After a year of infighting between student unions, on Aug. 27 the Superior Court of Ontario ruled that part-time students on U of T’s Mississauga campus must remain members of EPUS, the Erindale chapter of the Association for Part-time Undergraduate Students.
The conflict began in fall 2007 when a handful of UTM part-time students, dissatisfied with EPUS, requested that they be represented by the larger UTMSU.
In February 2008, UTMSU held a referendum on behalf of EPUS, and in a landslide decision, the part-time students voted to join UTMSU. The decision was approved by the University Affairs Board and put through Governing Council in June.
APUS, for its part, contests the referendum’s legitimacy because it was held in accordance with EPUS and UTMSU bylaws—not its own. “Any union is guided by its members. We have obligations to our membership, and when an external party decides to dip into our membership pool without any discretion, it very alarming,” said APUS executive director Yolisa Dalamba.
APUS also contends that the UAB stepped outside its jurisdiction by deciding the membership of student unions.
What started as a benign movement grew into a full-fledged legal battle that touches on issues of representation and inter-campus politics. Ruling in favour of APUS’s claims, Justice Allen stated the referendum did not follow APUS bylaws and thus should not be held valid, and declared that UTMSU did not give APUS proper notice or information. “The judgment set a precedent for protecting all student unions in the future,” said Dalamba.
Meanwhile,APUS faces other on-campus battles, most notably where it will call home. At the beginning of the last school year, APUS was evicted from its offices in Woodsworth College and moved into the Margaret Fletcher building on Devonshire Place, only to be told that they will be evicted once more to make way for the new Centre for High Performance Sport.
