JB report buried as minutes resurface

According to a leaked Judicial Board report, independent student councillor Stephen Rosenshein appears to have committed “corrupt electoral practice” during the 2007 Concordia elections. If a group of councillors is successful, however, this report will never be presented.
The JB’s report was designed to shed light on allegations of electoral fraud against two councillors, Stephen Rosenshein and David Kogut, and on its decision last year to strip them of their seats. Although this ruling was later overruled by a special meeting of the CSU council on April 26, the minutes of that meeting have remained mysteriously absent during the course of this year, and have been a constant source of conflict within council.
CSU President Angelica Novoa, as acting secretary at the April meeting, said the sole paper copy of the minutes was left at the CSU’s reception desk and was “taken.” She also claimed the computer file of the minutes had been lost.
The JB’s report, prepared by Board Chairman Tristan Teixeira and obtained by The Concordian, provides confirmation from Danielle Tessier, the University’s Director of Board and Senate Administration and the Dean of Students Office, that CSU Councillor Rosenshein was not an independent student at the time of the elections – and was therefore not eligible to run for an independent council seat.
Now, mere weeks before the Judicial Board’s Chairman was scheduled to provide his report to the CSU council, the missing minutes have reappeared, delaying indefinitely the JB’s report, and leading indirectly to the expulsion of several councillors.
According to Noah Stewart, the CSU’s VP Communications, the minutes of the special meeting were found by councillor Zach Battat. Stewart said that Battat received the minutes from a former CSU councillor who is no longer in Montreal. Neither Battat nor the unnamed ex-councillor were available for comment.
At the Dec. 7 meeting, Battat, along with councillors Dalia Guy and Eddie Fuchs, presented the found minutes to council. Included with the minutes was a motion, “that no further motions or items of discussion be accepted for consideration by Council or placed on any Council meeting agendas on any issues relating to the CSU’s 2007 General elections or the status of any current sitting members of Council.”
According to Stewart “[These councillors] . . . had found proof that the meeting happened, that everything had been by the books, that the meeting had quorum, [the] motion was passed legitimately, and that they were sick of talking about this issue so they didn’t want to see it discussed anymore.”
Before council could vote on the motion, four councillors – Julien Morency-Laflamme, Elona Ritchie, James Doyle and Matthew Forget – walked out of the meeting, attempting to break quorum (the minimum number of councillors required to be present for decisions to be binding), which for the CSU is one-third of its members. According to Morency-Laflamme, he believed that with 12 councillors in attendance, the four walkouts would end the meeting.
At the beginning of the meeting, twenty-seven members were still considered legitimate, leaving the minimum quorum at nine.
However, councillors who miss more than three meetings are deemed to have resigned their seats, and according to Stewart, since absences from council are counted at the end of the meeting, some councillors who left while trying to break quorum were deemed to have resigned their seats.
“My understanding is that there were four or five more councillors that have been deemed to resign, so it brought us down to a total of 22 or 23 councillors, which made the quorum eight (sic).” The motion passed with no opposition.
Battat, Guy and Fuchs had not returned The Concordian’s calls for comment by press time.
According to the newly released minutes of the April 26 special meeting, one of the grounds for overturning the Judicial Board’s decision was that Rosenshein had not been interviewed by the Board.
The council also voted that the Board’s decision “was made without ‘notifying’ the respondents ‘in writing’ as to the details of the case as is stipulated by the CSU’s By-Laws,” and that the decision was made after the deadline laid out by the By-Laws and Code of Standing Regulations.