I sat down with Vice President, Internal candidate William Cuddy to talk about his experience and his plans for the position if elected.
The Strand: What sort of experience and skills do you bring to the table?
Will: Well, I’ve been on VUSAC for two years now. I was a Councillor in my first year, and I was also a Councillor in my second year. I was a student leader in my high school as well. In the two councillor positions, I dealt with a couple different portfolios. The ones I worked with ended up dealing with a couple of the bigger issues the judiciary were tackling at the time. My first year, myself and the other councillors were dealing with various internal struggles. In my second year, this year, it’s been more dealing with a lack of engagement of certain members.
There has been concern expressed over the role of Councillors, and interest expressed in increasing their responsibility. As VPI, how would you intend to address those concerns?
I think that this has a lot to do with the hierarchy that VUSAC has. I’ve mentioned it on the forum; the Councillors work with the Commissioners, and are treated a lot like interns by them. They work with the judiciary as well, and are treated in much of the same way. The way Councillors get to pick the initiatives they work with throughout the year is very quick, they’re not allowed very much time to decide which initiatives they work with, and they’re not given access to higher-level meetings. Judiciary meetings for example, are quite insular—there are no commissioners or councillors present, they don’t take minutes, they only release the resolution of their meetings to council, and it’s presented in such a way that it makes the judiciary resolutions seem as if it should be the opinion of council.
I can understand the temptation to make Councillors have more concrete responsibilities; the constitution of VUSAC does not specify what Councillors should do. I would be willing to work with the President(s) to give them more flexibility and more of a role on council. Councillors are elected in the fall, and therefore there’s this whole span over the summer in which the judiciary has been working and the Councillors are just thrown in there with no context. They basically say, “Here are the initiatives that have been setup, choose one of them,” without much context. I think that really needs to be changed, and I really want to work on the way that initiatives are assigned to Councillors, and how the hierarchy is structured.
It’s your first week as elected VPI, what’s the first thing you want to do?
I would want to start by talking to the Execs of every Vic levy, and look at how many transition reports they have, and how far back they go, for their roles and of those in their groups. I’d like to compare these to VUSAC’s, and see how far they go back. And I know, from my past two years, it doesn’t go back that far. It goes back five years, max. And so I want to start talking to people to get a sense of how they feel, how their transition reports work, how their roles work, how their predecessors say, “This is what you should remember”, and what they should pursue. I want to start to work on a history of those groups, to create something more than just a transition report because these can be lost very easily. This can offer a lot of context for the roles within the levy, and within VUSAC.
Your platform says you want to improve communication within VUSAC – do you have a plan as to how to do this?
As councillor this year, I noticed there was a sore lack of some kind of integrated communications platform within VUSAC. We has a Facebook group, but the main use of it was basically, “Can someone cover my office hours”, and that sort of stuff. I felt there wasn’t any sort of discussion of the topics that VUSAC has to grapple with every meeting, and there’s this two-week span between meetings in which there was a void for a lot of members. I know that Councillors who aren’t working on a specific portfolio don’t get informed about what the contents of the next meeting might be; they’re just left hanging, and have to wait till a couple of days before the next meeting to see the agenda. And so I fought quite hard over the December break to find another mode of communication that we could use, and I found Slack. I thought we might be able to use it to have a structured discussion about what we might want to discuss, provide feedback on initiatives—for example, Sustainability could have a channel where they can discuss some ideas they might have with the rest of VUSAC. Unfortunately, trying to implement something like that in the middle of the year doesn’t really work out that well. We have created one, but it hasn’t really been adopted. I think that has a lot to do with the way that people are introduced to VUSAC. I really want to integrate fully and introduce at the start of the year the use of Slack, instead of the use of Facebook or e-mail in order to coordinate VUSAC, which I think has been a problem for the past two years that I have seen in the way that VUSAC works.
