Conor Tangney resigned from his position as Arts and Culture commissioner at Victoria College on November 21 following a failed motion to impeach him from the Victoria University Students’ Administrative Council (VUSAC) eleven days earlier.
Four voting VUSAC executives voted in favour of Tangney’s dismissal, while four voted against it and six abstained.
The motion did not receive the required two-thirds majority it needed to pass.
When asked about the reason for the attempted impeachment, Rowan DeBues, VUSAC president and mover of the impeachment motion, said, “The simplest and main one is his conduct in the office space. Ideally, the VUSAC office is going to be the pinnacle of a safe space at Victoria College and the say he was carrying on was not facilitating that.”
Tangney declined The Varsity’s request for comment.
At the meeting, DeBues circulated hard copies of a confidential document that laid out the full list of allegations against Tangney. Although the document was not permitted to leave the room, DeBues confirmed in an interview with The Varsity that the charges against Tangney included disrespect towards orientation officials, misogynistic jokes, and homophobic slurs in the VUSAC office.
The dispute regarding orientation week arose when two orientation executives filed a complaint against Tangney, alleging that he called a lunch with VUSAC, scheduled for orientation week, a waste of time. “I disagreed with the placement, timing, and the event itself,” Tangney is reported to have said according to the minutes package from the November 10 VUSAC meeting. “I believed it to be a conversation that was between me and the execs, or me and a friend — not speaking badly about orientation week.”
Tangney is also alleged to have joked that “women have no place in politics.” According to Tangney, the remark was a private joke delivered in a sarcastic tone.
Tangney said that he apologized immediately after he made the joke. “A lot of you know my humour, out of all the women in the room on VUSAC — I voted for most of you if not all of you,” he reportedly said to the VUSAC members present.
During the meeting, Tangney expressed concern that the first time he saw the full list of charges or accusations was at the meeting.
DeBues clarified that he knew Tangney was considering resignation and did not want to make the allegations public if he was going to resign.
“[Had] I known all the charges, I would’ve submitted a resignation,” Tangney said.
DeBues notes that more grievances were made in the week following the motion to impeach Tangney.
DeBues does not know whether it was those that compelled him to resign, because Tangney did not mention them in his resignation letter.
VUSAC councilors are fulfilling the duties of the Arts and Culture commissioner until the new term, when DeBues hopes to hold a byelection for the position. “I don’t like the idea of losing someone democratically elected and replacing them with an appointee,” DeBues says.
