News broke Monday morning, indicating that the 5-week long strike casting a shadowing upon the University of Manitoba may be coming to an end.

The tentative agreement was reached Sunday night but wasn't officially ratified until members had voted in favour of the agreement just after midnight Tuesday morning.

According to a news release from UMFA (University of Manitoba Faculty Association), 881 members voted in favour of the new agreement while 88 were opposed.

Orvie Dingwall, President of UMFA, caught up with Portage Online to discuss the end of the strike.

She says that faculty members are happy to have students back in classes and also happy to have the longest strike in the union's history finished with.

Dingwall shares a message with students.

"We know to students and their families that a strike is really disruptive, whether you're supportive or not, and we are, of course, very thankful to those who came out and demonstrated their support. But today (Tuesday), we have students back in their classes, and our members are committed to supporting students. "

The agreement will be three years in length; Dingwall outlines what the three-year term means to the university as a whole.

"We're already half a year through it, but that is something we wanted, some stability for students and for the whole University of Manitoba community, and three years will achieve that."

The President goes through what UMFA was able to attain through this strike.

"We think that what we've been able to achieve through this round of bargaining, and certainly through the strike is the next steps needed to ensure that we can recruit and retain the top faculty members which we know students are coming to the University of Manitoba to learn from and to do their research with. So, what we've been able to achieve here keeps us competitive with the other research-intensive universities across Canada."

Dingwall shares that with this new agreement, they will be able to send any compensation issues that they may have to an independent arbitrator who will be able to access the finances of the University of Manitoba and the needs of the factuality members.

UMFA's President closes out the interview by outlining the biggest issue for the union throughout this whole process.

"One of the biggest barriers to us was a mandate from the Provincial Government that was creating a barrier for us to getting a deal with the University of Manitoba. We were disappointed when we reached out to conservative cabinet ministers; we wanted to make sure that they knew about the sort of crisis situation that was starting to happen at the University of Manitoba, as faculty members left for other provinces or they weren't able to come here because their salaries weren't competitive. When we tried to meet with those ministers, they were not available. So we'll keep reaching out post-strike and hope that students and their families do the same as we need to ensure that students can stay in the classroom and are able to keep choosing the University of Manitoba."

Classes were significantly affected by this 35-day strike, as now the fall semester will need to run past its scheduled end date of December 10. In turn, it will also make the winter semester run later than usual into April.