What have you accomplished this summer?

We have finally [finalized] the tenants we have in the second floor cafeteria. We also finished Gerts! The half-million dollar renovations are finally completed. We’re really happy that we could negotiate a new beer contract, and the food at Gerts was also something we worked on. It’s a really good selection; we tried our best to make sure it’s pretty decent and reasonably priced.

Orientation week took quite a big part of our time. There was approximately 12 months of planning; it was really time-consuming, not only for the six executives, but for all our full-time staff here over the summer. We’re really excited about how it turned out.

The other interesting thing we’ve been working on is changes to the General Assembly (GA). We have new requirements for how GAs will be run, with particular regard to online voting and online ratification of GA motions afterwards. We’ve been working hard to make sure that [GAs] still maintain some of the culture that they have possessed in the past. I’m really confident that [GAs] are going to be pretty different this year and I hope people are [encouraged] to come out and not [simply] vote online.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

Something I would like to continue this year is working on a stronger coalition between student faculty associations and the school associations as well. Projects always seem to happen [a certain] way, where you have SSMU doing overarching projects and faculties just doing projects within, but I think that we can bring everyone together a bit more and work closely on campus-wide projects even with the faculty associations.

We have a lot of outdoor space projects planned for this year, in particular focusing on winter life outside. The goal is to get people outside, to take a break from studying because winter is a low point in terms of mental health.

How do you envision your role on the Board of Governors?

I’ve been finding out over the summer about what it means to be on a board in general, not necessarily McGill’s. My role is interesting —technically, I’m not the SSMU rep to the board of governors and it’s unprofessional to bring the SSMU opinion to the table. I’m supposed to bring Josh Redel’s opinion as a student to the board. So how do you play that? I envision myself being tough with how they move forward. It’s great that [the governors] are there because they have experience with different industries and, theoretically, with educational institutions, but I’m there because I’m currently attending an educational institution. So I see my role as tempering their very corporate view of an educational institution.

What have you accomplished this summer?

I’ve been working on having meetings with all of the services to go through all of their budgets and get them better set up for this year. I’ve also been working on office allocations on the fourth floor. Instead of office moving day—which is really chaotic—we’re going to have an orientation. We’re also going to be doing midterm reviews of these services to make sure they’re actually being used;for example, that groups actually know they have a locker.

My other role is as co-building manager. Lease negotiations have been a big conversation all summer. There are a lot of building renovations, like to the legal information clinic, which is getting much-needed space. I’ve also been talking to our lawyers and trying to rewrite all the bylaws. This was a big project last year, but they didn’t really get to bylaw book 3, which is the one I deal with a lot.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

Improving all of the staff exit report systems and the VP Clubs and Services exit report. Last year, the office switched mid-year to this new document online management system, which makes a really big difference in how we work day-to-day.

My big long-term plan that I’ve been working on this summer is a better club management system. What I’d really like to see, ideally, would be an online document management system that we and clubs could use in the office; so that when you’re transitioning between executives you could just pass on your login name and password for your clubs and they could see their constitution. We’re also trying to improve the club accounting process, because it really is a problem that no clubs do their own audits. So JP and I have been working to make these little accounting kits for all the clubs.

How do you plan on running Activities Night this year?

Fall Activities Night is going to be traditional, but we’ve been talking about a lot of ideas for Winter Activities Night. One idea we were bouncing around for Winter Activities Night was to have a differently themed night each night, for about a week. So one night might be Musical Groups Night. You go if that’s what you’re interested in, and we could have different groups perform… it would basically work more with club categories and get clubs to be in touch with each other. I really don’t see too many other ways [Fall Activities Night] could be executed, because it is a really hard time for clubs to get organized. But we can play around with Winter Activities Night a bit more and make it a bit creative. I’m definitely looking for suggestions and feedback.

What have you accomplished this summer?

My main goal over the summer was to create new relationships, meeting with a lot of different people  around campus. In terms of SSMU, we have a bunch of new policies; for example, a new communications policy that deals with social media. I’m also really excited about our new “SSMU explains” videos. They should be an interactive way to get people to understand who we are in two minutes, so students don’t have to read through the whole website. Another project is going to be an interactive map of the campus, which will have key information that students might need to know about.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

My main goal is addressing McGill equity. McGill doesn’t have an equity policy, and one of our equity commissioners told us that having one is not feasible. So we suggested that we create a McGill statement regarding this value. If we espouse it as a community, as something that we all believe is important, then we should make a statement to that effect. So it’s very possible that this year we’re going to have a change to the mission statement of the university that would include something about equity. There are also going to be a lot of academic issues this year because there wasn’t a lot of time last year to cover them. For example, we have a lot of support from professors for the creation of a Native Studies program.

