LunarLuau

Referendum Outcome

Like I noted yesterday, CKMS is gone, and WUSC is a go. I had pretty much guessed this outcome from the poll run earlier for CKMS, and WUSC for the fact that it’s pretty hard to say ‘no’ to a dollar a term for refugees.

The CKMS issue was probably the biggest draw to the ballot page and I think the takeaway from this experience is that there can often exist a quiet majority on several issues. The pro-CKMS side also didn’t quite get the message when it came to following the election rules. It looked like they got dinged many times for campaigning outside the campaign period and having non-students campaign. Hiring a lawyer wasn’t the smartest idea either. I can’t imagine what would compel someone to do that in a school referendum.

I know a lot of CKMS volunteers were not students and thus unable to campaign, but that was kind of the point of the referendum. There wasn’t enough student involvement in the radio station to warrant the 90% of their budget being paid by students. A lot of the pro-CKMS arguments were also pretty awful. “4 of the 7 board of directors are students”, “your fee is pennies a day”, “estimated 2500 listeners”: students are not idiots, and I really think that any side that campaigns on the hope that student don’t realize that 4/7 is a lot less than 90% is doomed to failure. The “estimated 2500 listeners” bit was also dishonest. Again, students can tell when they’re being bullshitted with lies, damn lies, and statistics. Actually showing a map show how far CKMS is away from campus also wasn’t a hot idea either. They also seemed to make a lot of arguments based on the volunteers at CKMS getting a great experience out of the station; but students are smart enough to know that doesn’t scale to the 20,000 people who pay the fee.

The focus of the pro-CKMS side should have been more to the effect of “look, we know there are issues, here are what we will do to correct them in the future”. That would try an massage the “no” side to be the consensus vote, and maybe have a shot. The “yes” side apparently only spent $34, which goes to show that sometimes you only need to convince people to vote, rather than convince them to vote your way. Given that the referendum committee also had the job to get out the vote, they were really working on their behalf. Simple statements and posing of questions to the individual based on their own experience were all that was necessary. While the number of “yes” posters seemed smaller (independent of being torn down), none were offensive to the logic center of my brain and some didn’t even seem that partisan: “did you know that you fund CKMS?” could have really gone both ways.

A 2-1 voting result is something you rarely see, but it was within the margin of error of the poll I conducted. While Facebook polling may not be super-accurate, it will be able to help student politicians tell the difference between popular and not popular in the future.  There will always be the “only 12% voted” argument; but that’s loser-talk. I have yet to meet anyone in student politics who doesn’t think that things would have gone their way if only the turnout was higher. The results are within the range of the poll I did, so I don’t think you’d see a different outcome if you somehow forced 100% of people to vote.

If I were WPIRG, I’d be scared something fierce right now. WPIRG really needs to spend the next year justifying their existence, since we’ve seen that if students don’t like a fee, and there is a competently-led campaign against them, the fee can be in trouble. WPIRG might have an easier time though, it’s hard to say that a walk to north campus is just as hard as a walk to the 2nd floor of the SLC to get a refund.

From here, it’s off to the Board of Governors. I really hope CKMS spends their last term of funding thinking of ways to keep going rather than trying to fight this with the lawyers they seem to love. Once again, the BoG is going to be the party actually removing the fee on FEDS advice, rather than FEDS itself. There is also an issue that if CKMS tries anything litigious that the BoG might refuse to collect future 3rd party fees on behalf of the students if they worry that it’s a legal minefield if the fees are ever removed. The admin collects 3rd party fees more/less as a favour to us and I’d hate to think that the parting gift of the CKMS/UW relationship is that they ensure no other group can have what they did. Also, before hiring some ambulance-chaser, CKMS should take a look at the legal talent UW has on BoG before doing anything to burn bridges.

As for WUSC, I’m not shocked. The issues I have with that fee have a lot to do with the implementation of it and whether this should be considered within the scope of what ancillary fees should be for. The number of people with that kind of knowledge of how fees work is pretty small, not that I even expect your average student to know how they work. On the surface, it’s a dollar a term for a refugee at Waterloo, so it takes a lot to be against that without knowing how money flows between admin, FEDS, and 3rd parties.