By Alexandra Holyk
A motion to remove and impeach Board of Governors’ (BoG) student representative David Jardine from the Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) Board of Directors (BoD) was passed at the Dec. 19 BoD meeting.
The meeting quickly moved in-camera since the RSU’s lawyers, Alexi Wood and Dustin Down, were present to provide legal counsel, which Wood confirmed can only be done in-camera.
After more than four hours in-camera, the board held a roll call vote to determine Jardine’s fate. 22 board members voted in favour, one opposed and six abstained, including Jardine.
Per a bylaw amendment made during the April 2019 Annual General Meeting, “abstentions will be counted as neither an affirmative nor negative response, and will not be considered in the impeachment vote.”
Since more than two-thirds of the board members present voted in favour of the impeachment, the motion passed.
The impeachment motion was introduced at the beginning of Friday’s BoD meeting as an announcement by Yousaf. It was moved by vice-president operations Liora Dubinsky and seconded by Yousaf.
The motion states that Jardine “acted in a manner that it is not in the best interests of the RSU and contrary to [their] duty of loyalty to the RSU.”
The motion further states that Jardine violated section 8.13 of the RSU bylaws, which requires directors’ confidentiality on matters discussed in-camera during RSU BoD meetings. This means they cannot communicate the information discussed to any third-party organizations without the consent of the board.
In this case, the motion claims Jardine is “rendering advice, assistance and confidential information” to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 1281 and that “some of the information shared with CUPE by David Jardine was only provided to David Jardine during in-camera sessions of the board.”
CUPE Local 1281 is currently in arbitration with the RSU over the termination of five full-time staff members who were represented by the labour union.
Jardine is the first RSU board member to be impeached. The only other successful impeachments within the RSU were those of former president Ram Ganesh in February 2019 and former vice-president operations Augustine Onuh in December of the same year.
The BoG student representative position on the RSU’s BoD remains vacant.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that there were 22 votes in favour of Jardine’s impeachment, not 19. The Eyeopener regrets this error.
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