any major city.

“I think we are taking too fast an approach to rush things through. We’ve got to take a little more time here.”

The future of Occupy

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

October 31, 2011
The Ubyssey

It has been four months since Adbusters first advocated an “occupation” of Wall Street, six weeks since the tents went up at Zuccotti Park, four weeks since the media started paying attention and two weeks since a Canadian version of Occupy Together began.

But as the novelty of the movement wears off and the occupiers don’t get into the media anymore just for being there, where is all this heading? It’s increasingly looking like that will depend on who screws up first: the occupiers, or the police.

In various American cities, eviction notices have been issued by city councils, and police have swept in to clear out the camps. The most spectacular eviction—for all the wrong reasons—took place in Oakland last Tuesday, as a rather shocking and surely unnecessary level of force was used by police to round up anyone who refused to leave. A 24-year-old Iraq War veteran had his skull fractured after he was allegedly hit by a police-fired tear gas canister.

The Occupy camps are a difficult situation for police forces, as most large-scale protests are. I don’t envy their job. They are usually just taking orders from City Hall and many of the people they are supposed to control have the idea that fighting back against a cop is a heroic act.

Yet Vancouver police have so far set a very high standard of intelligence and patience in dealing with this, to the point where the Occupy Vancouver Twitter account thanked the Vancouver Police Department on Saturday for “all the fine work they have done in our community.”

Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Susan Anton has bombastically claimed that if she is elected, the occupiers will have seven days to leave. Chris Shaw, a UBC professor who is anti-Olympics, anti-vaccination and pro-9/11 “truth,” told the Georgia Straight that any such move by the city would result in “civic disturbance.” That would be a disaster.

City Hall and the VPD should not try to force an early end to this. Prominent activists are already growing frustrated with the endless, aimless debates in the general assemblies, and rightfully so. I briefly visited one on Friday evening and it was insufferable. At some point, change is going to come in how the movement is organized.

That’s not to say there aren’t still good things happening. The marches to close bank accounts and move them into credit unions are a very good way of advancing the cause. The library, live music and speeches keep the camp a lively place. But what happens to a leaderless movement when periodic marches stop getting attention?

Here’s the problem: a significant proportion of humanity is taken up by idiots who do stupid things. Unless smart people are able to channel Occupy’s energy in a direction that will start to influence political leaders, idiots will destroy the movement. At some point the traffic-blocking will go too far, or windows will get smashed or a cop will be attacked during a protest. If that happens, mainstream support will collapse and Occupy will wither.

The best outcome here is that Occupy snowballs into a broad-based movement that relies less on tents and more on holding elected representatives accountable through relentless attention and campaigning. But the worst outcome is that one side runs out of patience and does something stupid and violent.

In Vancouver, things are still looking pretty good. Let’s hope nobody loses their cool.

(Photo Credit: Marc-Andre Gessaroli/The Ubyssey)

Emails show UBC Bookstore told supplier to cut off student union

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

October 27, 2011
The Ubyssey

What does a university bookstore do when falling book sales threaten its business model? At UBC, one tactic has been to use its buying power to cut smaller competitors out of the market.

All large retail outlets, such as the UBC Bookstore, have staff called “buyers,” who have the job of negotiating supply contracts with product distributors. The buyers negotiate with either vendors who work directly for the distributors, or sales representatives who work for many different distributors.

At least one clothing and giftware buyer working for the UBC Bookstore has, in the past, told vendors to stop supplying their product to the AMS Outpost, the much smaller campus store run by the student union. The Ubyssey has acquired emails showing that when one vendor refused to cut the Outpost off, the Bookstore buyer canceled their orders and told the vendor that “future business is now compromised.”

Debbie Harvie, managing director of the Bookstore, said that Melanie Dodig, the buyer in question, acted inappropriately and that the practice has ended.

“I’m quite honestly horrified that this even started at some point,” Harvie said. “The only person who can speak for the Bookstore is our management team. This was something that got out of control. We have dealt with it; it won’t happen again.”

Vendors and sales representatives were hesitant to speak about their interactions with the Bookstore when contacted—largely for the reason that they still sell to the Bookstore and didn’t want to hurt their business. But according to multiple sources, Dodig’s tactics were well known among those who sell to the Bookstore.

One sales representative, who spoke only on the condition of not being identified, confirmed that many vendors have been pressured by Dodig not to sell to the Outpost.

“[The Bookstore] made it clear that they prefer an exclusive on campus, is usually the way they put it,” the sales representative said. “I can tell you that it’s happened more than once with me, for sure.”

