The Student Legal Fund Society (SLFS) has been in turmoil for years. Lucia Lu, Jacky Xue, Vihaan Gukta, Nathan Harris, Damarise Carcellar and Elaina Fung are all running unopposed for positions on the SLFS’s board. Without opposition, the six will be acclaimed.
Editor’s Note: The new Editorial Board is a pilot project launched for this year’s elections. From now on, that term refers to the group of journalists who write their views as a collective in the newspaper’s name, linking us with centuries of newspaper tradition.
Our pilot Editorial Board consisted of Features Editor Elena Massing, Politics Columnist Maya Tommasi and AMS Columnist Quyen Schroeder, who served as the board’s chair.
Over the past few weeks, they contacted every candidate, held interviews, attended debates and studied platforms before deliberating among themselves who The Ubyssey will endorse. Their deliberations were private and isolated from the rest of the newsroom, including from me, the Opinion Editor, until drafts had been filed. Like all of our journalists, they practised according to the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Ethics Guidelines.
— Spencer Izen, Deputy Managing Editor and Opinion Editor
You can’t vote on this next SLFS board, but you still deserve to know our opinion on the candidates and the organization as a whole.
The SLFS is a society independent of the AMS. It is funded by a $1 student fee and was founded in 1998 by referendum to “fund cases to improve education and the accessibility to education at UBC.” The SLFS has funded student cases on fewer occasions than they have received criticism. This year, humble AMS Councillor Luke Parolin accused the SLFS of not approving an annual budget and, in 2023, AMS President Eshana Bhangu criticized the SLFS for its poor transparency and governance practices.
Each year, SLFS candidates campaign on fixing the SLFS. Self-evidently, it hasn’t worked. Year after year, the SLFS has failed to discharge its duties, only rarely surfacing throughout the year before election season rolls around again with a new crop of candidates promising to fix everything. This year’s crop is proposing a major restructuring and realignment of the SLFS, including the creation of multiple vice president roles to support increasing the scope of the SLFS, but their plans may be hampered by the SLFS’s limited financial leeway.
Their proposal to revitalize the SLFS involves selecting typography, running events and rebuilding transition structures. The Ubyssey’s Editorial Board appreciates the ideas brought forward by this slate, but doubts they’ll be successful in reviving the SLFS.
Xue said that the SLFS supports the work of the Law Students Legal Advice Program (LSLAP) — which is run by students studying at the Peter A. Allard School of Law — through funding and providing office space. However, this year, they didn’t fund LSLAP despite typically doing so. The SLFS also collaborated with AMS Advocacy and the Sexual Assault Support Centre in previous years, but no longer does.
Financially, the SLFS is in a bind. The SLFS pays the AMS $39,354 a year in contracts — two-thirds of the society’s annual budget. The 2024/25 Income/Expenses spreadsheet (the only available financial document for the society) indicates that the society spent an additional $487 on their website but only $90 in filing fees. The remaining $15,058 was unallocated. Xue described that year as having “minimal expenditures.”
Xue alleged the SLFS’s financial situation was the fault of a previous board signing an unfavourable contract and rental agreement. Despite repeated questions during our interview and two followup emails, no member of the SLFS was willing to name the board members who signed that contract.
We asked about the median cost of cases the SLFS has funded. We were told only about a single case, which was recently funded to the tune of $100,000. Given that a year of minimal expenditures entails only a $15,000 remaining balance, it seems that the SLFS can only fund a case every seven years.
This slate plans to add other ways to engage: creating online courses about tenancy law, holding events and restarting their Instagram — with better colours and fonts. Further, they proposed collecting data to aid the AMS and student representatives on the Board of Governors and Senate with their advocacy.
Perhaps the SLFS’s engagement efforts should be focused internally. We asked the incumbent Xue for the minutes of any single meeting in the past year. We did not receive an email response, but in a conversation after an election event, he described being unable to provide any because they were “confidential.” We then asked for the minutes of their annual general meeting, which the SLFS is required to keep under section 20(1)(i) of the Societies Act. Xue said he couldn't access them because they were in the possession of fellow incumbent Harris. The slate seems aware of these organizational problems. Following our original interview, we received a document bullet-pointing the slate’s goals for the year. One of them was “having a google [sic] folder for all our documents.” This is an exceptional idea. We don’t know why incumbents Xue and Harris are waiting to implement it.
While some of this slate’s plans are interesting, we’re not confident they’ll reach fruition. Notably, Xue responded to most of our questions during the interview and emails afterward. Harris and Fung were unavailable for our group interview. We worry that members of this slate will become demotivated over time, leaving only a few bearing the brunt. And given this slate can’t co-ordinate to provide records, we are concerned internal conflict may lead to strife among the remaining directors.
We don’t think this slate will be successful in reviving the SLFS — but for the sake of students, we wish them well.
Editor’s Note: Nathan Harris wrote one article for The Ubyssey in 2024. He has not written for The Ubyssey since he ran for the SLFS board in 2025
Editorials are opinion essays, and while they represent the views of the Editorial Board, they may not speak for every person at our newspaper. They are subject, however, to the same standard of fact-checking as anything else in our report.
