Last Monday’s Council Meeting was fairly uneventful.

Unfortunately, Council has adopted something called a “consent agenda”, which has essentially hidden all Council activity from the students who may attend. Students who attend receive only the agenda, and while there are various reports submitted by the AUSU Executive, staff, and committee chairs, none of those are available to student attendees, and no information is provided during the meeting except where one of the Councillors may have a question about one of the hidden reports.

This makes the “public” nature of AUSU council meetings nearly meaningless. However, what I did manage to glean while I was there are that there have been changes to the Elections policy. After investigating further with the Executive Director of AUSU, most of the changes to the policy were simply adjustments in wording reflecting changes in the bylaws and eliminating redundancy.

There were a couple of substantive changes, however. First, scrutineers have been eliminated from the election, as the vote count has been done electronically and automatically for a few elections now, which means there simply hasn’t been anything to scrutinize other than test election systems to ensure votes are being recorded properly?something which technically falls under the CRO position. And second, the CRO has received additional authority to adjudicate fairness in the elections, with a doubling of the honorarium being provided to reflect both that and inflation since the honorarium was first set.