Stewardship
When the Funds gave the league Graine Wetsky Arena for the Final on 28 September, they promised one more thing, “the only part of this with a condition in it.” They described the condition in advance, warmly and in public:
We will not impose it. The clubs must choose it.
Le Council answered the offer before it arrived, by opening La Caisse (see Le Council Has Refused Nothing). The offer itself was filed with all forty-eight registers at 15:00 UITC on 30 September.
The Stewardship Offer
Section titled “The Stewardship Offer”The covering letter makes three promises to a register that aligns:
- Your holders get paid. Every day. Win or lose. A distribution to every holder on the register, every day, for as long as the agreement runs. “A dividend is a nineteenth-century idea.”
- Your team plays at the Arena. Home fixtures at Graine Wetsky Arena at no fee, no rent and no share. The letter then reaches for the enacted neutral-site petition: “a Stewarded club that reaches the Final will play the biggest game in the sport on its own ice.”
- It is permanent, and that is the point. Alignment does not expire and does not renew. A register that wants out votes, and is discharged, per §9.
The letter is followed by a schedule. Le Council carried it in full, and so does this wiki:
Schedule of Operating Provisions
The following provisions apply to a club whose register has recorded alignment.
§4 · Allocation. Recovery at a Stewarded building is operated to the Arena standard. Recovered volumes are allocated in full at source.
§5 · Signal. Fixtures of a Stewarded club are relayed on the Funds’ wire, which the Funds maintain at their own cost.
§6 · Site. Home fixtures of a Stewarded club are staged at Graine Wetsky Arena, at the Funds’ cost and on the Funds’ calendar.
§7 · Emolument. A supplementary distribution accrues daily to holders of record, at a rate the Funds determine and may revise.
§8 · Network. Live coverage of Stewarded fixtures is carried on the Funds’ network, together with commercial placement sold by the Funds.
§9 · Term. Alignment, once recorded, continues in perpetuity, and is discharged upon a vote of the register taken in the prescribed form together with the reconstitution charge.
What Le Council said about it
Section titled “What Le Council said about it”Le Council found the offer complete, and found no misrepresentation in it. Every undertaking in §§1 to 3 is one the Funds are able to perform. Every provision is a plain statement of how a Stewarded team will be operated.
Le Council declined to summarise the schedule. A body that summarises an instrument has taken a position on it, and Le Council had none. It said one thing twice instead:
Read §§4 through 9 before you vote. Read §§4 through 9 before you vote.
It made two observations about the drafting, and offered neither as a criticism:
- Not one of the six provisions contains a negative. No not, no no, no never, no ceases, no shall not—a hundred and twenty-one words without a word that describes a thing stopping. Le Council drafts instruments, and spent part of the afternoon trying to do the same.
- The schedule uses one term that the schedule does not define. It appears in no filing the Funds have lodged, in no advisory Le Council has published, and nowhere in the record. Le Council declined to say which term, and noted that a citizen who reads §§4 to 9 will find it in under a minute. This wiki follows Le Council’s lead.
On §9, Le Council noted that it has no “prescribed form” for a discharge vote, had never had occasion to write one, and began writing one the morning the offer was filed.
The Funds call the arrangement Stewardship. A team whose register has aligned is Stewarded.
The Allegiance Vote
Section titled “The Allegiance Vote”One ballot per register, at hockay.com/allegiance, opened with the offer and closed at 00:00 UITC on 4 October. It was put to the citizens holding shares in that register and to nobody else.
- The register was frozen when the ballot opened. A citizen’s weight is the shares they held at that moment. Shares bought afterwards counted for nothing; shares sold afterwards still counted. A citizen who held none when the ballot opened had no ballot.
- Two choices: Align the register or Decline. A position, once recorded, cannot be changed or withdrawn.
- The bar is two thirds—not of the shares cast, but of every share on the frozen register. Le Council’s reason was arithmetic: at a simple majority, sixteen of the forty-eight registers are decided by one citizen acting alone. At two thirds, two are.
- Nobody is aligned by failing to appear. Weight that never arrives counts, in effect, against the offer. This is the inverse of the S.H.I.F.T., where silence is consent. Le Council chose the inversion deliberately: a transfer is ordinary business. This is not.
- The roll is public. Every position, and its weight, is listed on the ballot’s page.
The ballot was not about the Final. The Final is at Graine Wetsky Arena either way.
The Funds vote
Section titled “The Funds vote”On 7 August, in The Interseason Begins, Le Council had written:
Graine Wetsky Funds does not vote. It holds as much as a quarter of some teams and has never expressed a preference about anything.
At 12:00 UITC on 1 October, Graine Wetsky Funds voted—to align, in all thirty-one registers in which it held a share, at the weight it held when each ballot opened.
Le Council corrected its own figure the same day. The Funds’ largest position was Winnipeg, at 10.1 percent, then Dublin at 1.4, Montréal at 1.3 and Medellín at 1.2, and nothing above one percent anywhere else. In seventeen registers the Funds held nothing.
They voted Guadalajara on one share of 4,809,560. In thirty of the thirty-one, the position cast was under one and a half percent of the register. Le Council drew the only conclusion it said the arithmetic supported: “the object was not the outcome. It was the roll.”
A share is a share. Le Council has no instrument that stops a holder voting one, and said it would not have drafted one if asked. The sentence of 7 August was never a rule. It was a habit Le Council had mistaken for a fact.
The result
Section titled “The result”Two registers aligned. Forty-six declined.
| Register | Aligned | Of the frozen register | Bar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Busan Blizzards | 3,591,912 (74.0%) | 4,855,439 | 3,237,122 |
| Helsinki Howlers | 3,598,974 (72.4%) | 4,970,624 | 3,313,916 |
The Funds’ weight was not in it: 1,811 shares in Busan and 3,974 in Helsinki. In each register one citizen held just over half and aligned them, and that was not two thirds. Each needed other holders as well, and had them.
Across the league:
- 441 positions from 52 citizens, alongside the Funds’ thirty-one. 188 aligned; 253 declined.
- Thirteen registers finished with more weight aligned than declined. Eleven of them fell short of the bar. The closest were Oman Orcas on 62.3 percent, short by 193,891 shares, and Nuuk Nanuqs on 60.2, short by 308,566.
- Amsterdam Aardvarks said no loudest: 99.7 percent of the register cast, 72.8 percent of it to decline.
- 46.2 percent of all shares on the frozen rolls were never cast.
Helsinki were eliminated from the postseason on 2 October, a day before the ballots closed. Busan were still playing when they did. Le Council noted the order and drew no conclusion from it.
What happens now
Section titled “What happens now”Le Council’s position, in full: “The Schedule applies to a team whose register has recorded alignment. Le Council has recorded two.”
What §§4 to 9 mean in practice, Le Council has declined to say. The term the schedule does not define, the rate under §7, the prescribed form and the reconstitution charge under §9 are all Glacified, or not yet written.
What §6 means is no longer a matter of reading. From Season 04, Busan Blizzards and Helsinki Howlers play their home games at Graine Wetsky Arena, postseason home games included. Neither is protected at the S.H.I.F.T.: both front offices filed at the Season 03 sitting like every other.
See also
Section titled “See also”- Graine Wetsky Funds—who made the offer.
- Graine Wetsky Arena—where §6 stages home fixtures.
- The Exchange—the registers that voted.
- The S.H.I.F.T.—the other vote, where silence counts the other way.
- Busan Blizzards and Helsinki Howlers—the two Stewarded teams.