By Kinda Kakouni
Only one student showed up to the Toronto Metropolitan Students’ Union’s (TMSU) commuter town hall held on Oct. 19.
The town hall was set to discuss various commuter concerns such as the possibility of getting discounted transit passes, increasing designated napping spaces on campus and eliminating 8 a.m. classes.
The town hall proceeded with a writer from The Eyeopener, a single audience member who tuned in via Zoom, vice-president education Nathan Sugunalan and communications coordinator David Jardine. TMSU president Marina Gerges also showed up at the end of the town hall to check-in.
At the beginning of the meeting, Sugunalan explained that the town hall was “for the students” to “give an overview of how [the TMSU] see[s] things.”
Sugunalan added that this was an opportunity for the TMSU to “touch base with membership and see where everyone is at,” with the goal of creating a road map for future administrations to create a student transit pass.
During the town hall, Jardine and Sugunalan discussed the barriers in place for getting students discounted transit, particularly due to GO Transit’s “fervent” rejections of any proposed student discounts, often citing that it already has student discounts.
Currently, GO Transit has a student discount that offers students 40 per cent off the regularly priced adult fare.
An added barrier, according to Sugunalan, is that there needs to be a time frame of about five years in between referendums. However, The Eye could not independently verify this information.
When asked about her reaction to the turnout, Gerges explained that she is “disappointed but [the turnout was] kind of expected,” due to the busyness of midterm season for students. “We’re just going to do better in terms of promoting every event,” said Gerges.
“Everything that we have, we have to make sure that students know what we have going on.”
In the meeting, Jardine said, “This is our first event in [person] of the year, so yeah, we’re learning.”
The Eye also took to Gould Street and asked 50 Toronto Metropolitan University students whether they’d heard about the meeting and all said they hadn’t.
This wasn’t the first time the school and the union attempted to create a transit discount for students. Between 2017 and 2018, the then-TMSU executive team was involved with the referendum for a transit pass, known as the RU-Pass.
As previously reported by The Eye, the RU-Pass would cost students $70 per month. The Toronto Transit Commission approved the creation of the framework necessary for the implementation of the RU-Pass in December 2017.
Subsequently, a referendum was successfully held in November 2018 and the school announced that the RU-Pass would be administered for the first time in fall 2019. However, the school said it would not be administering the RU-Pass following the release of the Student Choice Initiative (SCI).
Introduced by the provincial government in January 2019, the SCI‘s goal was to give students the opportunity to opt-out of certain fees that had previously been deemed mandatory.
In November of that same year, the SCI was ruled to be unlawful in a unanimous Ontario Divisional Court ruling.
During the town hall, newly-appointed vice-president education Sugunalan said that in the 2017-18 year, the then-vice-president education “wasn’t able to feet this motion within their term, so the plan was sent over to the next [vice-president] education. Unfortunately, the [vice-president] education wasn’t necessarily up to par for the task at hand.”
Also raised at the meeting was the concern of 8 a.m. classes for commuter students and some creative solutions to this problem, like live-streaming or hybrid options classes online.
“We’re the students’ union,” said Jardine. “Most of the people who work in and around us are either students or have recently been students and so we think [those options] are great solutions.”
However, they added that “The university doesn’t share that sentiment” and regardless of the unions’ opinions, the school needs to be “on board.”
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