Just as election season seemed like it was in the rearview mirror, the Carleton University Students’ Association is holding elections again.
After endless confusion over referendum phrasing and timing, students will vote on March 8-9 to decide whether FundQi remains as an ancillary fee.
Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming referendum.
What is FundQi?
FundQi is a service that matches students with scholarships, awards, grants, bursaries and other funding. It also provides one-on-one support with applications for funding.
In January 2020, students voted by a narrow margin to institute FundQi as a $9.99 per-semester levy. While students are automatically opted in to paying the fee, they can choose to opt out.
Zuberi Attard, founder and president of FundQi, attended Carleton and served as a CUSA scholarships co-ordinator in 2017.
What am I voting on?
Here’s the referendum question, as passed by council:
“FundQi is a grant program currently in use by the Carleton University Student Association hereby referred to as CUSA. A successful referendum will make FundQi no longer a CUSA ancillary fee. The cost is $100 per year for a premium FundQi membership. Current students access FundQi premium for $9.99 (indexed to inflation) per academic term for a total of $20 per year but may opt out through the FundQi website should they choose to do so and should they be willing to give FundQi personal information for the reimbursement. Do you feel that FundQi should be removed as an ancillary fee for Carleton students?”
A yes vote is a vote to remove FundQi as an ancillary fee, while a no vote is to keep FundQi as an ancillary fee.
The yes vote
Some students and CUSA councillors say making all students pay for FundQi, while only some use it, is unnecessary.
“While the program might be a valid service for Carleton students, making its opt-in mandatory for all students isn’t fair,” wrote Matt Gagné, president of the Carleton Academic Student Government (CASG) and president-elect of CUSA, in an op-ed published in the Charlatan.
Gagné said in a recent video posted to Instagram that FundQi has not been transparent enough about how many students are using the service, whether it has been effective, and where student fees are going.
Additionally, students and councillors argue the original FundQi referendum, held at the same time as executive elections, was surrounded by confusion.
In that referendum, students who opted out of CUSA fees under the Student Choice Initiative could not originally vote. With hours left before polls closed, CUSA changed the policy and permitted all students, regardless of whether they had paid CUSA fees, to vote.
“We’re putting forward this motion to ensure that students get a fair referendum,” said Cameron Davis, a CUSA councillor for the faculty of engineering and design who submitted the motion for a second referendum.
“We’re not specifically anti-FundQi,” Davis said. “We just want students to decide and truly have their voices heard.”
The no vote
Attard said in CUSA’s November council meeting that around 1,000 students opted in to using FundQi this school year and that it succeeded in connecting students to around $500,000 in scholarships last year.
FundQi said that by having all students pay $9.99 a semester, low-income students get access to a service they normally wouldn’t be able to pay for.
“Not every student will use the service, and not everyone that does will win a scholarship,” a post on the FundQi Facebook reads. “Supporting the service means supporting your fellow students.”
FundQi also said students should vote no on the referendum because of their endowment fund for Carleton students. To keep it growing, FundQi said it needs “support from our students to gain support from new donors.”
What else do I need to know?
Since council voted in December to hold a second FundQi referendum, a confusing back-and-forth over the referendum’s dates and specific wording has muddied the lines on what students are voting for.
The original referendum question, as passed by council Dec. 8, would have changed FundQi to an opt-in service at $9.99 per semester. This would have meant that if the referendum passed, students would automatically not pay the levy but could choose to do so if they wanted access to FundQi’s services.
However, FundQi representatives expressed concern at the meeting and in the months that followed that they would not be able to sustain their business at $9.99 a semester with only some students paying.
At a council meeting in February, FundQi COO Scott Braddon advocated for an amendment to the referendum that would make FundQi a $105 per semester opt-in fee if the referendum passed.
“We had to push forward with this recommendation on what we, as a company, are able to fiscally offer,” Braddon said at the time. “We just need to acknowledge it’s going to cost a bit more per student.”
While the amendment ultimately failed because of the large price tag and fear of the increased fee being arbitrary, Braddon said FundQi was willing to meet with CUSA executives to settle on a price that worked both for students and FundQi. A meeting never happened, according to Braddon.
“[$105 per semester] is just our best offer that we could make on an estimated guess that would satisfy our needs and CUSA’s needs,” Braddon said. “There was no discussion. It’s like they were scared to talk to us and I don’t know why.”
Some councillors also expressed concern that unilaterally changing the terms of FundQi’s service agreement with CUSA would open up the organization to legal action. The service agreement stipulates that it can only be changed “by a written agreement duly executed by all parties.”
To rectify both of these problems, CUSA council amended the referendum question in a Feb. 25 meeting to ask instead whether FundQi should be removed as an ancillary fee entirely, which Attard said would satisfy FundQi.
Because of the confusion over the size of the fee and phrasing of the referendum, voting was delayed from March 2-3, when it was originally scheduled, to March 8-9.
“We had to put a halt to all of the logistical organization for this referendum … to wait for this council meeting tonight,” said CUSA chief electoral officer Alexa Camick at the Feb. 18 meeting.
“[The current schedule] is not feasible for the elections team to oversee this referendum,” Camick said.
