Rapport Final de la 2005-2006 Directrice des Débats de Langue Française
Brittany Piovesan

De façon très générale, dans la dernière année, il y eu 4 tournois francophones dont le tournoi novice à Sherbrooke, la Coupe Pierre Elliott Trudeau à l’Université d’Ottawa, Opération Sherbrooke 2006 et le Championnat National 2006. De plus, deux nouvelles écoles se sont jointes à la SUCDI: l’Université du Québec à Montréal et la Polytechnique de Montréal. Ce rapport tentera de décrire ce que j’ai fait durant l’année, ainsi que ce que j’ai appris sur la situation du débat français au Canada.

Les tournois
Le nombre d’équipes qui ont participé aux tournois cette année à alterné entre 5 au tournoi novice à 10 équipes à PET et le Championnat National. Le plus grand problème étant la participation des divers écoles aux tournois et leur dévouement pour le débat français en général. Les désistement à la dernière minute sont très communs, ce qui rend l’organisation d’un tournoi très difficile. Les suggestions qui ont été amenées lors du Championnat National étaient:

1- Tournoi novice: Avoir le tournoi novice plus tard dans la première session car les divers universités n’ont pas suffisamment de temps pour recruter et donner une base de connaissance sur les débats à des possibles débatteurs. Aussi, il a été suggéré de tenir un tournoi plus tôt dans l’année de style ‘magic wand’ comme essayé à Sherbrooke cette année. Ce format pourrait aidé les novices en les permettant de voir des débatteurs expérimentés de divers écoles dans tous leurs rondes. Ce tournoi permettra aussi à les plus anciens débatteurs de perfectionner leurs talents. L’Université d’Ottawa s’est offert pour organiser un tournoi ‘magic wand’ qui servira de tournoi novice aussi. Il aura lieu quelque temps à la fin d’octobre/début novembre, dépendant du calendrier de la SUCDI.

2-Quatre tournoi: Je dois admettre qu’avoir trop de tournoi en français cette année était ma faute. Je croyais qu’en avoir plus était un but de la communauté de débatteurs francophones. En réalité, avoir 4 tournois par année en français semble être le nombre parfait. Ceci explique les problèmes qu’il y a eu avec le tournoi Opération Sherbrooke (très peu de participation) et ‘Roi de la Montagne’ de la Polytechnique de Montréal (annulation).

Débat dans l’ouest
Une lettre de la part du Directeur des Débats de Langue Française à l’administration de la University of British Columbia leurs a permit d’acquérir assez de subventions pour envoyer deux équipes complètes. Si ce type de lettre peut aider avec l’acquisition des fonds, ce serait excellent. Un suivit sera fait auprès de l’administration leur remerciant de leur support.
De plus, Guillaume notre débatteur de l’ouest hors pair était présent à la Coupe Trudeau et au Championnat National.

Il y eu aussi une grande discussion au Championnat National au sujet d’organiser un tournoi francophone dans l’ouest. Spécifiquement, UBC voulait savoir s’il y aurait de l’intérêt. Le support pour ce projet était assez grand, tous les écoles se sont mis d’accord d’essayer de trouver des subventions pour envoyer au moins une équipe. Le tournoi a été planifié de façon tentative pour janvier 2007 à UBC.

Débat au niveau secondaire/CÉGEP
Durant l’année, j’ai été contacté pour faire partie du Comité de développement de l’ADDEQ (Association des Débats et Discours Étudiants Québécois). Le grand but de la participation du Directeur des Débats de Langue Française est de créer un lien entre le niveau secondaire et universitaire, car ces débatteurs seront éventuellement notre relève. De plus, il est possible que le partage de nos ressources et idées pourrait avoir des avantages pour l’ADDEQ ainsi que la SUCDI. Je suggère (dans la mesure du possible) au prochain directeur de continuer ce travail.

