Last Thursday, March 29, a motion was submitted to SSMU council proposing to censure SSMU’s VP External, JoÃl Pedneault. The motion, moved by nine council members, only narrowly failed to pass, with a vote of 11 for, 11 against, and one abstention.
The Tribune believes the nine movers of the motion were unwise to use the tactic of censure as a means to discipline Pedneault. A motion to censure does not exactly help to create a stable atmosphere at SSMU, and such a close result will be very unhelpful in assuaging the increasingly prevalent political polarization on campus. Had the motion passed, it would surely have had a negative effect on student politics. A censure of Pedneault would have caused resentment from many students who believe he is doing his best to represent their interests, and would have placed a great strain on the rest of the SSMU executives.
Had such negative politics not happened before, a motion for censure might have been more forgiveable. However, a similar motion was brought forth just last year, and to disastrous effect. The motion to impeach former SSMU President Zach Newburgh-regardless of the motion’s legitimacy-induced an atmosphere lacking in co-operation among the executives for the remainder of the year. [Editor’s note: Zach Newburgh sits on the TPS Board of Directors.] The movers of the censure motion therefore failed to learn from past mistakes.
In addition, the motion itself was grounded on some dubious foundations. Some reasons may have been based on understandable concerns, but the use of a censure is a disproportionate and overtly public reaction to something that could have stayed more low key and constructive. Certainly, the Tribune agrees with the motion’s movers that Pedneault’s decision to allow members of the Coalition Large de l’Association pour la Solidarité Syndicale étudiante (CLASSE), the organisation behind the Quebec-wide student strike, after-hours access to the SSMU office was an inappropriate use of the VP External’s authority. We hold this view because of the fact that SSMU is neither a member of CLASSE nor on strike, and such perks should be reserved for McGill students and organizations.
Yet some reasons were not fair and not accurate. A motion to censure is a means to sort out a constitutional technicality, a punitive measure to deal with members of the SSMU executive inexcusably overstepping their mandate. Indeed, criticising Pedneault’s participation in the strike and his active involvement on the picket lines of other universities in Montreal is misguided. Considering the other Montreal universities are currently on strike, where else is a VP External, McGill’s liason officer with other Quebec universities, supposed to liase with our fellow Quebec students-something that constitutes an essential part of his mandate-other than on the picket lines? Moreover, the movers are not respecting Pednault’s right as an individual to participate in the Quebec-wide student strike. As a student representative for McGill, it does make it more difficult for him to do this, but it is not incompatible for him to represent McGill interests during his day job, and his own when he is not on the clock.
Furthermore, the movers were unfair to cite the administration’s exclusion of Pedneault from the university campus for five days as a reason for censure. Surely the exclusion is a punishment in itself. The motion is merely seeking to punish Pedneault for getting punished.
One co-author claimed that the she was satisfied with the result because the aim was partly to voice concerns. Using the possibility of punishment of a VP to facilitate a discussion is inappropriate. We would not be surprised if future executives failed to fulfill their mandates for fear that any misstep-which should be addressed privately first-may result in a censure.
Therefore the Tribune believes that the motion to censure Pedneault was not well thought out, and was an excessively inflammatory means to sort out a problem that could have been far better solved through persuasive discretion. Had a more discrete means already been repeatedly tried to no avail, it would have been a different story, but it was also up to the motion’s movers to make this clear. As they did not, they come across as going against Pedneault for reasons of complaints with ideology rather than the more just reason for motions, that of a technical complaint.
