After an exhaustive Council debate lasting nearly two and a half hours, the Students' Society voted last Thursday to create a committee to work toward an independent McGill Tribune.
The motion, which came from the SSMU Executive Committee, stated that because the Tribune is editorially independent, but supported by SSMU, the relationship was a "less-than-ideal situation" and moved to separate the two entities.
Before passing by a 21-to-4 vote with one abstention, the motion was amended several times, changing the projected date of independence to Jan. 1, 2010 and creating a committee including both councillors and editorial board members to create a viable business plan with input from the newspaper and transitional support from SSMU.
"Originally, we'd thought that the Tribune would want to oversee its own independence," said Vice-President University Affairs Adrian Angus. "Now from the new motion it's clear… that the onus is on the SSMU executive to make the Tribune independent and we are going to go forward with doing that."
Nearly half of the Tribune's editorial board was on hand to object to what they saw as the underhanded nature and unviable timeline of the original motion.
"The [original] motion, as a whole, was sneaky," said Byron Tau, opinion editor of the Tribune.
The editors claimed that they had received the motion on Tuesday night, when it was sent out on Council listserv, while the motion was only made public on the day of the Council.
"The Tribune received zero consultation on this issue," said Tiffany Choy, Tribune Editor-in-Chief.
The original motion proposed that SSMU offer "sufficient assistance" to the Tribune until the beginning of the winter 2009 semester. Its many supporters included SSMU President Jake Itzkowitz, who claimed that the idea of a separation had existed since before the term of the current executive.
"We've had the 'How's our relationship?' talk for the last two years," he said. "This is the break-up talk."
2008 Woodie Awards
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