Mcgill student union leaves Quebec association

Results revealed after three weeks deliberation on fairness of referendum question

SARAH COLGROVE THE MCGILL DAILY (MCGILL UNIVERSITY)

MONTREAL (CUP) — The student society at McGill University has officially broken up with its provincial student association.

Elections McGill unsealed the results of November’s referendum on whether the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) should remain a member of la Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ).

Nearly 75 per cent of voters wanted SSMU to secede from FEUQ. Of the remaining voters, 24.9 per cent were in favour of FEUQ membership, and 1.2 per cent spoiled their ballots.

The judicial board, SSMU’s highest decision-making body, sealed the referendum results three weeks ago in response to a constitutional challenge to the referendum question by former SSMU and FEUQ executive Eric van Eyken.

Van Eyken alleged that the question was improperly administered, biased, and out-of-line with SSMU’s agreement with FEUQ.

Results remained sealed as the judicial board decided whether the complaints were valid and merited destroying the results.

Although the judicial board criticized the referendum procedure, two of the three judges decided that the question was in line with SSMU’s constitution and ordered the results unsealed.

“The referendum question . . . is perhaps the model par excellence of the type of question that should be avoided in referenda, however, it does not mislead or confuse students,” the judicial board report reads. “The quality of the question may be suspect, but the results it obtained are not.”

The report criticizes the question for being long and biased — it outlined SSMU’s past problems with FEUQ before asking students whether they wish to remain members — but points out that referendum questions are usually biased, and that there is no requirement in the society’s constitution that questions be neutral.

Although SSMU president Aaron Donny-Clark said that the criticisms were fair, he argued that having a “neutral” referendum question would not make sense.

“If the question put before students were simply, ‘Do you agree that we withdraw membership: Yes or No?’ that would leave so many students in the dark,” he said. “If you’re asking students to pay more, it’s appropriate to line up ‘whereas’ clauses stating why they [should consider it].”

But according to van Eyken, the wording of the question cheated voters.

“SSMU issued a statement on the ballot expecting students to agree with them; the question made the conclusion obvious,” he said. “By its very nature, a vote represents the student voice and will, but how students came to believe something was the effect of the question itself.”

In his challenge, van Eyken also complained that SSMU council adopted the referendum question without due process. The question was modified after the deadline for submitting it, and the council held two meetings in one night — one to present the question and one to approve it.

On the first point, the judicial board ruled that the question was not changed substantially after submission.

It further ruled that that the lastminute nature of the referendum warranted holding two meetings on one night in order to push the referendum question through the required second meeting before the deadline.

SSMU had called the referendum when executives caught wind of a confidential meeting between SSMU members and FEUQ executives that aimed at forming a strategy to make sure the society remained a member of FEUQ.

SSMU executives said the covert meeting, which van Eyken arranged, undermined the society’s democratic sovereignty. A referendum was called after FEUQ did not offer substantial promises of reform.

Around 30 campus politicos gathered to hear the results of the referendum, greeting the announcement with applause.

“I feel like justice was served, but I wouldn’t call it a victory in any celebratory sense because we shouldn’t have had to do this,” said Max Silverman, a SSMU vice-president.

The turnout for the referendum was 24.9 per cent — far higher than fall referendums usually attract.

According to Donny-Clark, the SSMU will work independently with student societies across Quebec to lobby for out-of-province and international tuition fee freezes.

As of last week, the society is also a prospective member of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), a federal student association, after leaving the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) in 2005.

Donny-Clark added that CFSQuebec could not replace FEUQ as the society’s provincial lobby group, since it lacks francophone membership.

FEUQ president Christian Bélair refused to comment.