On the afternoon of Friday Oct. 20, polls for the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Vice President (VP) Finance by-election came to a close with only 12.4 per cent of eligible students voting. Amina Kudrati-Plummer won the election with 60.6 per cent of the votes. The only other candidate, Brishti Guha, earned 31.5 per cent of the votes, the remaining votes being abstentions. The election came as a result of the resignation of former VP Finance Alice Fang on Aug. 7. Since Fang’s resignation, the VP Finance’s duties have been divided between the current SSMU executives.
“I want to thank the McGill community for putting their trust in me, and I recognize my opponent for her good effort in this election,” Kudrati-Plummer wrote in an email to The Tribune. “I look forward to following through with the initiatives I have proposed and ensuring the transparency of SSMU finances.”
Kudrati-Plummer, U3 Arts, emphasized the importance of transparency and accessibility of SSMU financial documents in their platform. In particular, she criticized the student government for failing to post the 2023-2024 budgets on its website and for making the budgets for the previous two academic years only accessible under the “Legislative Council documents,” rather than under the “Budgets” tab. Kudrati-Plummer also highlighted the need for more information to be provided alongside financial documents to make them more accessible for students.
“I would really like to make those budgets more logical, easier for the average person to understand and also just make sure they are available, because that is a huge misstep on SSMU’s part over three years to just have those hidden on the very dense SSMU website,” Kudrati-Plummer said in an interview with The Tribune.
Similarly to Kudrati-Plummer, transparency was a key issue in Guha’s campaign. One of Guha’s proposals was to create a financial dashboard online to make public-facing SSMU financial documents more easily understandable for students.
“The dashboard would be a digital platform offering a snapshot of SSMU’s finances [such as] revenues, expenditures, allocations to clubs in a visually appealing and interactive manner,” Guha wrote to The Tribune. “Because every student has a right to easily understand where their fees are going and how their money is being used.”
Sophia Karabatsos—a physiology master’s student and former co-director of the McGill chapter of Scientista—echoed the need for greater transparency from SSMU. In an interview with The Tribune, Karabatsos noted the difficulties that Scientista faced because of unclear information on the SSMU website concerning club financial matters.
“You want to kind of know where everyone’s money from the tuition is going,” Karabatsos said. “And if there is this money available for clubs, it would be good to be transparent about it, because a lot of clubs could use it.”
To limit any delays regarding funding as a result of the unfilled position, Kudrati-Plummer also plans on holding regular office hours and a workshop—something normally provided by the VP Finance at the beginning of each semester—for clubs in need of assistance with financial procedures.
The VP Finance-elect’s platform also focuses on creating economically sustainable programs for students, including relaunching programs that were discontinued since the COVID-19 pandemic began. One program Kudrati-Plummer proposes reintroducing is a textbook exchange program wherein Le James bookstore buys students’ used books back from them to sell at a reduced price.
“Initiating economically sustainable programs for students is really important, especially bringing back ones that died out over COVID, because a lot of stuff did,” Kudrati-Plummer said. “Especially as things like food insecurity become more pressing topics on campus, and also with these new laws that [the] Quebec [government] is suggesting, it’s really important for SSMU to make student life as affordable as possible.”