The Fall 2021 Elections of the Student Association of George Brown College (SAGBC) is set to go ahead without any candidates running for offices of director of communications and internal and director of operations, its two highest executive positions.
Despite extending the nomination period with the aim of finding candidates for these top two offices, SAGBC could not secure any nominations for either of the roles.
The Dialog is funded by SAGBC.
The certified list of candidates has not certified any nominations for the Preparatory and Liberal Studies Centre Representative either, a position that was initially up for elections.
The educational centre representative positions for the Business and Community Services and Early Childhood centres, however, will be contested amongst candidates in the upcoming elections.
The extended nomination period for the election ended on November 19.
The campaign period of the election began last week and will continue until the last day of voting on December 8, 2021. Voting will be held between December 1 and December 8.
According to the list of candidates certified by Charles Wilson, the chief returning officer of SAGBC, a total of five candidates would be running for these two educational representative positions.
The contest for the Business Educational Center Representative position is a two-horse race between Chahat Pusha and Marion Shevlin. Whereas, the position of community services and early childhood educational center representative will be contested amongst GBC students Alex Chan, Elise Patterson and Gehna Rajwani.
It is still unclear how the duties and responsibilities of the top two director positions will be fulfilled in the next term and how it would affect the day-to-day operations of SAGBC.
A recent amendment to the organization’s bylaws, passed at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of SAGBC, made it a mandatory requirement for students in these top two director positions to have no more than a 50 per cent course load, while also increasing the required work hours for both positions to 28 hours per week.
This amendment could have played a pivotal role in the lack of candidates for these two positions. The modified minimum requirements made it virtually impossible for international students to run for these two positions. Canadian immigration policies require international students to be enrolled as full-time students and also prohibit them from working more than 20 hours per week.
Over the past two years, the board composition has been 90 per cent international students, according to an email from SAGBC General Manager Rosalyn Miller received by the Dialog following the AGM.
Even for domestic students who could potentially run for these two positions, the requirement to become part-time students could create different complications for them in a number of ways.
Becoming part-time students would require a much longer time for them to graduate.
Many GBC programs operate on a block-based registration system that comes with different limitations in being able to register selectively for individual courses.
Many programs also offer particular courses only once a year, which makes it very difficult for students to miss out on them.
Considerations for completing prerequisite courses also have to be taken into account. Thus, even for domestic students it may be challenging to understand the fuller implications of deciding to be part-time students in order to run for the top two executive offices.