Par contre, il serait absolument fait de croire que le Québec est le seul endroit au pays ou il y a des débats français au niveau secondaire. Il serait important aussi pour le futur directeur d’essayer de créer des liens avec les autres réseaux de débats francophones secondaires à travers le Canada. Quoique ceci n’est pas la seul façon de recruter des futurs débatteurs universitaires, ça pourrait en être un et surtout un pas important dans la création d’une culture de débat dans les milieux francophones.

Jeux du Commerce 2006
J’ai déjà touché à ce sujet dans mon rapport mi-session, mais en gros, les Jeux de Commerce étaient très utiles pour rencontrer des gens intéressés dans le débat français. Par contre, lorsque j’ai continuer de contacter ces gens, il ne répondent pas au courriels. Ma solution est de retourner l’an prochain pour que la présence de la SUCDI devienne ancré et d’essayer à nouveau.

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Je crois que cela incorpore la majorité ce que j’ai fait ou apprit sur le débat francophone au sein de la SUCDI cette année. Comme déjà dit, je serai plus que prête à aider le prochain directeur. Cela comprendra lui soumettre tout mes contacts, une copie des mes divers rapports et d’être disponible pour l’aider durant l’année à venir. Par contre, j’ai quelques brèves suggestions générales pour le futur:

1-Maintenir un contact et support constant des divers écoles de la SUCDI, mais surtout les nouvelles écoles, qui règle générale connaissent très peu au fonctionnement de la SUCDI comme tel.

2-Établir quels écoles organiseront des tournois l’an prochain aussitôt que possible, surtout le Championnat National.

3-Ce que je n’ai finalement pas fait, mais essayé de contacter divers écoles travers le Canada, les invitant aux tournois francophones.

4-Commencer dès maintenant à chercher des sources de subvention pour un tournoi dans l’ouest et établir un contact avec UBC.

Si vous avez des questions, n’hésitez-pas à me les poser!

President 2005-2006 Final Report
Jessica Prince

As of March 2006, I am quite pleased with the state of CUSID and the achievements that our organization made this past year. I will outline the various measures and actions that I undertook in my capacity as CUSID President, and then suggest some recommendations that future Presidents may want to consider.

Membership Expansion

During the 2005-2006 year, I presided over the admission of seven new member clubs to CUSID. Exceptionally, four of those new clubs are in the West, and I find the growth of debating in that region to be particularly encouraging. Of course, CUSID also admitted an American debate club this year; the fine folks at the University of Alaska have joined our organization and shown themselves to be quite committed to debating in CUSID. The remaining three new members reside in Central, and I am quite proud of the fact that two of those clubs are Francophone institutions.

In the coming years, I hope that CUSID will witness more growth in the East as well. St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia considered applying for full membership this year; I hope that they will be prepared to join our organization in 2006-2007.

Executive Duties

Jointly with the Executive Director and the Treasurer, I cleaned up and passed some new constitutional articles and by-laws surrounding the role of the CUSID Executive.

Firstly, all Executive Officers of CUSID are now constitutionally obliged to produce a formal written report at the end of their term. This applies to the President, Executive Director, Treasurer, all three regional Vice Presidents, and the Director of French Language Debates. The motivation behind these amendments came from the frustration that myself and other members of the Executive experienced in attempting to carry out our duties without much formal indication (beyond our constitutionally mandated roles) as to what we were meant to do or how things had been done in the past. Hopefully, the existence of annual formal reports will enhance CUSID’s institutional memory and ensure smoother transitions of power in the future.

Secondly, the “Balanced Budget and Account Rule By-law” was altered, such that the Treasurer is now required to produce an official statement of cash flows for the year. This statement must reconcile the CUSID bank account’s opening balance with it’s closing balance for the year, and must be accompanied by appropriate receipts. This measure is intended to promote greater transparency and accountability between the Executive and the membership, as well as between one year’s Executive and the next.

