Point of Inquiry: The AMS saved us three dollars in 2022. We’re still paying the price

Quyen Schroeder (she/they) writes Point of Inquiry, a column covering student politics and the AMS. They are a fourth-year student studying English and Computer Science. Her email is q.schroeder@ubyssey.ca.

Who doesn’t want to save a buck or three? Thanks to the 2021–2022 AMS Council, we’ve done just that. By reducing our student fees, they saved us $3 per year — by now that’s $9 saved. With that kind of money, you could forget to renew your U-Pass before getting on the SkyTrain three times!

Just one small problem: the $9 we saved has come at the cost of the very services the AMS exists to provide.

In 2022, council ran a referendum to decrease the Clubs Benefit Fund by $1.03: from $1.78 to a measly $0.75. Unsurprisingly, students passed this referendum. (Two other fees were also decreased or eliminated. Between the three, students saved $3.37 per year.)

The ultimate cost of the few bucks wasn’t clear in 2022 — especially not in the referendum question posed to students. In the two years prior, the AMS had started spending more from the Clubs Benefit Fund: in 2020 to provide newly constituted clubs with $500 of seed money; again in 2021 to increase the funding available to clubs from $2,000 per club per year to $10,000 — a 400 per cent increase; and yet once more in 2022 to provide support to clubs returning following COVID.

Then, citing the historically low use of the fund, they dropped the amount students paid into it. Instead of the student body contributing nearly $100,000 into the Clubs Benefit Fund, we contributed just $41,000 per year.

In the years that followed, council continued to increase expenditure from the Clubs Benefit Fund.

Though in the referendum’s year, the fund had $700,000, the money going in went down, and the money going out went up. Last year, we used six times more from the Clubs Benefit Fund than we did in 2021–22. You don’t have to be an economist to know that is the recipe for draining your bank account.

What did we gain from the reduction of this fee? We gained … $3 each. The price? The Clubs Benefit Fund has been drained — to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This means fewer clubs (now limited to 350 total) and less financial support, including reduced membership subsidies. Necessary improvements to club services have stalled, like the deployment of a new room booking system and the creation of additional club spaces and lockers.

Last year, in response to this fund’s poor performance, the AMS tried to increase the fee again, but by a single dollar. They literally just wanted to press the undo button on an ill-informed, barely impactful fee-reduction measure. The referendum — which also included three other fee increases totalling to $4.95 — failed. The reduced Clubs Benefit Fee remained for the 2025-26 school year, exacerbating an already dire situation.

This election season, the AMS is tabling a more ambitious ask: a $12 increase split among three fees. The first is a $5 Student Services fee, returning from 2014; the second is a $4 increase to the Clubs Benefit fee; and the third is a $3 increase to the Capital Projects fee.

The specificity of these fees works in the AMS’ favour. Last year’s fee increase referendum only vaguely gestured towards what would happen if it failed. All the AMS said was that services would no longer be supported “at current levels.” Students were asked to pay more for the status quo, which is not exactly an inspiring message.

This year, the AMS is going on offence. The referenda questions clearly describe how students would benefit — rather than warning about reductions if it fails.

The Student Services fee would allow the AMS to hire more permanent staff, which has been a bottleneck for services like the AMS Food Bank, given the order of magnitude usage increase in recent years. The Clubs Benefit fee may reverse the recent cuts to new clubs and funding — justifying hiring enough staff to handle the thousands of room booking requests. The Capital Projects fee would bring planned Nest renovations over the finish line, such as adding a sink to the Food Bank and creating a Student Study Lounge.

Much like the push for this year’s quorate Annual General Meeting, I think clubs will be the crux of these referenda’s success. Clubs are centres of campus community and will materially benefit from these referenda passing. Club executives should speak to their members to inform them of these referenda. AMS organizers should focus on ensuring these executives are aware of the referenda and prepared to advocate for them.

Passing a fee increase referendum is difficult. Success is far from guaranteed. But what won’t move the odds is lying to ourselves about the support for these referenda.

The AMS’s referenda coordinators presented the results of a survey to council on Feb. 11. Their report was the opposite of clear-eyed and honest. They grouped respondents into two groups: “potential supporters” and “supporters/neutral.”

For one referendum, as many as 69 per cent of students were potential supporters! But what distinguishes potential supporters from supporters/neutral? It’s rather simple: potential supporters are students who don’t support the referendum, dummy. Instead of producing a good graph which faithfully represents the survey data, they forced the data into a fictitiously optimistic binary.

Instead of performing a lexical tap dance around the concept of not supporting something, we need to show students both how they will benefit specifically and how our community as a whole will benefit from these fee increases.

To quote the great philosophers of yore, “we live in a society.” Every one of us relies on those around us — in small ways and large ones.

Every year, I pay $254 for UBC’s Athletics and Recreation fee. I don’t lift weights in the gym, skate in the rinks or play intramurals. Yet, I happily pay this fee so that others can live out their Heated Rivalry fantasies in UBC’s Todd Ice Hockey League.

Your reading of this article is made possible not by any one person, but by the entire UBC community. We decided that independent, community-centred journalism benefits all of us and is worth chipping in $8 a year. (Author’s Note: $8 is an absolute steal.)

Before you vote on these referenda between March 9 and 13, think about which services on campus you use. Ones you had access to only because everyone pitched in to fund it. No one will benefit from every initiative.

I do not enjoy paying more arbitrarily. However, there are tangible benefits attached to these fee increases — including more functional communal spaces and increased support for food-insecure members of our community.

I hope you’ll consider joining me in voting yes on these fee increase referenda when voting starts on March 9.