Downside of not renovating or selling the Whistler Lodge: students no longer have cheap accomodation in Whistler. Upside: local hippies/wildlife have a new place to squat. Comic Indiana Joel/The Ubyssey
Whistler Lodge still stuck in limbo
Last week, Council voted down a motion to fund renovations to the Whistler Lodge. Council seems to take this decision to mean the lodge isn’t worth fixing and should be sold.
But it isn’t that simple. Even if all of Council agrees the lodge should be sold, students still have to approve the sale in a referendum. Without student approval to sell, the lodge could be stuck in limbo. It will cost around $400,000 to demolish the lodge, and the AMS will have to pay for its upkeep while they wait for student approval to sell it.
The last referendum to sell the lodge failed, but AMS execs want to sell it anyway. It seems the execs are pressuring councillors into selling the lodge. A recent survey shows students want to keep the lodge.
The AMS needs to make a decision now before it loses even more money. At this point, it seems like their options are to make the investment or let the place rot.
Your primer on the annual tuition increase
It’s spring: the sun is shining, birds are singing and if you’re a domestic UBC student, your tuition is rising by another two per cent. Since 2005, the steady increase in tuition fees, designed to put students and not taxpayers on the hook for inflation, has seemed as natural as the changing of the seasons. The B.C. Liberals instituted the two per cent cap on tuition increases eight years ago, and since then, students have received emails every March indicating that the Board of Governors has decided to raise tuition yet again.
It hasn’t always been this way. In 1996, the B.C. NDP opted to institute a tuition freeze. This meant universities and government had to cover the cost of inflation. In 2002, the Liberals scrapped the freeze, and tuition skyrocketed. Public pressure forced them to impose some sort of tuition regulation, and the cap was born.
This has a few implications for UBC. For one, it means that UBC has to find new sources of revenue wherever it can. International students aren’t protected by the cap; they pay the entire cost of their education. So while UBC looks good when it increases international recruitment, financial motives are involved. New degree programs are another way to get around the cap — that’s what happened with the bachelor of international economics last fall. The new degree charges students several thousand more than a BA, and that extra money will go towards UBC’s bottom line.
The cap also forces Board of Governors student reps to vote on increasing tuition. In the past, this might have been a real ideological decision on the role of government in education, but not anymore. Now, tuition votes have been more or less a rubber stamp; reps either agree outright and vote for the increase, or agree in principle but opt to abstain from voting.
The tuition cap, in many ways, informs everything UBC does: it’s managed to redefine middle-of-the-road public policy. It’s unlikely that the next government will touch the cap. The Liberals won’t remove it and shift more of the cost of a university education onto the student — they’ve learned that this is not a popular move. And the NDP likely won’t freeze tuition again, because it would force governments to pony up more money or watch their universities cut staff and services.
So the tuition cap is probably here to stay. On balance, things could be a lot worse.
Unreported bonuses defeats purpose of program
When the AMS introduced a bonus system for their executives, it was supposed to make them more accountable.
The society was bitter and burnt out over two years of scandal: first, a president caused a national embarrassment by complaining to the United Nations about UBC’s tuition rates, and then another president launched bitter personal attacks on candidates in the next year’s student government election. Having a bonus to give or withhold was supposed to discourage kerfuffles like these: executives, out of their own self-interest, would stay in line so they could collect their cheques.
But if the student body doesn’t get to know whether or not their executives get bonus cheques, the rationale for this system dries up. Those disgraced presidents of yore? The worst part of what they did was acting dishonestly against the wishes of the AMS Council and students at large. Blake Frederick (the UN complainer) spent thousands of dollars in legal fees on that UN submission, without telling anyone. Bijan Ahmadian (the elections mudslinger) started by misrepresenting AMS Council in negotiations with UBC, and then moved on to mount an elaborate, secret scheme to smear candidates in a student election. Their transgressions were, primarily, all about not being accountable and not telling students — or students’ elected Council representatives — what they were doing.
So long as the AMS keeps execs’ bonuses a secret, it’ll just be insular hacks awarding money to other insular hacks. Maybe a good crop of insular hacks on both sides will result in hardworking executives with good projects who deserve every cent they get; some of this year’s team should have earned a full $5,000 or possibly more. But this is a system that’s supposed to help the AMS avoid worst-case scenarios. And it won’t accomplish that if it’s shielded from public scrutiny.
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