Members of Carleton’s Board of Governor’s (BoG) ultimately voted to defeat a motion on Sept. 27 calling for vice-chair Michael Wernick to publicly apologize for comments he made in April 2015 comparing student protestors to “brownshirts and Maoists.”
Greg Owens, undergraduate student governor, said he was “seeking to address an issue that seems to have gone through the cracks,” by putting the motion forward.
“I draw our attention to this piece of history not to dig out skeletons from the closet, but to find closure to a rift between this board and one of its key stakeholders, the students,” Owens said. “We can disagree on tactics and we can disagree on decisions, but this does not give permission to any governor to refer to other governors or stakeholders with derogatory or defamatory statements.”
At BoG meeting on March 30, 2015 was shut down by student protesters seeking to prevent the approval of a vote to increase tuition fees. Following the meeting, an email written by Wernick, who is also the current Clerk of the Privy Council, referred to the participating student organizers as using the tactics of “Maoists and Brownshirts.”
Citing section four of the BoG’s code of conduct, which outlines how governors must handle a conflict of interest, Owens moved the board to vote “to request vice-chair Wernick to publicly apologize, issue a retraction, and take appropriate corrective action as deemed by the executive committee.”
The motion was defeated, with Owens and Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) representative Michael Bueckert being the only BoG members who voted in favour.
Conversely, Owens and Bueckert were the only BoG members who voted against the motion to approve the university’s audited financial statements for the 2015-16 school year.
“I only received the consolidated financial statements an hour and a half before the meeting,” Bueckert said, questioning whether or not it was “in order to be able to pass this document given that we hadn’t seen it until basically we got to this meeting.”
“I personally don’t feel like I can vote in favour of adopting this having not had a chance to see it,” Bueckert added.
The financial statement was presented by Michel Piché, vice-president (finance and administration). It stated that total student enrolment had increased by 2.4 per cent over the previous year, and a budget surplus of $2.3 million had been appropriated to the pension reserve.
The statement also said $45 million had been approved in the construction of the Health Sciences building, which is projected to be ready for classes in the fall of 2017.
Piché also said that Carleton’s undergraduate engineering experienced the second highest intake in the province, second only to the University of Waterloo.
According to Suzanne Blanchard, vice- president (students and enrolment), there was a seven per cent decrease in full-time bachelor of business student enrolment.
Blanchard also gave an update on Carleton’s sexual violence policy.
“We’re planning to have the first draft posted on the web for everyone to comment during the month of October,” Blanchard said. “We’re going to be posting within the next week.”
Blanchard added that faculty, staff, and students will be receiving an email with the draft policy that they can submit feedback on.