The only company willing to keep its name on the record was Stortz & Associates Inc., an importer and distributor of toys. Stortz provided documents to The Ubyssey that clearly show the Bookstore canceled orders with them because they continued to supply the Outpost.

Last spring, the AMS brought a complaint about the Bookstore’s actions to Harvie. AMS President Jeremy McElroy said he had been informed of the problems by the manager of the Outpost, Wendy Smith.

“[Smith] obviously thought this wasn’t fair, and brought it to our attention. That was where this whole thing started.” McElroy had an email exchange with Harvie, who promised to look into it. He also informed Pierre Ouillet, the Vice-President Finance, Resources and Operations of UBC, of the student union’s concerns over how Bookstore buyers were operating.

According to Harvie, this was a one-time problem that she was unaware of until the AMS raised it with her. And although Dodig still works for the Bookstore and was not disciplined for her actions, Harvie said that the problem has been addressed.

“We don’t stop the Outpost from buying from any vendor. It was just a very unfortunate circumstance.”

Under tremendous pressure

This controversy comes after the Bookstore created a stir this summer with a proposal to change its name to UBC Central.

A document circulated by the Bookstore to address questions about the proposed change explained that its current name “does not accurately reflect the wide range of products and services offered in the store.” It added that “the traditional book industry is changing and we are adapting along with it.”

In a subsequent interview with The Ubyssey, Harvie said that book revenue has declined by seven per cent over the past five years, to the point where books and course materials only account for 49 per cent of the Bookstore’s revenues.

The name change was years in the making, originally arising out of a research project conducted by the National Association of College Stores that anticipated the changing business environment of campus bookstores.

Although the Bookstore’s re-branding had been approved by senior university executives, it was greeted with a storm of negativity when it was announced to the public. Kim Snowden, a women’s and gender studies professor, started a petition against the change that was signed by almost 1000 people, including the dean of Arts, Gage Averill.

Nassif Ghoussoub, a mathematics professor and member of UBC’s Board of Governors, wrote on his blog that although the Bookstore’s management was downplaying the backlash, “every staff member, every student and every faculty member I talk to about this issue expresses dismay, shock, even disgust with such a decision.”

The name change was eventually postponed by the Bookstore so it could “collect more input from our customers and the UBC community at large.”

The Bookstore operates as an ancillary department of the university, which means it is expected to be financially self-sufficient. It gets free rent and services from the university, but must pay back a dividend every year. Dividends used to be calculated as a percentage of sales, but are now based on what the Bookstore can afford.

In each of the past few years, the Bookstore has paid a dividend to the university of around $800,000, according to Harvie. Before that dividend is paid out, the Bookstore is profitable.

At a Board of Governors committee meeting on September 20, VP Finance Ouillet noted that “the Bookstore is under tremendous pressure because the book market is experiencing a double digit decline across North America.” Yet he added that the Bookstore is doing a better job of surviving than most, due to their focus on affordability and expanded retail selection.

“I was horrified…”

On April 30, 2009, Dodig, a clothing and giftware buyer for the Bookstore, sent the following email to Stortz & Associates Inc.:

“Per our conversations, you are aware that the Bookstore does not support vendors who sell identical products to the Outpost.

“Your company’s decision to continue to supply the Outpost necessitates that I cancel the two outstanding orders PO #P43226 and P43225 and that future business is now compromised.

“Should your company reverse it’s [sic] decision in the future, we may be amenable to re-establishing contact.”

The orders concerned a line of stuffed animals called GiantMicrobes.

A year and a half later, on January 19, 2011, Dodig sent another email to Stortz, asking them to remove her from their mailing lists because “we buy directly from another supplier since we lacked support from your corporation.”

After McElroy raised this issue a month later, Harvie sent him an email on March 16 to follow up on the complaint.

“To my knowledge, none of the buyers have ever asked a vendor to not sell to the Outpost. If they have, or if any vendor has given the impression, then I would be very concerned. If you have any specific examples, you should get back to me.”

Three weeks later, Harvie again emailed the AMS and asked for examples. McElroy then gave her email evidence of what Dodig had been writing to Stortz.

“As soon as I saw it, I directly reached out to Jeremy and we had a conversation about it,” Harvie said. “But by that point, we had actually addressed it and I apologized because I was horrified when I saw that. Because it’s certainly not something I was aware of at the time.”

McElroy said that he and Harvie never spoke personally about the problem. “I sent the emails to Debbie, and she said, ‘We’ll look into it,’ and that was the last we heard.”

Harvie said that to her knowledge, there was no other occasion when the Bookstore has cut off a vendor for selling to the Outpost.

