“It’s a lot of meetings and a lot of emails and a lot of forms, which not everybody loves, but my happy place is an Excel spreadsheet.”
On July 17, The Fulcrum spoke with the Operations commissioner for the University of Ottawa Sudents’ Unions (UOSU), Fiona Broughton. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, lightly edited for readability.
The Fulcrum (F): Could you introduce yourself and include your program in your study?
Fiona Broughton (FB): My name is Fiona Broughton. I use she/her pronouns. I’m going into my fifth year. I started out in political science, and then switched to linguistics mid-pandemic because I realized it brought me more joy and poli sci didn’t, but I had those credits. So now I’m stuck constantly explaining [my] major in linguistics with a minor in poli sci.
F: Can you talk about any previous experience in student life on campus or anything relevant to this role?
FB: So starting in 2021 I was the VP of Finance for the Student Association of Faculty of Arts (SAFA), which was super interesting.
I was doing the position interim and then got ratified because not everyone was elected. It was mid-pandemic engagement was small. And my friend messaged me, who was the [then] president and he said, ‘Hey, Fiona, do you want to be part of SAFA?’ Because I had just switched my program so I wasn’t eligible for AAIPPSA anymore and they were like, ‘Okay, we gotta snag you’ and I said, ‘Yeah, do you want me to be like director of communication or VP internal’ and he said, ‘How about finance?’ And I went, ‘Okay’, and I wasn’t afraid of math, and in the Faculty of Arts that makes you qualified.
So I did that for about a year and a half. And it was super fun. I was making the operating budget, I was helping out with 101 week, scholarships, all our events, and I really loved it. And as part of that, I was working with the UOSU for like, levies and being in the money roundtable.
And then when the election came around this year, I hadn’t heard of anybody running for operations and I was like, you know, I care about the union, I think it’s really important for us to have that representation with the University and also just like, a place that students can get support. And so I said, Alright, I guess I’ll do this. So that was kind of my journey from zero to UOSU operations Commissioner.
F: In your own words, can you explain how you understood the mandate of operations Commissioner when you decided to run?
FB: It’s kind of twofold and the part that’s very obvious to everyone is you’re in charge of the finances and you have to make sure that students’ money is being used as responsibly as possible.
The other half of it is also human resources. So kind of how I like to explain it is: I’m the bureaucrat in the back office. I make sure everything is running smoothly so that everybody else can do their fabulous projects and advocate for students. And I just kind of keep the gears turning. So it’s twofold in that way, the finances and the HR, so very much an internal role. But in terms of the finances, you know, it’s making sure that students’ money is used responsibly and used for things that go back to them.
On the management team, we have our Executive Director, her name is Manon [Méthot], she’s wonderful. We also have an HR advisor. So I work with them and do everything in terms of hiring and stuff like that. So it’s kind of that internal portfolio that we all work on. So I work a lot internally with our staff with our management team.
F: What does a week in the life of the operations Commissioner entail for you?
FB: That’s a classic one. It’s good. I mean, everybody will tell you this: it’s a lot of emails. It’s a whole lot of emails for me. I don’t get as many requests from students. It’s a lot more like I said, internal. I’m the bureaucrat. So it’s approving payments, drafting the budget, going to meetings with our various like departments. So communications, finance.
It’s a lot of meetings and a lot of emails and a lot of forms, which not everybody loves, but my happy place is an Excel spreadsheet.
F: I know Max [Christie] was hoping to make it so that executives didn’t have to be part-time [students]. Now that you’re in the role, do you feel like the part-time requirement is a valid one or do you think that it could be changed?
FB: I think it is. Because it is such a huge responsibility. I know I couldn’t be taking more than two or three classes right now. I just don’t think that would be manageable for me.
Also part of the course requirements is that international students have to take four courses so they’re still full-time obviously. It’s because their visa requires them to be full-time students and I absolutely commend anyone who manages that. It’s very impressive. And part of how that works, as I understand it is, it’s helpful to have the other commissioners who are domestic students have a little more time on their hands to be able to support the team, say someone who’s a full-time student is going through midterms going through finals week. They’re going to have to take some time off and do those when we have other people with more time that can kind of support them.
So, I think having a balance of workload throughout the team is really important. And if more students, like domestic students, were able to be full-time students … I just don’t think there are enough hours in the day. Obviously, I won’t say that exceptions can’t happen and that’s not up to me, but personally, I’m apprehensive about changing those requirements entirely. Just because having gone through it myself. And [I’ve] spoken to other people, like we work more than 37 and a half hours a week like it’s a lot of time. I was taking one class over the summer and even that was a little frantic at times.
F: Are there any issues you believe UOSU should be spending more resources tackling than they might have been in past terms?
