SAC Exec members elected to NBSA Exec
At the recent annual general meeting of the New Brunswick Student Alliance (NBSA), the new SAC President Sam Gregg-Wallace and Vice-President External Mark Kroeker received some exciting news. With Gregg-Wallace as President and Kroeker as Treasurer, Mount Allison now holds two out of three of the NBSA executive positions. Both Gregg-Wallace and Kroeker were elected by a six to one vote. Sylvain Bérubé (NBSA Secretary), a member of the Université de Moncton students' union executive, holds the third executive position.
Gregg-Wallace noted that “[b]ecause all three executive members are located in eastern New Brunswick, we’re able to do a lot of work here, but our general meetings will [still] be shifted from school to school.”
For both Gregg-Wallace and Kroeker, their positions on the NBSA will only serve to strengthen their positions on the SAC executive. “We’re able to bring the policies that all university students in New Brunswick want to create and use that information to help us lobby our administration,” Gregg-Wallace explained, “it’s bringing the NBSA to the students at Mt. A.”
Kroeker noted that he felt the two positions “…are very separate […]. The Treasurer [of the NBSA] is inherently a non-political position, whereas I also have the position of representing Mt. A at the board level [as VP External].”
According to their website, the NBSA is “a lobby group which represents over 16,000 students from six campuses and one community college across the province…The NBSA lobbies for student interests at the provincial and inter provincial levels of government.” The NBSA’s membership includes all three of Université de Moncton’s campuses, both campuses of the University of New Brunswick, St. Thomas University, Collège Communautaire de Dieppe, and Mt. A.
As noted in their mission statement, the NBSA works to represent and advocate on behalf of New Brunswick students. Gregg-Wallace focused on this, stating that in his mind, the President is the “head spokesman for [the organization].” Due to this commitment, he estimates he’ll be spending around two weeks of the summer in Fredericton working in advance of the provincial elections in September. “[The NBSA Board] creates lobby points and meets with leaders of all three major parties to get into the campaign at the front end,” said Gregg-Wallace.
In terms of developing lobby points, Kroeker explained that “[policy] is created from the board up.” Gregg-Wallace added that the purpose of this is to ensure that “the Executive will no longer be creating policy on their own.” The recent general meeting also saw changes to the NBSA constitution, which devolved more power from the executive to the board and increased each member school’s representation on the board. Kroeker noted that this has created “a more democratic process.”
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