Thirdly, as of this meeting, both the President and the Treasurer will be constitutionally responsible for jointly reviewing and updating Schedule A at their term’s end. One of the biggest problems with maintaining an up-to-date membership list is that inactive members, who lose their full membership status for lack of adequate participation in CUSID, tend to go un-noticed. As a result, incorrect Schedule A membership lists are passed from one Executive to the next, and the problem compounds. Our hope is that by requiring a complete review and updating of Schedule A at the end of each Executive’s term, the list will be more accurate.

Finally, the Executive Director’s constitutional role was updated to more accurately reflect the duties of the position. While the Constitution used to deem the Executive Director responsible for “maintaining the CUSID WWW site and CUSID-Net mailing list,” it now reads that he or she is responsible for “maintaining the CUSID WWW site and CUSIDnet discussion forum.”

New Materials

I am particularly proud of the new training and fundraising materials that are now available to CUSID member clubs. This year, the Vice-Presidents and I created a CUSID open letter to be used by clubs for internal university support and external fundraising purposes. With one letter specific to each region, I’m happy to report that they are being used and I hope that they will help clubs garner more institutional and financial support. Ideally, these letters will be translated into French in the coming year. The English versions of the CUSID open letter are available here: http://www.cusid.ca/documents.php?cat=official

I also compiled a National Debate Guide that focuses on issues that pertain to the entire CUSID community. For example, it provides advice and expert opinion on British Parliamentary debating, North-Ams style, French debating, and the different regional styles of debating. It is my hope that this resource will prove useful to clubs across CUSID, and that it will continue to be built on in the coming years. The National Debate Guide is available here:
http://www.cusid.ca/documents/guides/national_debating_guide.pdf

Finally, the Vice-President of the Central Region also produced an ambitious and extensive Central Debating Guide. I helped Dash with the editing and polishing up of this mammoth undertaking. Although the project was motivated by Central-specific concerns, it has proved a valuable training resource for clubs across CUSID. The Central Debate Guide is available here:
http://www.cusid.ca/documents/guides/central_debating_guide.pdf

World’s Council

My role as CUSID representative to World’s Council this year was fairly procedural. UBC made a fantastic presentation about World’s 2007 and their status as the host school was unanimously ratified.

There was only one bid for 2008 Worlds, that of Assumption University in Thailand. The bid was also quite impressive, and CUSID should be happy to know that our own Joanna Nairn will be one of four DCA’s at that event.

Finally, the issue of whether World’s should include an English-as-a-Foreign-Language component, as well as the current English-as-a-Second-Language event, was discussed at length. Briefly, the distinction between the two categories lies in the amount of exposure an individual has to English in their daily lives. For example, someone who lives in Japan, does not regularly encounter English speakers, and attends a Japanese-language school would be classified as an English-as-a-Foreign-Language speaker, whereas someone who lives in the Netherland, attends school in English, and is exposed to English in their day-to-day lives would be classified as English-as-a-Second-Language. Due to the fact that next year’s host school (UBC) had absolutely no problem with including both an EFL and an ESL element to their tournament, I voted in favour of a motion of allow an EFL component at UBC World’s as a trial for coming years.

CUSID-APDA Relations

I had some contact with the APDA President and his Executive this year. Although we had planned a ‘Heads of State’ meeting between the CUSID and APDA Executive at the North American Championships, in order to discuss issues of concern to both of our organizations, this was canceled at the last minute, due to the fact that the ADPA President chose not to attend the tournament. I did meet with the remainder of the APDA Executive, however, who were all very friendly individuals and were unaware of any concerns that the APDA President had voiced to me at World’s Council.

With the North American Championships held in Canada this year, CUSID can be quite proud of the job that Hart House did and the quality of that event. Particularly, in light of the number of APDA teams who did well at that tournament and the hard work of our Canadian Chief Adjudicator to achieve consensus on tough issues, the perception that CUSID North-Ams are biased against American teams has largely been mitigated this year.

