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Official CRD vote not the whole story

Re: “Politicians yield to province on control of sewage project,” Jan. 10. By Robert’s Rules of Order, a motion passes when a majority of the votes cast are in favour of the motion.

Re: “Politicians yield to province on control of sewage project,” Jan. 10.

 

By Robert’s Rules of Order, a motion passes when a majority of the votes cast are in favour of the motion. But that is not what happened at the meeting of the Capital Regional District sewage committee.

By a show of hands, and confirmed by a recount, five directors of the committee voted in favour of the motion to yield control of the mega-project to the province, whereas seven directors voted against the motion. By Robert’s Rules, that motion failed. Yet the motion was deemed to have passed, which naturally caused an outcry from the public gallery.

What enabled this minority to have the power to give control of the project to the province? The answer lies in the province’s additional rules of order, which treat votes not cast at all as “yes” votes.

Hence, when three directors of the committee neither supported nor opposed the motion to pass control of the project to the province, the province’s rule is that those directors’ uncast votes are votes in favour of the motion. This enabled the vote to be deemed passed with eight in favour, seven opposed.

I hope the reader is as aghast at this revelation as the public gallery was. This same flaw in the rules of order has been instrumental in allowing the project to get this far, and to avoid a cost-benefits analysis or an environmental assessment to justify it.

 

Brian Burchill

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