FB: I know one thing that we’re talking about is, I mean, obviously, it’s on everyone’s minds that we’re going into a recession. I’m not an economist, but even I know that. Groceries are outpacing the cost of inflation. Last year, our food bank had over I think 200 per cent more traffic than in previous years.
So one thing I’m doing in allocating the budget; is we’ve given a lot more to our food bank, and my view on it is that the UOSU operates by students and for students on students’ funds, right? So when someone pays in for the membership of the UOSU, the way I see it and how I’m trying to prioritize is looking at every line item, [seeing] what is going back directly to helping and supporting students and, seeing what other initiatives we can take to support students in this year. [That’s] because the benefit of having us as a collective is we have access to more things than we would as individuals, for example, our health insurance, we have a group plan that makes it so much easier for people to get more benefits than it would if they tried to get insurance as an individual.
We all pay a certain amount. Sometimes people don’t use all of it. I know I always claim the glasses, but I don’t get a lot of the other things because they’re not relevant to me. But because we all buy into that plan. It’s there if we ever need it. And there are a lot of students who do use it.
So that’s kind of my mindset toward everything, right? We are that collection, we are that community support. And everything we do is scholarships, right? So we all buy into this to know that we’re going to get the support when we need it most like students who are in financial hardship, you know, we have bursaries for that or you know, the health insurance.
So that’s what is on my mind to prioritize most this year is really supporting people in the most direct way we can.
F: How do you intend to facilitate communication between students, BOD, and executives or how have you been?
FB: Yeah so for me, like I said, my role is a bit internal. So obviously, a lot of things in the HR process are confidential. So when I give updates to the board, I talk about everything I’m doing with the budget and all my miscellaneous items, and then I say, ‘I’ve worked on HR’. So really, most of what I can do to, stay transparent with the students is when the budget is done. That’s going to be done in a couple of weeks and then it’ll go up on our website. It’s going to be presented at the general assembly [GA], as well.
What I’m doing for our financial statements because obviously, those are supposed to be public and they haven’t always been public in the most efficient way. Sometimes, we fight with SharePoint every day and I feel like my whole life is fighting with SharePoint. But what I’m trying to do is our financial reports can be a little intimidating, especially for people who don’t have any context with our finances or just with numbers in general, they freak you out. I totally get that.
So what I want to do as a new initiative is when we post the whole big bash up, this is a table with all sorts of numbers. If you’re not too into it, you wouldn’t really have context for what it means to have shorter executive summaries of you know, fun colorful pie charts and bar charts and like giving the context of how we’re spending, you know, this is how much we’ve got, this is how much we have left for the rest of the year.
Making it easier for students and not burying the answer in a whole Excel spreadsheet, which is never our intention but can happen in terms of like, we get too deep in the operation that I look at those numbers, and to me it makes sense. But anyone who doesn’t spend their whole day looking at them will be like, ‘What is this?’ So trying to make it not only accessible but understandable.
F: That’s awesome to hear. I guess one thing that might come along with that is more criticism of your budget. I know in past years, I read last year’s budget, and PIVIK was losing a lot of money. But also that’s something you can explain because businesses lose money in the first year. So are you prepared to have conversations where you explain those losses?
FB: Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think a lot of that is contextualizing it and contextualizing it when the information is given right away, rather than after the fact, right? Because if people see just the raw numbers, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, what is going on here?’ Then everyone freaks out and then we have to dislike waiting until the GA to describe things.
I think sort of the preventative action for that is, you know, explaining everything right off [and] making it easily understandable. I know one thing that broadly the executive and the board have discussed is the potential of having town hall meetings. More regularly than a GA obviously, where you set up in a room [and] students can come to you with their concerns. So we haven’t officially planned that yet.
We’re gonna sort of gauge interest and see what’s feasible. But those are kind of my ideas in terms of, you know, how to communicate better with students. And sort of as the year goes along, be informed by what questions I receive and what students want, because the in the summer, obviously there’s a lot less engagement. There are a lot [fewer] people on campus, it’s very much planning things and getting the budget done.
And then we have the GA pretty soon in the fall. It’s just the beginning of November. So I think a lot of questions there will, you know, help inform what the students need for me going forward. But that’s kind of my initial thoughts.
F: Awesome. That’s great to hear. My next question is; which committees are you cheering are part of and why did you choose to be part of the ones that aren’t mandated that you’re a part of?
FB: I chair the Finance Committee. In that committee, our job is to review payments, review our finances generally, and review and pass the budget before it goes to the Board of Directors. Pretty straightforward for what you’d imagine from the finance committee.