“There had better not be, quite honestly. That is not our policy, that’s not something that I support nor is it something that Jennie [Orpen], our merchandise manager, supports. I think this was just part of a very unfortunate exchange between Melanie [Dodig] and this particular vendor.”

But documents show that Jennie Orpen was copied on the April 30, 2009 email from Dodig to Stortz that canceled the order.

Nobody who has been involved in selling to the Bookstore was aware of other examples of a vendor’s orders being canceled because they supplied to the Outpost. However, multiple sources who have dealt with Dodig made it clear that a climate had been established where any vendor who sold similar products to the Outpost was in danger of losing their Bookstore accounts.

An email exchange given to The Ubyssey by a different sales representative—again, given only on the condition of anonymity—shows what happened when a vendor who has an account with the Bookstore was asked about selling to the Outpost.

“Has [Dodig] been given an exclusive on campus?” asked the sales representative. “Because she is very adamant about this, apparently.”

“Knowing [Dodig], it will not be a favourable response,” the vendor replied. “She is currently a very good account that buys a lot…she is also a very vocal person at the [trade] shows.” The vendor declined the Outpost account because they didn’t want “to get her back up.”

When told about this, Harvie said she wished such vendors “would come talk to me, rather than make insinuations about Melanie or anyone else on staff.”

Abuse of dominance?

One option for the AMS when these problems arose was to make a complaint to the Canadian Competition Bureau.

Greg Scott, a senior communications adviser with the Bureau, stressed that a full investigation would have to be done before any conclusions could be made about whether the Bookstore’s actions violated the Competition Act. But if the AMS were to make a complaint, he said they would likely try to invoke the Abuse of Dominance Provisions.

“There are a number of very specific criteria that would need to be established before we could consider looking at something under the Abuse of Dominance Provisions,” Scott explained.

It would need to be shown that a company “substantially or completely controls a market or specific area of business.” That company must then be shown to be engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. The practice has to have, or be likely to have, “the effect of preventing or lessening competition substantially in a market.”

Determining whether the Bookstore has dominance in the market would depend on many factors, including the number of stores that sell the same product in the surrounding area.

But there is no doubt that the Bookstore wields vastly larger buying power than the Outpost. Although the AMS does not reveal financial information about its individual businesses, McElroy said that yearly revenues for the Outpost are around $250,000. In the 2009-10 school year, the Bookstore reported revenue of over $32 million.

If the Bookstore is found to have violated the Abuse of Dominance Provisions, the possible repercussions range from simply ending the practice to fines and reparation payments.

Ultimately, Scott said, it would come down to whether it was seriously affecting student choice. “If the products are widely available on campus or anywhere off campus, in the city, then that’s not really limiting student choice.”

Scott added one more question that they would look at: “What’s the effect on price? What’s going to drive the price up dramatically, because it’s only available in one place?”

A matter of principle

If Harvie’s understanding of the situation is correct, then the emails from Dodig do not show a systemic practice by Bookstore buyers, but instead one case that had gotten out of control.

There are still Microbes being sold in the UBC Bookstore, even though Stortz is the only distributor licenced to supply them in Canada. The Bookstore is being supplied by an American distributor that Harvie says they’ve had a “long relationship with,” and gives them a good deal.

Until this month, there was a sign in the Outpost noting that Microbes were $2 cheaper at the Outpost than “elsewhere on campus.” At the Bookstore, one can see that the price tag for Microbes used to be $11.95, but has now been stickered over at $9.95—the same price as the Outpost.

Linda Stortz, the co-owner of Stortz & Associates Inc., says that having a buyer try to tell her who she is not allowed to sell to “happens more than you might think.” Stortz herself has a student union background, and says that it was a “matter of principle” to refuse the Bookstore’s request to stop selling to the Outpost.

Buyers have no specific authority to tell vendors what to do, but depending on the size of their account, they do have a lot of power. “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve got to look at where we’re going to make the most money,” said a sales representative. “It’s not discrimination against the AMS or anything else, but it is a fine line we walk between the suppliers and the clients.”

Harvie noted that the game can be played both ways; she can cite cases of vendors trying to play buyers off of each other to get a higher price for their products. “Many of these vendors are not honest, and many reps are working on commission and they’ll do whatever they can do to get a sale.”

Yet Harvie is very clear that the Bookstore management does not allow its buyers to intimidate vendors into not selling to the student union. “The Outpost is a student venture and we’re not out to in any way damage the way that they can do their business.

“The UBC Bookstore is not out to be cutthroat in any way, shape or form.”

(Photo Credit: Jessica Li/The Ubyssey)