Sran Rap

the Manitoban interview:
The Manitoban exists to serve its readers as students and citizens. To that end, we bring you interviews with the people who make decisions that effect your life everyday. Today, we bring you Garry Sran, University of Manitoba Students’ Union president, halfway through his second term in the highest student office.

Chelse McKee, Staff

Manitoban: What do you hope to do with UMSU, aside from the tuition freeze, this year?

Sran: We have a couple campaigns that we’re working on right now. One is the White Ribbon campaign. It’s a campaign that we’ve worked alongside with RPM, and the Womyn’s Centre, and Engineering Students’ Society. It’s a campaign to stop violence against women and it’s being organized in conjunction with the December sixth memorial. We’re also doing a campaign for Grants, Not Loans. With the winding down of the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, we’re hoping that the federal government will take that [$]2.1-billion endowment and put it into a national system of needs-based grants. We have a couple of other innovative campaigns that we’re working on, aside from those, which is our environmental sustainability campaign, which is going to be kicking off next year. And we’re also hoping to bring in David Suzuki next March, which is going to be amazing. On top of that, we’re also working on the World Awareness Day.

M: Do you feel like you’ve been effective as an UMSU president the last couple years? Do you feel like you’ve made a difference as UMSU president?

S: I think, what we’ve seen in the last number of years, is we made a lot of changes when it comes to administrative accountability and that’s a lot of work coming from the membership in our council. So, representing students at the board, ensuring that policies and bylaws against students are being forwarded and that student’s do have a voice. Also, ensuring that when we’re meeting with government, that we compile student’s ideas and in the last number of years, there’s a couple of accomplishments we made within the students' union and outside and some of them being, most notably, the continuation of the freeze. Unfortunately, the ancillary fees are something we’re still working on. Also, working nationally and getting the federal government to boost funding post-secondary education and we’re hoping to see that money flow this year and ensure that we’re working with the other provinces and with the university to ensure that that money comes directly to the institutions.

M:Where do you think you could have done better?

S: This is a question that’s caught me off-guard. I guess the one difficult thing about this campus is that it’s a commuter campus and what also makes it difficult is the University of Manitoba has three campuses. So I wish I had more time in the day, so I can talk to many more people, getting their ideas and thoughts and just helping out in that way. I think a lot of our time is definitely bound down in work in the office and stuff like that. In the end, it’s all fulfilling knowing that we’re out there representing students.

M: What does your average day look like? How much time do you spend in the office?

S: Most of the time I start off at 9:30 a.m. and reason being, we work till late. An average day is from 9:30 a.m. till about 8:30 p.m.. Most of our meetings do, with students, happen in the evenings because a lot of our committees don’t have time to meet in the daytime 'cause everyone’s in classes. Then in the daytime we’re usually in university committees and within that time, is when we meet with members of the government. Daytime, we’re running in and out of the office. We’re also running in and out of committee meetings around campus and then in the evening meeting with all the UMSU committees. So they’re pretty long. On average it’s about twelve hours, ten to twelve hours. On busier days such as things like the strike and orientation, we sometimes sleep here. Then, when we do have those statutory holidays we try to come in and just clean up and do some housekeeping on our e-mails and voice mails.

M: As short as five years ago, there would be five candidates running for UMSU president. Last year, you ran uncontested. Why do you think that is?

S: Hopefully it’s a sign that I was doing a good job. [Laughs.] Hopefully. It is an issue that we’re concerned [about]. We definitely want more participation and more people coming out and running. We had an effective job, in terms, last year, of reaching our members, telling them what UMSU does, and we did an effective in doing classroom talks. This year, we took on a greater role to get more people involved and participating in UMSU. Most of our committees have been opened up to a lot more of our members. So you’ll notice that even though there are voting spots, we also opened it up to students that might want to come in and sit on the meetings and participate, yet at the same time may not have enough time to participate in all the meetings. We’ve been doing a lot more outreach in getting a lot more students involved. So hopefully this year we see a difference and we get back to a time when there were five candidates running. Even five years ago, it goes up and down, right? It fluctuates. Some years you’ll see ten people running, some years you’ll see nobody running and what we’re trying to do is get more students involved. The difficult thing is not only are students busy working, busy studying, it do[es] get difficult to get involved and engaged, but hopefully we can make a difference in that this year.

M: When you say that your reaching out to students, does that include students aren’t already interested in politics? How do you reach those students?

S: When we throw our events, we’re always out there talking to students about [how there is] more to UMSU [than] just the advocacy side. There’s also the fun stuff; doing the event. If people are wanting to get involved and getting some experience there. We also have five to six businesses, working in that area, always trying to expand in that area. Also just in general, student advocacy, you know representing students, when they’re fighting an appeal or when they need representation on certain committees. We’re just trying to reach out in that way as well, that there’s more to UMSU than just the political aspect. [I] think we’ve done a good job in terms of getting people involved in our committees. Slowly but surely, we’ve had more programming meetings this year, consulting with more students and more faculty councils and [we] try to go out to events and just talk to our members.

M: What is your reaction to students who want the tuition freeze melted?