I’m also on the Governance Committee, which deals with our governance, constitutional amendments, and anything like that goes through there. The operation commissioner is, by default, on that committee just because, again, my main concern and what I deal with is our internal operations, how we work, the structure of the workplace, and the Corporation aspect of the Union. So I’m on that committee.
I also sit on the Student Life Committee. Again, I represent that in the financial aspect when we plan 101 week. I go ‘Okay, this is how much money we have to do this, this is how we are responsible with our payments.’
And currently, I’m the Interim Chair of the club’s committee, as the Clubs and Services Commissioner position is currently vacant. A lot of the chief concern we have at the moment is club funding and generally our club system, so as someone who concerns themselves a lot with how our internal systems operate, and how the budget is, I wanted to contribute to that. So I’m currently the interim chair and trying to think I think that’s everything.
F: Why did you choose to run for operations commissioner and do you believe the election turnout gives you a strong mandate from students?
FB: Yeah, as I mentioned, why I ran for operations is my experience with SAFA; I was very much the finance person and I figured out that I loved it. And I’d been working on the money roundtable and working sort of, in the orbit of UOSU. I saw a lot of things that I thought could be improved on. And when the election came around, and not many people were running and I didn’t hear anyone running for operations commissioner, sort of thought to myself ‘If you want to see it done well, why not do it yourself?’ And yeah, I think I had that experience to bring to the table.
I thought I could learn a lot. As I said, I really think that the union is important for students to have and to be that support and that community. And what I can bring to that is my experience with finance and also I think HR is a really important concern that people don’t always talk about because it’s not the forward-facing thing that you see. So I wanted to do my bit to see how I can improve those.
In terms of mandate from the students. The voter turnout was 3.8 per cent and I was running unopposed. Do I feel a strong mandate from the students? The answer is, I hope so. The people who did vote, you know, there wasn’t a no-campaign against me. I love that. And I have confidence in what I’m doing, when I’m drafting the budget, and every line item, I think, ‘How does this directly go back to our students? How does this help them? How does this benefit them?’ So I feel that I’m doing the best I can for them.
I hope they believe that. And I’m also trying to, in terms of our whole executive, our biggest concern is getting more engagement from students and getting more direct feedback from them. So election turnout, is not great, and we’re doing our best to improve that right because we can’t say we have huge support from students.
We have a significant amount of confidence from students because most students didn’t tell us whether or not they had that confidence. So I think what we can do to sort of offset that is be as open as we can and ask for feedback and promote the union and saying, ‘all right, you are a member of this union. You are entitled to vote to help make those decisions’.
F: Can you give me a rundown of your portfolio as operations Commissioner, when should students be reaching out to you?
My portfolio is the finances and HR. When I’ve had students reach out to me in terms of scholarships, if there are any problems with their electronic transfers, that’s when they usually come to me for stuff like that.
They can also come to me with you know, asking questions about the budget or questions about where our money goes or delegating like that or even if they’re wondering: how does the union work? What’s the structure? What am I as a member, a part of? During my office hours, people don’t usually come to them. Again, because I am so internal. There aren’t a lot of you know, questions from members. It’s usually once the budget is out, people will ask me about the budget and I love to have those questions. Because I spend so much time making it I want to hear what people think. So that’s kind of what they can talk to me about.
Those are the things I’m directly involved in, so I can help you with the budget and I can direct you to someone else who can help you with any accessibility concerns, equity concerns, stuff like that. So if you want any bureaucratic information, that’s when you come to me.
F: Awesome. Okay. What does your oversight for each of the commissioners look like over the summer? I know, obviously, from the first BOD I was at, you had a huge conversation about something that happened in the last term with the operations commissioner, and the former president made comments that he didn’t know about it until April. There’s not even a president to tell at this point. So what are the internal mechanisms keeping everyone on track in the meantime?
FB: Yeah, so there’s a couple of things for me again, since I deal a lot with the finances and internal stuff, I work a lot with our managers. So our finance department is kind of the final say on payments and spending. I approve something, then it goes to them, and they verify they make sure everything’s good. So from a purely procedural standpoint, it’s mostly the staff that I work with, from a sort of big decision-making standpoint, it’s the board and the committees. So the way our payment approval works work, is we have a policy that outlines what needs to go to whom depending on you know, how large the expenditure is. And in the summer, those thresholds are lower than normal because the budget hasn’t been approved yet. So we have to be, you know, even more, stringent on making sure that our expenses like fit within what we’re projecting.
So, I believe it is expenses over 1000, but below 5000, goes to the executive committee. So the Executive Committee has to vote to approve those. One example of a thing we do is, we approved purchases for the services. We had one thing that was quite large for the Bike Co-Op, they’re making a new workstation. So they had to buy a bunch of equipment and that was a cost that went through the executive committee.
