Pre-meeting Board of Governors report main business at quiet SLC

By Ashar Memon, March 22 2019 —

A pre-meeting Board of Governors report from student-at-large Frank Finley was on the docket at the March 19 meeting of the Students’ Legislative Council.

BOG will be voting on approving the U of C’s consolidated and capital budgets at the upcoming March 23 meeting. Finley said the consolidated budget of the university is over $1.45 billion. He asked representatives to look into details of the budget online and to attend the meeting themselves if they’re interested.

Finley said that BOG will also discuss Bill 19, a bill passed last year that caps tuition fee increases to Alberta’s Consumer Price Index.

The U of C’s Mental Health Strategy will also be discussed. Finley added that most recommendations made by the strategy were complete but work is ongoing on initiatives like certificate programs and a suicide-prevention framework.

Social work representative Marissa Bennett asked if Finley had more details on the framework. Finley said he would ask questions to BOG to see if there are any plans to expand programming that prevents suicides on campus, noting discussion on deaths around campus within the last year.

During executive reports, SU vice-president academic Jessica Revington said she met with an official from the U of C’s copyright office to discuss Open Educational Resources and a long-term, “student-focused” copyright-compliance strategy.

Vice-president student life Nabila Farid said she attended a Campus Opioid Stakeholder meeting where a draft of a campus opioid awareness campaign was discussed.

Vice-president operations and finance Kevin Dang said he worked on potential new programming for MacHall and meetings with the tri-media groups, the Gauntlet, CJSW and NUTV.

President Sagar Grewal and vice-president external Anayat Sidhu were not present at the meeting. In Sidhu’s report, which was read by Revington, she said she worked on street teams for the SU’s ‘get-out-the-vote’ campaign.

Dang said the Operations and Finance Committee approved the 2019–20 executive travel and conference budget, while the Policy Development and Review Committee discussed SLC meeting structure and policy structure. Farid said clubs committee approved last-minute event funding applications.

The next SLC meeting will be held on March 26 at 6:30 p.m. in the MacHall Executive Council Chambers. Access elected official reports, trimester reports, minutes and all other SLC documents here.