SU Elections 2021 Fact Check: presidential candidate’s 2019 council attendance

Big claims were made about the presidential candidate’s 2019 attendance at Students’ Council at a forum and this fact check aims to set the record straight.

Last week, the Augustana forum closed with an audience member questioning presidential candidate Rowan Ley‘s commitment to Students’ Council. Currently the Students’ Union vice-president (external), Ley was also the Board of Governors (BoG) representative a year before in 2019-20.

Amlan Bose, a Students’ Council engineering councillor wrapped up the forum by questioning Ley’s track record and his involvement in the Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS).

“You ran for BoG rep two years ago and promised students to present a “business model” to the board and convince them to reduce the tuition fee,” Bose asked.” You failed to do that and also, you were seen to be absent in a significant number of council meetings. In your current position as the VP External, you are seen to act more as the chair of CAUS, which is an incompetent and failed organization, rather than the VPX of the U of A Students’ Union.”

“Since you only failed to do your job in your previous positions, what makes you think that you will succeed as the president?”

At the forum Ley came back to this question with claims about his and Bose’s actual attendance.

“Since you raised my attendance at council, I took the liberty of going to the Students’ Union order papers from 2019 to check both of our attendance… and I found that I was present for 46 role calls that year and you were present for 38,” Ley said. “So Amlan, I would encourage you to not hold others to standards you yourself, are not able to meet.”

Ley also convened a sense of betrayal from his collegue.

“That comment [about CAUS] is inaccurate and I’m disappointed to hear that from someone I considered a friend.”

So, who was right about Student’s Council attendance? It turns out that Ley is correct that he has a higher attendance record than Bose, but was off in his numbers.

According to the Students’ Council 2019-20 attendance sheet, Ley had an attendance of 54 while Bose has an attendance of 53, meaning only one attendance roll call separates the two.

Presidential candidate clears up miscalculation, addresses claims about his advocacy

In an interview with The Gateway, Ley said he realized after the forum that he miscalculated their attendance in the short amount of time he had before answering the question. Since the forums were held on Zoom, candidates could take a look at questions before answering to prepare speaking notes.

“For every question we do a similar process,” Ley explained. “We see that someone wants a specific fact for example, then it’s good practices [to prepare] so that you can give people better answers and better service.”

Though there Ley only has one more attendance than Bose, he said that his point still stands.

“The spirit of what I said it all true, I just want to be proactive in correcting it was a slip of the tongue,” he said.

At the time, Ley said he was disappointed that Bose would, in his eyes, violate one of the oaths they took as members of Students’ Council.

“We say that we criticize ideas, not people and I think he was verging dangerously close to behaviour that doesn’t uphold that,” Ley said. “I think his comments tonight were an embarrassment to both himself and the thousands of students he represents. I hope he is reflecting on his comments.”

Though Ley said that “worse things” have been said about him, his personal relationship with Bose made the comments harder to take.

“I have worked pretty hard to built what I felt was a constructive and positive relationship with Amlan,” he said “I’ve gone out of my way to consult with him on things and to try to generally try to be a friend. For him to go out of his way and say things that were framed in an unnecessarily hostile way that was also borderline misleading and untrue, that’s what really disappoints me.”

In terms of Rowan’s failed “business-model” plan as BoG rep, Ley said that he knows he was unable to get the board to lower tuition. However, he pointed out wins he still had that year, such as getting the university to set aside 15 per cent of new tuition revenue for student financial support and getting Board of Governors meetings live-streamed.

“We had successes on tuition and fees,” he said. “It wasn’t the ones we hoped for, but under the circumstances it was the best that was possible.”

In terms of the claim that CAUS is ineffective, Ley said despite being one of the cheapest memberships in Canada, CAUS has saved students insurmountable amounts of money. He gave examples such as CAUS’s advocacy against the deregulation of tuition, advocacy for the past tuition freeze, defeating the province’s idea to create super boards, and advocating for Bill-19 which introduced the cohort tuition model for international students and an approval framework for mandatory non-instructional fees (MNIFs)

“Our wins in recent years, and this is not an exaggeration, are measured in the millions of dollars,” he said. “So if [Bose] thinks the six thousand dollars the SU spends on provincial representation is too much, I would suggest that from the perspective so several billion dollars, that is not true.”

Councillor apologizes for tone but stands behind intention of question.

In an interview with The Gateway, Bose said that despite the heated exchange that took place that night, he and Ley have talked and apologized to each other.

Bose also clarified that he was not trying to attack Ley, but instead was hoping to get him to reflect on his past positions.

“My actual intention was to make him talk about his failures and what he is going to do to not repeat them during his presidency because let’s be fair, he is the only person running and he will be president,” he said.

It was actually the fact that Bose had known Ley for so long that he felt justified in asking the question.

“I observed his journey because we were both on council for the past three years and as the BoG rep and VP external, your work life is an open book and I am someone who takes notes during forums to keep him accountable.”

Despite apologizing for the tone of his question and being incorrect about their attendance, Bose stands by the content of the question, especially the idea that Ley has spent a lot of his time in his position as CAUS chair.

“I see him as more as the CAUS chair rather than the VP external of the Students’ Union,” Bose said. “Recently CAUS got a rental agreement with the SU and the first person who let the councillors know was [him], not the VP operations and finance, and rental agreements usually fall under the VP operations and finance.”

“Rowan is a fantastic guy and he hasn’t done a bad job as VP external, I just feel that he waded a bit too much towards being CAUS chair and I was expecting an answer on how he would stick to the role the president requires… how he would rectify mistakes or move forward… I’m a bit disappointed but we talked about it later.”

Bose also maintains his opinion that the work CAUS does is not apparent to the average student.

“If you even look at their social media accounts, it’s so backdated and only [around] three hundred students follow them — If I were a normal student I wouldn’t have even known who the chair of CAUS is,” he explained. “How can I trust an organization that is so backdated and isn’t up to the game… as a student I don’t know where my money is going.”

In the end, Bose still believes that what he was trying to ask is valid, even if he takes back the way he asked it.

“I would still love to know what he would do more in the future to stick to what his [executive] role requires him to do,” he said. “I do really wanna know what he learned from his failures,” he said.

“No one is perfect — I have failed in many things in my life and some of the things he did achieve was amazing. But people do make mistakes and I wanted to know what he learned.”