The candidates in the Board of Governors (BoG) race met at last night's great debate to spar over funding obligations, unspent money and food affordability.
When asked which body should bear the burden of bankrolling UBC, all five newcomer BoG candidates disagreed on who best to advocate to.
Master's of finance student Yi Chen said 30 per cent of UBC’s funding comes from tuition, and said in light of this student leaders should seek more funding from the provincial government.
According to UBC’s 2024/25 budget 41 per cent of the university’s funding comes from student tuition.
Former UBC Students' Union Okanagan President and UBC law student Cade Desjarlais said that while BC has been “neglectful in its investment in the university for years,” it isn’t in a position to provide more funding right now. He instead claimed the Board needs to invest into technology to introduce new streams of revenue as well as be smarter with the money it already has.
“The unspent millions of dollars need to go back to students,” Desjarlais said.
Second-year science student Bardia Mohammadizadeh echoed Desjarlais, saying UBC needed to better allocate its existing funds and do better in lobbying for government funds but did not specify provincial or federal governments.
Student senator and political science student Jasper Lorien used their response to target what they called an “egregious” lack of funding from the federal government. They also stressed that the representatives who get elected need to do more to push the government to provide funding.
Second-year arts student Mohkam Singh Malik (ਮੋਹਕਮ) claimed UBC wasted millions on Workday, an event he called unacceptable, and he seconded Desjarlais in stating the necessity of finding alternative revenue sources for UBC. However, Malik added that thinking the provincial government won’t provide more funding isn’t a good reason not to advocate to them.
All candidates explicitly agreed that the burden of financing the university should not be placed on students.
“When you’re seeing 50 per cent of students reporting that they are worried about affording groceries, they cannot afford funding more increases to this university,” said Lorien.
In September 2023, UBC's Registrar Rella Ng said that $5–6 million of student financial aid funding goes unspent. All candidates agreed on the importance of ensuring unspent financial aid funds reach students, but they differed in their strategies for the implementation of that goal.
Desjarlais recommended that UBC complete a bursary-system audit to better-author the criteria bursaries have to make them more suitable to students.
Lorien agreed with Desjarlais on the bursaries’ problematic criteria requirements, and said UBC should both try and renegotiate the criteria with donors to resolve issues with them.
Malik suggested augmenting donor bursary guidelines and said UBC should better advertise the existence of unspent bursaries to students, sentiments which Mohammadizadeh echoed.
Chen posited UBC’s lack of a central application site as the issue for the unspent funds and said she would advocate for students to be able to apply for all existing bursaries in a more streamlined way.
Later on, Desjarlais and Lorien questioned the knowledge of Mohammadizadeh and Malik after they didn’t name a specific Board committee they’d want to sit on when asked.
“I think it’s really important that we be able to name at least one committee when we’re on a debate for the Board of Governors,” Desjarlais said, before adding he’d sit on the Finance Committee to best utilize his budget-management knowledge.
Chen said she’d also sit on the Finance Committee to advocate for more financial transparency, and Lorien listed the Governance Committee as their answer since that’s where “a lot of the most important university policies” go through.
Mohammadizadeh said it’s more important to focus on the advocacy of different perspectives — like that of science students — rather than focusing on candidates’ differing levels of experience.
In additional comment later on, Malik added that he would sit on the Indigenous Engagement Committee — to which Lorien said they were glad Malik was able to use Google during the debate.
Heated discussion also ensued over the merits of finalizing a potential student discount for Save-On Foods, a goal brought up by Malik. In 2022, UBC said students could receive a discount at the local Save-On-Foods grocery store in a partnership with the Greater Vancouver Food Bank and The Ubyssey could not verify whether the discount is still available to students before press time.
Malik accused both Desjarlais and Lorien of minimizing the importance of the discount after Desjarlais said they could probably get a better discount using coupons than from a UBC discount, and Lorien said they didn't think a five per cent discount would solve systemic affordability problems.
“Don't tell us that you give a shit about students and then also say, ‘Oh yeah, a discount for groceries? No, just starve.’”
Both Lorien and Desjarlais clarified they didn’t characterize the discount as unimportant.
“What I said very explicitly is that a discount does not solve the structural issues of financial inequality at UBC, and it does not solve the affordability crisis at UBC,” Lorien said.
Chen said she would be in support of the grocery student-discount and said there need to be more food affordability initiatives in place specifically for graduate students, citing the majority of students who use the AMS Food Bank are graduate students. Bardia also agreed that having a small discount code for groceries is “very important.”
Desjarlais added that having election runners who “run for every single position and then withdraw their name at the last minute” usually aren’t clear on what they want to achieve and agreed with Lorien on the essentiality of recognizing the systemic financial barriers in place for students.
Last year, Malik ran in the VP finance, Student Legal Fund Society and Ubyssey Board of Directors races. This year, Malik’s running in the Board of Governors’ and student senator-at-large races, and he withdrew his name from the VP finance by-election race shortly before its first debate.
The Ubyssey Board of Directors has no control on the editorial operations of The Ubyssey.
This article is part of our 2025 AMS Elections coverage. Follow us at @UbysseyNews on X (formerly Twitter) and follow our election coverage starting March 3.
The Ubyssey additionally updated this article on March 8 at 12:43 p.m. to more clearly reflect the statements Desjarlais and Lorien made concerning the Save-On-Foods discount.
This article was updated on March 8 at 1:42 p.m. to fix an improper pronoun usage. The Ubyssey regrets this error.
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