Last semester you talked to the Tribune a lot about safe space. What are your plans regarding that topic?

One of the big things for this year is reconciling the student body. One of the research projects I’m going to use to help rebuild that kind of safe area is called McGill 101, which will be a public lecture series about the history of McGill, in the context of Montreal and Canada and on its own, the history of activism, and a bit about governance. But safe space is also between McGill [administration] and students. The events of last year have really given the ear of McGill to us, and [the administration has] come to us a lot more than they did in the past. I’ve been trying to encourage admin to get on the ground a little more— even just having lunch at McConnell. Furthermore, last year, a lot of admin felt personally vilified. We need to foster constructive dialogue. I definitely want to make sure that everyone is fairly represented and that everyone’s voice is heard.

What have you accomplished this summer?

Organizing frosh. We took a step forward significantly toward the integrated orientation model, in the sense that it was the first year it was truly a cooperative working relationship, not only between all the faculties and SSMU, but also with the First Year Office and Student Services. The first month or so, we spent a lot of time renegotiating our beer contract. That took a long time, but now we have Sleeman on campus.

We’re also looking into making the Listserv more integrative. We’re looking to use Mail Chimp, which is currently used by the Management Undergraduate Society — it’s great because you get diagnostics, so you can see how many people actually read it and whether or not it’s a total waste of time. So, we’ll do a test run and see how people respond to that, and if that doesn’t work, we can find other ways, maybe even having a video news update or something like that.

We’re really trying to make the social media more interactive this year, integrating the Facebook and Twitter accounts so that it’s something we can pre-manage, and is more of something that people actually want to follow because we’ll have constant updates. So that should really start to become apparent around mid-September.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

I want to make my portfolio about more than the usual events. For example, for the end-of-year concert, we’re looking to do a two to three day SSMU music festival, and have one or two larger acts, but also showcase a lot of McGill and Montreal talent.

I also want to do a lot of smaller things that build McGill as a community. Next week I’m starting some movies in the park, since the one we had during Frosh week was really well received. It’s not something that takes an outstanding amount of effort, but it’s something people really appreciate. And then hopefully trying to bring back a couple of smaller things like the apple picking, and a trip to Mac Campus, so that there’s something to do almost every week.

What lessons from frosh planning will impact the way you run other events this year?

Definitely the new openness towards having an all-age event every single night of frosh. The numbers for the beer tent this year show a record low in consumption, which I think shows that having all these alternative activities is a good thing. Frosh also really established a lot of camaraderie between the faculties and with SSMU. This year, there was a lot more cooperation, and that’s going to help everyone move forward a lot. Hopefully everyone keeps working together because all of the faculties have something unique that they do, and to have other faculties participate in that would be great.

What have you accomplished this summer?

Over the summer, it’s been a lot of gathering information and putting out information and keeping track of what’s been going on, particularly around the student movement. We also put a letter together in regards to a potential change in federal policy regarding student immigration. They asked for comments from student unions; so along with my political attaché and some of the other execs, we put together a letter and sent that in.

I’ve also been organizing street teams during frosh. We had groups of people out in the Milton-Parc neighbourhood giving out water and food and making sure that Froshies were safe. I’ve been talking about having people living in apartments in the Milton-Parc neighbourhood serve as resource people for students who are just moving into their own apartments for the first time. There’s a lot we could do to try and improve the relations between students and the other members there.

What are your long-term goals for the year?

One of my personal goals is to continue to make political issues relevant and accessible to people who aren’t already super knowledgeable and involved. There are a lot of issues that I would like there to at least be more conversations around—like what’s happening with the economy or the environment. There are specific issues like the tuition hike that can really divide people, but there are also a lot of issues that we need to realize are going to affect all of us one way or another. We should try to make that information accessible for people ,and then find ways for people to get involved in whatever capacity they’re most comfortable with.

How do you see your role as the VP External with regards to the student movement this year?

A lot of it depends on what the other students decide to do. Whatever happens, I will relay that information as those things continue to take place. Students who are already active here can find ways to organize themselves, but I think another big part of my position is having very basic intro-level information available, especially for first-years. If the PQ ends up having their big summit about education, then I think that’ll be a really interesting opportunity, because education and access to education don’t just involve the price of tuition. As an English school with many international students, it would be a very interesting debate to have on campus. One way or another, I want to be a source of information but also be as receptive as possible to the different opinions that there are on this campus.