June 1: As stated before, Clea nagged UBC’s counsel Jennifer Devins and Michael Wagner to provide any sort of communication to us regarding the Documents Decision from April.
June 5: Jennifer Devins sent an email to Clea where she stated “At this time, we are hoping to provide you with a revised list of documents and copies of the documents by July 31.” Clea missed sending it to me at the time of the last blog post.
We thought the time frame was far too long, given that UBC had at least since April to start preparing, and additionally that it had extra time due to the rescheduling of the hearing for the Hale case. It is far too plausible that UBC will simply blow the deadline and then wait around for us to object as yet another delay strategy.
June 19: We submitted a letter to the Tribunal formally requesting an order that UBC make the disclosure on July 31, 2020. This letter is now in the Documents tab.
OTHER NEWS
A correction to the news about the Stephanie Hale hearing: this was NOT the hearing for the case itself (a Tribunal Hearing). Rather, UBC had petitioned for Judicial Review of the Tribunal’s acceptance of her complaint. The JR Hearing was originally set for March 25-26 and delayed due to the pandemic; then it was set for June 22-July 3; and now it is rescheduled for July 30-31. As the JR Hearing was set to take place after the originally scheduled Tribunal Hearing dates for Hale, UBC filed an Application to Adjourn, which was granted. The Tribunal Hearing for Hale will likely be reset at the JR Hearing.
On June 20, Board of Governors chair Michael Korenberg resigned because he misunderstood Twitter and didn’t realize that other people could see it when he liked tweets from US political figures that didn’t so much criticize Black Lives Matter protesters and Democrats as suggest that they should be shot and persecuted by the government. Korenberg was outed by UBC Students Against Bigotry, one of the most important and impactful current watchdogs of the powers-that-be at UBC, and documentor of the links between UBC leadership and tolerance of right-wing culture warriors, now that the UBC Insiders blog is no more. (Folks may remember how Neal Yonson of UBC Insiders caused BOG member Greg Peet to step down after he publicized that a BC Supreme Court judge had found Peet was evading taxes by strategically moving money between BC and Quebec.) They tweet at @ubc_students.
On June 29, six members of Lake Babine First Nation (Cathy Woodgate, Richard Perry, Dorothy Williams, Ann Tom, Maurice Joseph, and Emma Williams) filed their Statement of Particulars to the Canadian Human Rights Commission about their January 2017 complaint that the RCMP had chosen not to investigate their allegations that John Furlong had abused them and others as children. (The federal human rights process is different than the BC process – the Commission investigates a complaint before it agrees to have a hearing, and this complaint HAS been accepted with a hearing yet to be scheduled.) Folks may recall that UBC invited Furlong to host a sport fundraiser in 2017, disinvited him after myself and the community shamed the institution as Furlong was a known child abuser, and reinvited him after an extended backlash among Canada’s powerful lovers of racist child abusers. In this time of heightened attention to police violence, RCMP racism, their tolerance of sexual abuse, RCMP abuse of UBC students in particular, and systemic racial abuse in society in general, that the Lake Babine First Nation survivors continue to be advocates for their own dignity should be uplifted, as well as the cowardly hypocrisy of UBC’s leadership in the face of criticism by right wing culture warriors.
The revised UBC’s Sexual Misconduct Policy SC17 was approved by the BOG and went into effect July 1, 2017. AMS and the SASC continue their outstanding efforts at sustained, thoughtful pressure on UBC to monitor how the university creates and administers this policy. The policy is also garnering intelligent, deep commentary on the policy such as this, pressuring UBC for a seat at the table for SASC.
Glynnis Kirchmeier - and - Kirchmeier obo Others v. UBC 