Generally speaking

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For those who attended last year’s General Assembly, this year’s was mostly a sigh of relief. No disorganized waiting lines, no major confusion with counting votes, no uncertainty about what was and wasn’t an acceptable request for the speaker.

The General Assembly as a governing body is an interesting concept. It only requires three percent of the student population to make a binding motion on the MSU. Some would argue that’s tiny. And relatively, it is.

General Assemblies are supposed to be places of discussion, but productive discussion rarely happens. With huge campaigns, like the BDS motion and three years ago, the implementation of the Welcome Week levy (which made the fee mandatory for all first-year students), there is no space for discussion during the GA. The time is also a ridiculous constraint. Two hours is not nearly enough for something as sensitive as BDS, and it seems strange that anyone would ever expect it to be.

Given that everyone’s minds were made up, we could have just as well emailed out a question to the student body, and those who showed up would have answered the same way. But what about those who didn’t come? Chances are a lot of them don’t care. This doesn’t mean their voices should be ignored, but it does mean that they probably wouldn’t have taken the time to educate themselves on the issue regardless of the venue their opinion was sought through.

So having a vocal minority of just over 600 who really wanted BDS to pass could, on one hand, be seen as a good way to make a binding motion for the MSU. Here are 622 people who clearly know what they want and cared enough to come out. That’s not a small number, when we consider that two years ago only 60 people attended the General Assembly, and it was only in 2012 that it finally reached quorum after 17 years of non-quorate GAs.

The last two years have shown us that students are not apathetic. Political mobilization at McMaster is possible. It takes work, it takes a couple of years, but it can be done. The problem is that students care about different things—that’s why things like the General Assembly appear unsuccessful. This year, it was mostly people who cared about the BDS motion who attended. Years before, it has been about other people and other causes. The aim is never to have all 20,000 McMaster students there, although looking at the slogan used for the GA (“Show up; Speak out”), you would be led to believe this is the case.

As a way of making binding decisions for the MSU, the GA seems set up to fail. As a way of having particular voices heard, we’ve seen that it can work well at times.

It’s also set up to fail because aside from preparing to avoid a reoccurrence of last year’s GA, the MSU did not do much. It still did an awful job at promoting it. It still only opened up one side of Burridge Gym. And it still failed to be an impartial voice for the motions put forward that could educate students who would otherwise not be involved with either side of the debate.

Are GAs like this everywhere? McGill, for example, has three different kinds of GAs. One per term that is similar to our annual GA, and special as well as strike GAs, which have to be called by at least 200 members of the union. These are clearly advertised in the SSMU’s (Student Society of McGill University) webpage on GAs. A similar attempt to find how a GA can be called by the membership on the MSU website amounts to nothing.

UTSU, the student union at U of T, also has an annual general assembly with a quorum of “no less than 75 people” and the Alma Mater Society at Queen’s appears to also follow the annual general meeting format.

McGill’s approach might not be perfect, but the point remains that this is a structure much more flexible than what the MSU has presented its membership with. The MSU knows that three percent is small. It also knows that most years there is absolutely no point in promoting the GA. If groups care, they will do it themselves. This is the biggest flaw of the structure in place. The GA is not a place of direct democracy. It is a place for vocal groups to be heard loud and clear by the union and the university. This doesn’t invalidate the work or any binding votes. To mobilize more than 600 university students during one of the busiest weeks of the year is an incredible feat.

However, we need to recognize what the GA is and what it is not. Maybe its time is over. Maybe it just needs a reboot. But I doubt that tweaks here and there, or the use of iClickers instead of voting cards, will make a difference for the meaning of the GA. It’s not about its execution, it’s about an idea that now appears archaic and, at times, rather useless.   

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