A Special SSMU General Assembly (GA) scheduled for this past Wednesday, March 28, wascancelled after the undersigned councillorswithdrew their petition. The assembly was called with the knowledge that there might be a motion for a strike vote, but at the time of its cancellationno such motion had been submitted, a contributing factor to the decision to withdraw the petition.
A petition to hold a Special GA of SSMU can be submitted to the speakers of council signed by eight SSMU Councillors, or 200 members of SSMU, who must be from at least four faculties or schools (with no more than 50 per cent of signatures coming from any one faculty or school). According to speakers of council Nida Nizam and Michael Tong, eight councillors signed the petition for the GA.
Adam Winer, one of the undersigned councillors on the petition, said that the movers of the petition had decided to withdraw it.
“The GA would likely have revolved around a student strike, although no motion, to my knowledge, was submitted to that effect before the cancellation of the GA,” Winer said.
SSMU President Maggie Knight noted that the speakers did not receive further interest in submitting a strike motion.
“There was no concerted effort to create a strike motion,” Knight said. “And the speakers had not received any other indication of interest in submitting motions.”
SSMU VP External Joël Pedneault suggested a reason for the lack of interest in a SSMU strike motion for the GA.
“At SSMU, even if there’s massive turnout it’s always going to be a small proportion of the [student body],” he said. “I feel like people preferred [holding GAs] at the department or faculty level.”
A ‘yes’ vote on a strike motion would have enabled all undergraduates at the downtown campus to go on strike, joining the more than 200,000 Quebec students currently on strike in protest against the Quebec government’s planned tuition increases.
Aside from the fact that no motions were submitted, there were other concerns that led to the cancellation, including the difficulty of finding a practical location and time for an assembly of this size.
“[The 500 person quorum] is larger than any space available in the SSMU Building,” Knight said. “I believe the petitioners … wanted to establish a date and time where it was possible to book other spaces on campus, as it is difficult to book multiple large lecture halls at short notice.”
Student responses to the planned General Assembly were also taken into account when deciding to withdraw the petition.
“Some students had raised concerns about the timing of the GA falling at a very academically heavy point in the semester,” Knight said.
“The special General Assembly would have been an excellent way to encourage student dialogue on the strike and any other topic,” Shyam Patel, VP Finance and Operations, added. “However, the time constraint was not ideal.”
