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Maggie Knight – President

How will your experience with SSMU influence your approach if you are elected?

I’m very aware of the fact that many students don’t understand SSMU. We need to be making ourselves much more accessible in a variety of ways to reach a variety of audiences. I think there’s a big chunk in the middle that if we made it easier, if we decreased the barriers to participation, if we decreased the burden on students to understand how SSMU works, and instead said “Hey! We want your input on this thing specifically, and this is how we’re going to take your information and enact it,” then we’d probably get a lot more participation. And I know that people say that every year, but I have had great success building up the environment side of SSMU. I’ve been able to do this in a microcosm of SSMU, and I hope I would be able to extend that model to other committees and other things SSMU does.

 

What are your thoughts on the GA?

You probably know how I feel about the GA. It absolutely needs reform. I wasn’t very happy with the way in which the attempt at reform was made. My approach is let’s warn people in advance, let’s set up a very distinct way of soliciting feedback, then take this feedback and write it into a resolution and put that to referendum. If we can’t make it work, then we should abolish it. But I don’t think we’ve given it its best shot yet. Surely we can come up with some sort of way where we can have a disucssion about important issues on campus and vote on them in a way that is democratic and inclusive.

 

Do you think SSMU should sign a contract with Jobbook?

Should we get rid of Jobbook entirely? Not necessarily. It could be a great service for students. On the other hand, for those students who are very upset about what happened, it’s not going to increase their trust in SSMU if SSMU then goes and signs a contract with a company with which they’ve expressed displeasure. It really comes back to consultation. Unfortunately we don’t have all the details, so it makes consultation very hard. Currently, I would be concerned about signing a contract with Jobbook just because I don’t think we’ve sufficiently addressed the loss of trust from some parts of the student body.

 

How important is it for the president to have a good relationship with the administration?

It’s very important to have a professional relationship with the administration. In other forums I’ve had the experience of going into meetings, being hard hitting, at times when necessary, but you keep your cool even if they tell you things you’re pretty sure are a blatant lie and you proceed. Sometimes it’s about collaboration. I think we need a more nuanced approach; sometimes we need to collaborate, but there are other times when our interests fundamentally do not align, and then it is our job to represent in the interests of students, because we are a student society, and it’s our job to speak up for ourselves.

 

If you could go back in time and high-five one person, who would it be and why?

Elizabeth the First, because she was a strong female leader, and she defeated the Spanish Armada.

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