The Daily Publications Society (DPS) will continue to collect student fees for the next five years, after 18.8 per cent of graduates and undergraduates voted in favour of renewing the DPS’s Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with McGill University. The referendum passed with 76.17 per cent of voters in favour of the DPS’s continued existence. The results were announced last Thursday.
An MoA is a contract between a student group and the university that specifies the details of their relationship, including fee collection, lease space, and distribution rights for the DPS’s two newspapers—The McGill Daily and Le Délit. McGill requires that independent student groups run a referendum every five years to ensure that students continue to support the organization’s existence.
DPS Chair Sheehan Moore, who was also the chair of the official ‘Yes’ committee for the campaign, said the DPS is happy with the result and the high voter turnout.
“We had over a hundred people sign up for our ‘Yes’ committee and they were extremely enthusiastic and helpful in helping us get out the vote,” he said. “I think attitudes towards voting on campus have also changed …. I think it marks a feeling of students wanting to get more involved in campus life.”
According to Elections DPS Chief Electoral Officer Faraz Alidina, this year’s election team worked to address challenges such as meeting quorum and involving graduate students in the election.
“The Elections DPS team worked very hard to create this electoral agency as one that was impartial and apolitical, and that the McGill student body would accept [it as such],” Alidina said. “The students could easily have not voted, we would have lost quorum, and this process would have been a complete disaster. In reality, the exact opposite happened—we raised the level of debate on campus and achieved a good turnout rate.”
According to Alidina, quorum was met within a few hours of the first day of polling. He also noted that the operations of both The Mc- Gill Daily and Le Délit continued as normal throughout the campaign period.
“We wanted to ensure that the regular operations of The McGill Daily [and] Le Délit were not consumed by the needs of the ‘Yes’ campaign,” Alidina said. “Both papers continued to publish and operate in their usual fashion, despite the pressures and stress of their existence being up for question.”
While 23.83 per cent of participants voted against the referendum, an official ‘No’ committee was never formed. Some students, however, were surprised by the results.
“I honestly didn’t expect The Daily to get de-funded, but I did expect [the results] to be closer, not 70 per cent [in favour], but in the fifties or even the sixties,” Graham Pinchin, U3 engineering, said. “I would have preferred that, just because I think it would have possibly made The Daily re-evaluate how they’re publishing. With [such a majority], I think that’s unlikely to happen.”
Despite their successful voter turnout, which exceeded the five per cent quorum, Moore said students and the administration should now start thinking about alternatives to existence referenda.
“The most turnout any [group] gets is 18 to 20 per cent of the student body,” he said. “We celebrate that, but it’s still fairly disheartening …. The motives behind [existence referenda] are extremely well-intentioned, but if you look at the student groups that [the administration] requires to have existence referenda, they all have their own internal structure of … checks and balances to make sure they are accountable to students.”
Moore said next year will provide a good opportunity to start working with the administration on this topic, since there will be a new incoming Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning).
“This would be a good time for students to be more proactive in trying to work with the administration to think of different ways … we can ensure that student groups are accountable,” he said.