As North-Ams will be held in APDA next year, it’s important that next year’s CUSID President and Executive appoint a Canadian DCA as soon as possible, so that the chosen individual can begin liasing with their ADPA counterpart right away. This is important to ensure that common ground can be found on issues of contention between our two organizations, in terms of the MOU, and to make sure that next year’s North-Ams are as CUSID-friendly as possible.

High School Debate

Relations between CUSID and Canadian high school debating have improved this year, notably because of the creation of a high school tournament schedule on CUSIDnet. Numerous high school coaches have told me that this has made their lives much easier and that it has informed them of tournaments they were not previously aware of. I would recommend that future Executives maintain an online schedule of high school tournaments being hosted by CUSID schools, so that all member schools enjoy more publicity and higher attendance at their events.

Furthermore, I did a great deal of informal liaising with high school debate coaches across the country this year. While this is due mostly to the fact that I have personal relationships with many of those individuals, I would recommend that insofar as it is possible for future Presidents, they ought to maintain a rapport with high school coaches. At the very least, it makes for good CUSID-high school relations, and at the very best, it ensures higher turnout at our high school events.

Recommendations

Beyond the few recommendations I have made in the above paragraphs, I would also suggest that the transfer of signing authority on the CUSID bank account from the outgoing President and Treasurer to the incoming President and Treasurer occur as soon as possible. This year, we had a great deal of difficulty getting signing authority on the account, and due to various problems at both of our banks, the issue took the entire year to resolve. Part of the problem is that the Treasurer and President often do not live in the same city, and thus, they have to do paperwork through different banks. This issue is unfortunate, but I do not see any way around it. What can be avoided, however, is an outgoing President or Treasurer failing to sign off on the account, so I would recommend that this transfer be done as soon as possible, perhaps at Nationals if all relevant individuals are present.

In terms of by-laws, there were numerous by-laws passed in CUSID’s recent history that are not up on CUSIDnet. While I attempted to track down these by-laws, there doesn’t seem to be any written copy of them. My recommendation here is an obvious one: when your Executive passes a constitutional amendment or by-law, be sure that your Executive Director makes the relevant changes to the documents on CUSIDnet. Firstly, this ensures that the membership at large is made aware of the changes and has access to the most up-to-date copy of documents, but secondly, it also ensures that these changes are not lost in the mists of time.

Finally, I think that CUSID is in very good shape. Our enormous successes at international events is a testament to that, as is our relative progressiveness on equity issues vis à vis the rest of the debate world. Of course, there are always areas for improvement: addressing the persistent, although much improved, gender disparity in debating, and aiding smaller schools in their ability to run tournaments are just two examples.

I think the biggest challenge in the coming years will be to ensure that we remain a strong organization; I think this is best addressed by a highly responsive Executive that listens to the concerns of its members, makes an effort to help those clubs who ask for it, and seeks to achieve a balance between different views. This is the approach that I have tried to pursue this year and I think it is a winning formula for CUSID.

Treasurer 2005-2006 Final Report
Joanna Langille
Actions Taken:

a) Budgeting

I presented a budget to the CUSID General Meeting in the fall. This budget was very similar to budgets that have been presented over the last few years; no drastic changes were made.

b) Reimbursements

There were only a few requests for reimbursements this fiscal year. These were standard requests for trophy engraving, website fees, and photocopying.

c) Constitutional Amendments

In my role as Treasurer I proposed two constitutional amendments. In the first term, I suggested that the constitution reflect the need for the Treasurer to keep receipts from year to year and to provide a statement of cash flow at the end of each year. This amendment, which was approved by the CUSID General Membership, was motivated by the need to maintain better records and ensure transparency and accountability.
The second amendment was co-sponsored by the CUSID President and the ED. We added a note that the President and the Treasurer should look over Schedule A at the end of the year to ensure that the membership list is up to date.

