Apostrophe on apostrophe

20 year old typo causes bureaucratic diversions

Every year I prepare the legal filings of our Annual General Meeting. This includes Form 11, which details any changes to our bylaws.

In October, the GSS passed several bylaw changes and I dutifully submitted them using the reuired Form 11. Following the procedure requested by the registrar in past years, I simply attached a copy of the new bylaws and sent them in with a note on the form asking them to replace the old bylaws with the new.

Today I received notice the bylaw changes are being "held on file" until I correct them because, as noted in the comments, "Name must be exactly as registered: Student's Society".

Apparently our founding board couldn't use an apostrophe correctly (what would Lynne Truss say?) and the GSS founding documents thus list us as the University of Victoria Graduate Student's Society. Or perhaps there really was only one graduate student back in the 80s when we were incorporated as a society.

Perhaps I should file a complaint about the GSS on this blog. It seems we are doomed to a legally required error... what is a person to do when government demands you maintain a typo to keep your bylaws legal? Perhaps call a special AGM simply to remove the errant punctuation? (Imagine the debate...it would rival the infamous Ince/Pollock semicolon battle of March 20;06!).

So there you have it, dear imaginary reader, my apostrophe on the errant apostrophe and the resulting form filing catastrophe.

CFS referendum question, voting method determined

Graduate students at UVIC are going to the polls March 18, 19, and 20 2008 to consider whether to maintain membership in the Canadian Federation of Students.

The Referendum Oversight Committee made the following decisions in their February 4 meeting.

The Question:

The referendum question will be:

Are you in favour of maintaining membership in the Canadian Federation of Students?

YES or NO

Method of voting:
The referendum is governed by CFS Bylaws and is overseen by a referendum oversight committee as per those bylaws.

GSS members should note there will be no web vote in the CFS defederation referendum. Voting will be done at two on-campus polling stations.

Proposed location for the polling stations is the University Centre and the MacPherson Library foyer, but this is subject to bookings so watch for final notice on this on.

Keep up to date
News updates and information on the referendum, referendum rules, etc. will be posted here.

everything you wanted to know about the CFS but were afraid to ask

Infamous (at least amongst geeky student union types like me) student blogger Titus Gregory has scanned an compiled a complete history of Canadian Federation of Students AGM minutes and errata for your viewing pleasure. He has some of the audits and budgets in there but not all, as well as some executive reports. Check it out at:

http://www.studentunion.ca/2008/01/from-1981-founding-congress-to-november.html#links

A recent motion at their AGM directed the CFS to post their governing documents on line, which is great news for members that aren't hanging out amongst the binders and files of their student union at all hours. However, I do find it hard to get to the documents on the CFS site (I can't find a place where it is linked to the main page) and also by using Google, so for GSS members I posted a link on our GSS site in the "Campaigns and Governance" section here ... which links to the CFS documents here: http://www.cfs-fcee.ca/html/english/about/documents.php

Fascinating, I know! Ok back to becoming a YoYo Master (see below). Expecting to get my YYM this year!