Posted: April 16th, 2024

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The TMSU is proud to be an autonomous, independent student union governed by its constituting documents and the votes of its student members. Our executive and board are democratically elected positions – and we take the fairness and transparency of our election process very seriously. We expect students who run for TMSU positions to do so in good faith. Those elected to TMSU’s Board of Directors and executive positions must put the interests of
students and the TMSU ahead of their own.

As the membership will recall, TMSU had to cancel the 2023 General Election. Shortly thereafter TMSU issued a Statement of Claim in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The TMSU has now reached a settlement with the defendants. The settlement terms are confidential, but they do include monetary compensation. The defendants have also issued the following statement:

Joint Statement of Areesha Quershi, Joel Kuriakose and Muhammad Maaz Rashid Regarding 2023 General Election
We regret the manner in which the 2023 TMSU general election unfolded, and our role in it. We wish to offer our apology to the student body, the TMSU, and the University for our actions. At that time we were current and former TMSU Board Members and as such we had obligations to act in the best interest of the TMSU. We know that our actions during the election, which were not in keeping with various TMSU policies and by-laws, ran contrary to these obligations. The decisions we made during the 2023 election harmed TMSU and the broader TMSU community. With the benefit of hindsight, we recognize that we ought to have raised any concerns we might have had about election processes through the appropriate channels, rather than trying to take matters into our hands. We recognize that by acting as we did, we contributed to an outcome in which everyone lost. While the terms of our resolution with the TMSU are confidential, we can advise that we actively cooperated with the independent review of the 2023 election in order to assist the TMSU and future electoral candidates with learning the lessons to be learned from this experience, in the hopes that future elections will be better and fairer for all students