S: It has become difficult when you have students that don’t want the fees because a lot of the times, it doesn’t go hand in hand with any context. It’s usually just attributing the lack of quality of education or the lack of equipment space because the tuition’s not there but there’re more to that, than just that. Universities weren’t built with tuition fees, they were built with government funding and the provinces and the federal government have shied away from the responsibility to fund these properly. What we do notice is the majority of students do support the tuition fee freeze. What we’ve seen in the last number of years is, I think, students have gotten comfortable with it and don’t realize how important it is to maintain a freeze, at the same time maintain government funding and I think a lot of times we try to put it into context when there wasn’t a tuition fee freeze and the amount of cut salaries that was coming from the government, at the same time not enough revenues were provided by tuition fees. That’s when the actual time that we’ve seen the quality of education decline with no money for deferred maintenance, no money for lab equipment, and since the freeze what we’ve seen is it’s been prioritized. By that, that the government does see a priority in funding education. With the announcement just this past year of 7.2 per cent from the province to the government definitely makes a difference in working towards getting the federal government to kick in more money and they’re providing it. It does make it difficult when students don’t have the context and our members and trying to reach out to them and talk to them but some students just not willing to listen. Hopefully we can do a better job in terms of informing our members of all the aspects that have to do with the freeze.

M:How do you think the tuition freeze is affecting student’s quality of education?

S: I think what we’ve noticed in the last number of years is what’s really affecting the quality of our education is the priorities of our university. We’ve seen money being spent on golf courses, on soccer stadiums, on administrative salaries, on blown-up public affair budgets, and at the same time they’ve done a good advertising campaign and marketing campaign on blaming it on one thing rather than looking at the issue as a whole and it does make it, our job is to get out there and inform students why the quality of education is denied. It’s about the priorities of the university and it’s also about the lack of funding that was coming from the government but hopefully, in the future, what will be seen and will be heard with government that they are making education a priority. It’s always been in the top three to five things that Canadians prioritize as being really important to moving forward and making our country better and we’ve seen the governments listen this year, so hopefully that continues.

M: What do you think about the recent universities that have had votes on whether they should opt out of CFS (Canadian Federation of Students)?

S: I’m not sure of any ones that have had recent votes to opt out of CFS.

M: Recently, some universities have had votes on whether they should or should not, but in the end they ended up staying with CFS. What do you think about the universities that have wanted to opt-out?

S: I guess with those students' unions, it’s up to their membership, if they’re getting the services they deserve or what they’re doing with the services they receive and I think what we’ve seen in the last couple years the ones that did join the federation, just last week I think it was in Ottawa 97 per cent of their voter turnout voted to be part of the federation with 20 per cent turnout. I think with some of those votes that did come down, it’s not a matter of their membership not wanting to leave; it’s a matter of groups of people that are on the executive that want to leave. Them depriving their membership of the services that CFS offers is actually doing more of a disservice to their members then it is providing those services that students have voted to doing. I think looking at some of the stuff that’s going on within those offices is important to realize that it’s actually coming from a group of individuals not from the membership.

M: If enough student members were interested in leaving CFS, would UMSU seriously consider that?

S: Yeah. There are policies and bylaws that exist within the federation when we joined and if that’s what the membership felt like that was important for them, it’s just like having any other referendum. If member’s think it’s important to pay an extra two dollars into UMREG then it’s up to the membership.

Curtis Brown, a student at the U of M, stated in a recent letter to the Winnipeg Free Press that UMSU “sold out the interests of the people it’s suppose to stand up for” in supporting the UMFA strike. What is your reaction to that?

S: My reaction to that is why did Curtis Brown ever come to any of our meetings, why didn’t he talk to any of us, or did he even look into our minutes? There’s a lot of lies in that article, a lot of uninformed opinions that he had. The comments that we did receive from the unions, especially UMFA and CAW, was that our backing them up helped expedite the process and showing that the university community stood together and the people that make a difference on this institution, such as the professors, TAs, sessionals, really helped get the university back to the table and coordinate a deal that’s worth it for the workers and worth it for the university.

M: Last year, the faculty of engineering voted for a rise in tuition. Despite negative predictions, enrolment went up by 13.3 per cent. So tuition freeze, rather than deterring enrolment actually increased it. How do you feel about that?

S: I think a lot of that definitely has to do with the demographics and I think without looking at the demographics of what’s going on there, it’s hard to make any sort of assumptions or conclusions but it definitely put the engineers in a hard place right? You’re being told by the administration that if you don’t vote yes, that your degrees are going to be worthless. There is a number of engineers that were forced to vote yes without knowing all the information and this goes back to priorities of the institution. The faculty of engineering is truly an important faculty, institution, and when going ahead, building the building or hiring more professors, for not budgeting or accounting for that was part in partial was something that university should have done to address these issues before it came to a vote for the students.

M: How could a student, not involved in council, with an idea of a project for UMSU, propose it?

S: There’s many ways that students can approach us. One is firing off an email, giving us a call. We all have office hours here, the five executives, Monday to Friday, 12 to two and talk to us about it. Once they start talking to us about it, we can direct them to the right. Like maybe they should present to this committee or lets work on this, lets get some research behind this to help out with that or if they’re only available to come to council meetings, there’s a section there where students are more than welcome to voice their opinions or say any ideas that they have or pitch any proposals to council and from there it’ll probably be directed to a committee where we would get them involved and help work out any new proposals or any ideas that they see of how we can help the university.

M: What do you think about the Manitoban?

S: Oh I read it all the time. I like it, I enjoy it, and I think it’s important that students get to read a paper that’s coming from the students. I think it’s an important institution of this university. I read it all the time. I have my copies right there (points to copies of the Manitoban behind his desk).

What’s your favourite section?

S: Asides from the news and the comments, those are two of my favourites, I like the sports.