Financial Summary:

Opening Balance: 1972.69

Revenue:
CUSID Dues x 31 = 310
Gavin McGrath’s outstanding CUSID dues = 70

Costs:
Engraving Nats Trophy = 19.23
Engraving Northams Trophy and everything else Jo Nairn won last year = 122.70
CUSID Web Hosting fees x 2 year = $63.56 (NB: Julieta was able to get a deal whereby the web company offered her a deal to pay for two years in order to get a much reduced rate. The Exec approved the advance payment of these fees.)
Dash for photocopying = 23.01
Mike Powell from Carleton for photocopying = 20.00
Padraic from Carleton for photocopying = 5.00

Current Balance: 2118.25

Recommendations:

a) Transfer of Signing Authority

This year there was a significant problem with the transfer of signing authority from the 2004-2005 President and Treasurer to me and Jess. There were three problems that could be avoided in future years. First, the former Treasurer left for abroad without having assured the transfer of signing authority, which meant that it was very difficult to coordinate a transfer. Second, it is easiest to transfer signing authority when all necessary individuals are in the same place at the same time. Finally, it was necessary to follow up on the actions of the employees at TD Canada Trust, for they failed to help us in the way that they assured us they would.
With these problems noted, I would suggest that future Treasurers and Presidents make an effort to a) transfer signing authority as quickly following the CUSID National Meetings as possible; b)

b) Request Receipts Earlier

This year I forgot to ask people for receipts until the end of the year. Next year the CUSID Treasurer should remember to do this earlier.

c) More Communication Required

Generally more communication is required between the past and present Executives. It would be helpful if the past Exec members would make themselves available to advise and assist the incoming members.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thanks guys!

Executive Director 2005-2006 Final Report
Julieta Chan

Throughout the term, I updated all sections of the website such as posting results and publishing the Points of Information in a timely manner. I was also actively involved in Executive discussions on issues concerning different areas of CUSID. Without boring you with all the little things I did, I would like to focus this report on a couple of projects that I carried out this year and issues that I encountered.

Website Updates

Schedule

Besides regularly updating the Schedule to include essential registration information, I added a link to the results of the tournament at the end of each tournament entry. This link shows the full tabs of the tournament or, if none is available, more detailed results than what is required of the Results page. This feature should be helpful for those who want to check some past tabs but do not want to go through pages of threads on the Announcements forum. Recently, some old tabs from ten or so years ago were posted on CUSIDnet and I took the liberty of organizing those results into the schedule as well. All available tabs from all years are now accessible through the Schedule.

Since we consider high school tournaments anyway when we are scheduling, I thought it would be a good idea to include a high school tournament section into the Schedule to list all the high school tournaments hosted by CUSID members. It was suggested that we could include other non-CUSID tournaments, especially high school title tournaments, but I decided against it since I wanted the schedule to remain a schedule of events hosted by or for CUSID members.

Contact Information and Schedule A

Updating the Contact list proved more difficult than I expected. First, I wasn’t sure which schools were supposed to be on the contact list, since the list of full members (a.k.a. Schedule A) had not been updated for a long time. So, I undertook the updating of Schedule A by trying to contact certain individual clubs and checking out whether they still exist. This helped the Executive weed out almost twenty clubs on the list that have been dormant for years. With an updated Schedule A, it should improve the efficiency of future Executives for various tasks since they would not have to try and contact a bunch of clubs that do not exist.

As you may have noticed, I suggested amendments requiring the Treasurer and the President to review Schedule A at the end of term. The problem with the current system in the Constitution is that Schedule A is updated whenever a membership bid has been approved. But people will often neglect updating Schedule A when a member has been dormant since it is subtler when it happens. The old Schedule A was only half updated since it included the new clubs that have joined recently, but nobody ever took out the really old ones. Hopefully, this amendment will solve the problem.

