The Students’ Society’s Winter 2012 General Assembly takes place tomorrow, and we’ll have the chance to see the newly-reformed GA in action. After a semester-long reform process SSMU Council approved a package of changes at their Dec. 1 meeting. The adopted reforms, however, didn’t go as far as introducing online ratification of GA motions.

The GA has been a problem for years, and various reform efforts have tried and failed to fix it. Part of me would prefer to see it scrapped for good. But perhaps putting decisions to an online vote could be a solution to the GA’s problems. This has the potential to preserve the GA as a forum for direct democracy and open debate while limiting its flaws and increasing its legitimacy. That could only be a plus for student democracy.

Since 2006, when mandatory biannual GAs were introduced, GAs have generally been divided into two sorts. When dealing with controversial motions they’ve tended to turn into shouting matches between polarized groups, the most notorious example being the Winter 2009 GA, which dealt with a motion condemning the bombing of educational institutions in Gaza. The rest of the time they struggle to reach or maintain quorum—just 100 students (spread among faculties) from an overall population of over 20,000. GAs have failed to meet or have lost quorum six times since 2006, and have been criticized for low attendance on a number of other occasions.

GA reform has been an issue every year since 2006. Referenda questions dealing with reform were on the ballot three years in a row before last year, when a motion to abolish the GA was debated but not put to referendum. None of these reform efforts did the trick, and the GA’s fundamental problems have remained. 

One of these problems has to do with the logistics of GA meetings. Although not central to how the GA functions, the fact that GA attendance is usually limited by the size of the room it’s held in has been an issue on more than one occasion. Denying students their right to vote because of room capacity is clearly problematic. And while everyone would love to see higher attendance at GAs, there’s a (theoretical) attendance limit, after which it becomes logistically impossible to run a meeting. This means the decision making at a physical GA is always limited to a very small proportion of the student body.

Yet by far the biggest problem is that the GA is a fundamentally unrepresentative body. The GA provides a forum for self-selected, vocal minority groups to push through policy that would often be rejected by the student population as a whole. It has become clear that small groups motivated by specific issues are able to outnumber and drown out the majority, who time and time again vote with their feet against the GA by not showing up.

At its worst, the GA is nothing more than a way for special-interest groups to dictate policy. This is fundamentally undemocratic, and it’s a far less representative institution than SSMU Council or referenda questions. This fall’s referenda were voted on by almost a quarter of undergraduates, versus the approximately 0.6 per cent who voted on motions at the last GA.

Introducing online voting on all GA motions could just be a way of finally addressing these issues. Done right, this would ensure that decisions are made by a larger and more representative group than at present Hopefully, it would ensure that controversial motions are decided not by polarizing minority groups but by a broader cross-section of students.

There are questions about  the constitutionality of online voting, but a referendum question changing the constitution would open the door to such a reform.

Online GA voting isn’t a new idea, and it isn’t a guaranteed solution to the GA’s ills, but it’s the best option if we want to give the GA another chance. If it works, then the GA can be preserved as the SSMU decision-making body. If not, there will be no sensible choice left aside from abolishing the GA and moving on.