In terms of things that are over 5000, that then gets approved either by the finance committee or the board. So there are quite a lot of eyes on everything in terms of finances, we try to maximize the number of eyes on everything to keep us up with our policies, and make sure all the numbers are correct. So that’s kind of my oversight in those terms.
F: What were some of your top concerns coming into the role from what you saw last year?
FB: One of my top concerns, which is the same as what people are bringing to me this year is, communication and engagement in terms of understanding what’s going on and, as well from an internal standpoint, making sure things happen efficiently and as fulsomely as possible.
In terms of the RSGs what I work with is getting them the student list, calculating the levies, paying those out to them, and making sure that those happen as swiftly as possible. And if there are any delays – which the university is a huge bureaucracy, there are always delays – [we’re] making sure to communicate those as best as possible. Just keep people apprised of what is going on because usually what is going on is super normal and not concerning.
The general way that bureaucracy goes and sometimes it’s slow, but when you don’t communicate that people that to people, or when they don’t know what’s going on, they haven’t seen the financial statements or whatever. That’s when tension arises and you’re like, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ Everyone gets worried about it, and then it gets out of proportion.
So kind of what I want to do is make sure we’re doing the best we can to get things done well and on time, and communicating to our stakeholders – whether they be RSGs, whether they be the general student membership, whether they be our [internal] staff and our services – making sure that we do the best we can to get things done to the letter, and as much as possible. And [also] understanding that obviously, not everything goes perfectly and not everything can go perfectly but working within that to keep everyone updated on the process.
F: How do you feel about having gone through so much of the summer now with vacancies on the executive committee? Can you talk about the role of interim directors or executive committee members in the overall governance of UOSU?
FB: Yes. So we started out the term in May with three out of seven commissioners, two of whom were uncontested, which was an interesting way to start. The office was very quiet. And before May even started, we were with the previous executives conducting interviews to hire interim executives, so we would meet quorum and have a full team in May. We hired two interim executives, which were the student life commissioner and the Francophone Affairs Commissioner.
So kind of how [interim executives] work is, they operate the exact same as any regularly elected commissioner and that they have voting rights on the board. They’re a full commissioner in that sense.
Their term is until the by-election, and they’re welcome to run in the by-election. And maybe we have them the whole year, maybe we don’t. Yeah, they operate just like the rest of us in that we’re a committee of five and we do our jobs the best we can. We reopened hiring [and] we only found candidates for those two positions that we recommended to the board.
We didn’t hire for President or Clubs and Services Commissioner. So we’re a team of five and we’re doing great, and I think that we’re a good team for now. We want to get more people elected in the by-election which will hopefully strengthen our mandate from students, in terms of also having a president; they’re very much the voice…and the face of the union in terms of our media presence, and also when we engage with the university administration, when we go to negotiate things with them, it’s very much the president who leads that – they’re kind of the captain of the ship. So, you know, we didn’t hire for that position because it’s weird to hire for that position. And we hope that we have someone elected in the fall.
We’re managing the workload quite well. Right now we have we’ve hired some deputy Commissioners, to help us out with that workload. And we’re kind of splitting the tasks of those two portfolios as a lot of the advocacy [tasks] the President would be involved in goes to the advocacy Commissioner. In terms of our internal operations, our equity commissioner has helped me out a lot with that; clubs and services. we have a deputy who is helping and I’m sort of involved in that. As I said, I’m the interim chair of that committee. So it’s going really well.
We have a small team, but we have a very powerful team and we’re excited to you know, renew our democratic mandate in the fall.
F: Good to hear. So those are all my prepared questions, but I will end by asking if there’s anything you’d like to add, any message for students.
FB: It’s interesting that I don’t have as many campaign promises or giant projects, you know, I want the ship to run well [and] I want to plug the holes. I want to keep it running. And so that’s mainly what I’m concerned with.
I’m not doing a ton of stuff facing the students. Pretty much what I want to work on is making sure that the union operates the best it can, to be able to support students. And I’ve got a hand in various places in terms of giving my ideas in general to the executive committee. So my outlook on the whole year and I’m not sure yet how this will play out in terms of what projects or what programs will take on, but just making sure that the student fees we’re buying into this, we want to be supported. We want to get the most we can out of this organization because that’s what we’re here for.
My main concern is seeing how much we can directly give back to the students and prioritizing directly giving back to the students, especially with the economic climate as it is right now. Part of what we’re doing is increasing spending for the food bank, and promoting our services like the Student Rights Center, the Pride Center, the RISE Center, and everything like that. Throughout the year, we’ll be keeping our eyes open to see what new initiatives we can take on to support students. That’s kind of what I’m looking out for in the background. I’m keeping the gears turning and hopefully, I can help the rest of the team in their initiatives.