CUSIDnet

Moderation

Fortunately, there were very few flamewars and none that needed intervention. In mid-January, however, there was a case of spam advertisement on the forums. A user by the name of “collegepokerchampionships” and signing off as “Peter” posted the same promotion of an online poker tournament on many of the public forums. While debaters announce non-debating events on CUSIDnet all the time, I think there was a clear distinction between spam and not-spam here. To continue the tradition of EDs defining moderation policy on wikipedia definitions:

A third form of Forum Spamming is where a person repeatedly posts about a certain subject in a manner that is unwanted by (and possibly annoying to) the general population of the forum….In a broader sense, advertising on forums where it is not wanted is known as spamming and is generally seen as an annoyance.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic))

The fact that this poster was clearly not a debater and created an account only to repeatedly advertise commercially the same message on several forums, I think, constitutes spam. I deleted those posts that had no replies or replies requesting the thread’s deletion but kept the one on the Community Billboard in case somebody really was interested and also the one on the CUSID Central forum since people started talking on it.

Software updates

The unexplainable behaviour of CUSIDnet about a year ago was caused by the phpbb package not being updated to the latest version. Since then, updates have continually been made and thankfully, no similar problems have occurred since then.

Webhosting Account

During December, our webhosting provider offered a Christmas Special that allowed us to buy one year of service and get another year free all with double the monthly bandwidth. They offer a Christmas Special annually, so a December renewal date will be very convenient. Since our account was up for renewal in March 2006 anyway, I decided to take advantage of this offer, which costs us a total of $127.12 including taxes. We now have a bandwidth of 80 GB per month, which is way above what we usually use (i.e., about 5-6 GB per month this year).

I also noticed that we were starting to run out of the 400 MB of webspace we had. Luckily for us, our webhosting provider recently upgraded their packages, so we now have 800 MB to use.

CUSID Open Letters

When the CUSID Executive took on the task of writing the open letters, I was in charge of designing a CUSID letterhead with the CUSID logo to give these letters a professional and polished look. The open letters were distributed in pdf format, but since the open letters will require yearly updating, a Word document version will be available for the Executive so that it can be edited. A blank version of the letterhead will also be passed on in case any future Executives find it useful.

Meeting Minutes

Although I was not able to attend every CUSID General meeting, I made sure that the minutes were taken. If full minutes weren’t readily available, I at least made sure that the results of the meeting were announced in the Points of Information within days after the meeting.

One election promise that I unfortunately could not fulfil was to retrieve the minutes from last year’s meetings. My pleading and Jess’s pleading came to no avail. I still think it is a worthy cause to retrieve these minutes and the future Executive Director might want to continue trying.

Recommendations

Presidents Mailing List

The idea of a mailing list that includes all the presidents or contacts for each CUSID member was suggested when it was clear that some schools do not read CUSIDnet and therefore are unaware when important announcements are made. I am fully in support of this idea. However, similar to my trouble with creating a complete contact list, I needed to figure out who should be included in this mailing list and the only way to do that was to make sure Schedule A was accurate. Given the lateness of the year, I will leave the creation of the mailing list to the incoming Executive Director since with new club executives being elected, the contact information will need to be changed very soon anyway.

For the next Executive Director

We all know that a background in computers and web maintenance is very valuable for the ED, but I think the ED should be equally, if not more, organized and diligent. The Executive Director is first and foremost the processor of large amounts of information and the facilitator of various levels of communication. The task can be overwhelming if the ED is not organized and is not consistently making updates. CUSID members can be left confused and lost if the information they find is not updated. Most of the job is about posting the latest information once it’s made available, responding to people’s questions, and fulfilling requests quickly and efficiently, so the ED should essentially expect to be on-call for CUSID.

It’s been fun!

I’d like to thank you, the CUSID community, for allowing me to serve you as Executive Director this year. It has been a very rewarding experience overall. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at ed@cusid.ca now or julieta_chan@hotmail.com if you still have any questions after my term.