On May 9, the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union (SCSU) ratified its 2025 election results during an emergency Board of Directors (BOD) meeting, following a failed ratification attempt in March due to concerns over election conduct. The motion to approve Chief Returning Officer (CRO) Joslyn Lawrence’s report on elections was once again defeated during an in-camera session.

In an email to The Varsity, SCSU Vice-President (VP) Operations Jena Bah stated that the purpose of the emergency meeting was “to consult with legal counsel and determine next steps in the best interest of both our members and the organization.”

Election ratification decision

The first motion to ratify the 2025 election results failed, but the election was ratified after an immediate revote. 

Before the vote, the board received legal counsel during an in-camera session, with only board members present. Following legal advice, all but six of the members present declared a conflict of interest and left the room. No members, even those involved in the election, had declared a conflict of interest at the March BOD meeting. 

Only six SCSU members remained to vote on the CRO report and election ratification: VP Academic and University Affairs Zanira Manesiya, Director of Anthropology Taimo Kodanipork, Director of Biological Science Zakariya Sohail, Director of Physical and Environmental Sciences Harry Xu, International Student Director Carlos Paez Gonzales, and First Year Representative Elaha Sidiqui.

To ratify the 2025 election results, at least four of the six voting members needed to vote in favour of the motion. In the first failed motion, Gonzales, Kodanipork, and Sidiqui voted in favour, while Manesiya, Xu, and Sohail abstained.

After Sidiqui motioned for a revote, Sohail shifted his position and voted in favour of ratification, carrying the motion and ushering in the next year of SCSU members.  

CRO report

Before the election results were ratified, a motion to approve the 2024–2025 CRO report was defeated. The report had also failed to pass at the March BOD meeting. 

Xu argued that the CRO’s hiring was “unconstitutional,” referring to the fact that the CRO was hired by past practice, rather than via a public posting and subsequent interview process, as stipulated by the Elections Procedure Code (EPC). He added that he opposed ratification “not only because of… the hiring process of the CRO, [but] also because of the material presented in the CRO report.” Xu particularly criticized the report’s recommendation to abolish slates — groups of candidates running under one platform.

Executive Director Sarah Abdillahi clarified that the CRO’s recommendations “[are] not policy changes; they have to go through the policy and bylaw committee first.” Regardless, the motion was defeated during the in-camera session. 

“An abuse of power”

Prior to the election ratification vote, SCSU Operations Coordinator Jeremy Wills and former 2018–2019 SCSU President Nicole Brayiannis urged the board to vote in favour of ratification.  

Wills stated that it was “an extremely terrible error” that members with “clear conflicts [of interest]” had voted during the March BOD meeting — referring to candidates involved in the election who had not recused themselves from the vote. 

Citing bylaw violations during the election, Gonzales stated, “the SCSU has failed on so many fronts in terms of self-governance.” Xu, also speaking against the motion, raised further concerns with the CRO hiring process. 

Wills responded, “Did the CRO have a direct impact on the materiality of the votes? That’s my question. I think the answer is clear — probably no… Was there anything that was material enough that you could say… objectively, these things that happened altered the outcome of this election[?]”

Brayiannis told board members that ratifying the results would protect the SCSU from “legal liability.” Brayiannis claims that during her 2019 term, the board was served with a legal notice for failing to ratify the VP Operations candidate, though The Varsity is unable to verify this at this time. 

Brayiannis explained that the democratic way for the board to address its concerns was to write recommendations for the incoming members to implement, adding, “Quite frankly, it’s an abuse of power if you folks do overrule the student vote.”

The future of the SCSU

During the election ratification discussion, Wills alleged that if another vote failed, the administration would “withhold our fees and put the organization in financial jeopardy.”

“What I will say is if you vote no, you are essentially damning the organization,” Byriannis added. “Student unions [have been] brought to court by the university, their fees withheld for over a year, and they basically crumbled during that time until the university could step in and take over.”

In January 2019 Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) withheld student fees from the Ryerson Student Union (RSU) after The Eyeopener, TMU’s student newspaper, reported an RSU credit card bill totalling $250,000 over eight months. These fees were withheld from the union until March 2020, when an Ontario judge ordered the university to transfer the millions of dollars in withheld student fees back to the union. In his decision, Justice Markus Koehnen said the RSU would otherwise have been forced to shut down. 

Xu was skeptical about the threat, arguing, “[The university] won’t do that as long as we practice lawfully… the university will have to respect student democracy; the union is a reflection of that.”

“I don’t want anyone here to get the wrong impression and think to themselves that the university and the admin like autonomous governance by students,” Wills underscored. “There’s absolutely no part of them that likes that we have our own money to advocate on our own behalf, our own budgets, and our own autonomous governance. [If given] any opportunity to come in and take that out, they are moving swiftly.”

In a statement to The Varsity, a U of T spokesperson wrote that the university “respects the autonomy of student unions in alignment with the Policy on Open, Accessible and Democratic Autonomous Student Organizations.”