UVSS Board steps up legal efforts for CFS referendum

Earlier this evening, David Foster broke the story that the UVSS has initiated further legal action against the CFS regarding the CFS's denial of a membership referendum at UVic.

What's particularly interesting about this news is that it is the first official progress we have seen on a referendum on the CFS in some time. While the UVSS board first hired David Borins for this legal effort on June 14, the only action that has occurred publicly on this issue until now is a letter written to the CFS asking nicely that the organization reconsider. Not surprisingly, the CFS rejected this request in early September.

Since then, two months have passed. While the board has discussed the topic in camera on several occasions, us UVSS watchers could only be told that progress was being made.

One would assume that the goal of this legal action is to have a referendum on CFS membership before this end of this school year. If it were to be delayed for yet another school year, this would represent two years or more since the petition to have a referendum was collected. Could this result in a referendum being rejected by a court since the student population could have changed significantly since the petition was collected?

As Foster's article states, "recently [Guelph Central Student Association] financial statements showed that the student association has spent $203,000 on litigation related to the CFS."

Meanwhile, only $15 000 from the 2010-2011 UVSS budget has been allocated towards legal expenses relating to a CFS referendum. This leads to the question of what the UVSS should reasonably expect the legal action to achieve a referendum to cost. Have board members raised this question and received answers? Does the ruling in favour of the Guelph Central Student Association represent a legal president that will ensure the UVSS's legal costs will be much cheaper? It looks like we are going to find out.

In other CFS referendum related news, the referendum at the University of Regina still has no results available publicly. The polling for this referendum ran from October 26-28. Nearly three weeks later, we still have no results from this referendum as the eligibility of a number of students to vote was in question. We can only hope that the UVSS and CFS sort out all of these issues before any referendum occurs to avoid a mess like this.