SSMU Hires New General Manager Position previously had high turnover

Abe Berglas

On September 18, SSMU executives announced on their website that they had hired a new General Manager, Maya Marcus-Sells. The announcement was repeated in SSMU’s weekly email.

The previous statement regarding a General Manager was the hiring of Daniel Dufour on March 13, 2020, but Dufour vanished around the beginning of the 2021-2022 year: according to meeting minutes, he was absent from Board of Director meetings from September 2021 onwards.

During the 2021-2022 year, there was a smattering of unofficial mentions of a General Manager, and then the absence of one. In a Board of Directors meeting in September 2021, when Dufour was first absent, the VP Finance mentioned that the General Manager had been working with the Building Director to get new office furniture. At the November 2021 Board of Directors meeting, a member of the gallery asked where the General Manager was, to which a Board Director responded that he was on leave and “attending meetings as required.” In March 2022, Dufour stopped being listed as absent in meetings, and his name was dropped entirely.

The position of a General Manager seems crucial to the functioning of SSMU. According to the SSMU website, the General Manager is “responsible for the SSMU’s administration, governance, corporate obligations, accounting, human resources, business operations, and legal affairs.” The General Manager position also seems difficult to fill. Dufour was hired following the resignation of Ryan Hughes on September 9, 2019, who lasted three years in the position, and before Hughes was Jennifer Varkonyi, who worked at SSMU for only six months before resigning.

In an interview with the Daily, SSMU President Alexandre Ashkir said that Daniel Dufour resigned in early 2022. Ashkir is unsure about the cause behind the delay in hiring a new General Manager, but speculated that it was an issue of executives having more urgent priorities. He also noted that executives in the 2022-2023 year began the hiring process, but were “pre-occupied with the return from covid” and were “dealing with a thousand small fires everywhere.”

He said that hiring a General Manager is something that requires everyone to be on board: this year’s executive team was the first to be able to dedicate the energy needed for it.

This hypothesis is echoed in the mentions of a General Manager that feature in Board of Directors meetings. The Executive Committee Report of Summer 2022 says that executives “worked on the Interim Structure for SSMU in the absence of a General Manager, reallocating the General Manager’s responsibilities among Executives and Management.” This reallocation suggests that Dufour at this point had left the position. The report also says that the President worked with headhunters to get information for recruitment services to find a new General Manager. Furthermore, the VP Finance listed several projects as “GM responsibilities” that he worked on, for example continuing negotiations with the SSMUnion. The SSMUnion negotiations were not successful: the SSMUnion would later accuse SSMU of bad-faith bargaining. Five months later, in January 2023, the Executive Committee report said that executives approved the email motion to approve the General Manager job description; details are unknown since there are no published minutes for this meeting. In March 2023, an Executive Committee report said they approved a motion to approve the General Manager salary range. Once again, there are no published minutes for this meeting. Ironically, the “thousand small fires” that prevented executives from hiring a new General Manager were partly why they needed one. The 2021-2022 and the 2022-2023 years were marked by failings of SSMU, especially at the level of governance, and the executives at SSMU, along with the Board of Directors and Legislative Council, seem to have suffered under the weight of these tasks without the help of a General Manager.

The prime example from the 20212022 year was the suspension of the SSMU President without communication from the rest of the executive team, and it doesn’t take long looking through meeting minutes to find other cracks in SSMU’s functioning. For example, in November 2021, the Building and Operations Management Committee was dissolved after it caused “a delay in negotiations with vendors” according to the corresponding motion. The SSMU Accountability Committee met only twice from August 2021 to August 2022, and neither meeting met quorum.

In December 2022, the VP Finance presented his budget revision two months late. In February 2023, the motion for ECOLE was forgotten from the agenda of the monthly legislative council meeting, causing a delay in its approval.

A General Manager offers an opportunity for executives to focus on their main responsibilities, and SSMU would greatly benefit from a General Manager who lasts longer than a few years. Over the past three years, SSMU has not communicated changes to students, letting important updates about the hiring process - for example, approving the salary and job description - sneak by in Board of Directors meetings. Finally, the absence of minutes for Board of Directors meetings - in 2022-2023, there are only seven minutes published, out of the 20 meetings - makes accountability all the more difficult.