Please note: A number of my friends have privately urged me to go public with what has been going on at UMSU this year. I’ve finally decided to say something about it, but am writing this anonymously because I am concerned about being targeted at Council meetings for the rest of the year. I’m friends with some of the exec, and I know that they’re not bad people, but I’m concerned with how irresponsible they’re being with students’ money and with how little information they give to Council on important decisions. Given how other people have been treated when they’ve asked for the exec to be accountable last semester and how hostile certain people on Council have been, I don’t feel safe having my name attached to this but I can’t be silent on it any longer.

So, to begin – I’ve been active and involved in a variety of groups in school and in my community since high school and have been in enough leadership roles to know how groups are supposed to operate. I wasn’t really impressed with last year’s UMSU exec and how radical some of them were, so I was happy to hear that some of my friends were going to run for election and try to get the student union to focus on the things that affected most students. I liked that they wanted to reconnect UMSU with the student body and focus on having more relevant events. I also liked that they talked about the importance of being diplomatic and making sure that they represented students’ interests in everything they did. Because of all of this, I supported them in the elections and I decided to get involved in UMSU through my own faculty. It’s also because of all this that everything that has happened this year is so discouraging.

Since they won the elections and took office, several of the exec have changed. I was expecting some of it, but I have found much of it to be surprising. I’m particularly upset by the level of secrecy with some of the exec and with how hard they have tried to hide how much money they’ve spent on certain things. Now, I don’t think that they’re all doing a bad job. In fact, my main concern is with Al Turnbull and Amanda McMullin. They are the main people responsible for all of the decisions I’m going to talk about below and have so far refused to be accountable to Council for any of them.

FroshFEST

The way frosh activities were run this year should concern any student who cares about what happens with their money and corruption. First, Justin Paquin, the former UMSU VPI, was contracted by the exec to run the concert through Paquin Entertainment. Justin is a nice enough guy (he’s actually the only one on last year’s UMSU exec that I liked), but he’s friends with the exec and helped out with their elections. Now, he might have been the best person/company to contract to – I don’t think it’s automatically a problem that his father’s company was contracted to do the work. But given his relationship to the exec, I was surprised to see that there was no open selection process or even call for bids to organize the event. When others on Council asked the exec to explain it, they just insisted that they had the power to hire someone but never explained how they came to select him. There’s definitely a high risk of conflict of interest when something like this happens, and it is disappointing to know that they didn’t actually look at any other companies before making this decision. The exec should have excused themselves from a process that involved hiring their friend to make sure that the decision was transparent and that they were being accountable. But that didn’t happen, and that makes the next point so much worse.

Overall, the Frosh Music Festival lost over $150,000 of students’ money even after ticket sales and sponsorships are taken into account. The exec has explained multiple times that the main act – Childish Gambino – cancelled at the last minute and they made the decision to extend the length of the event to two days instead of one in order to have him perform. I have organized enough events to know that unexpected things happen all the time, but everything about the financial calculations seems wrong. It doesn’t take a genius to know that doubling the length of an event is going to make a bunch of your costs go up. Instead of a stage rental for one day, it’s now two, and same with any security staff, bars, lighting, sound, etc. The decision to extend the festival—and take on this added financial risk—wasn’t taken seriously by the exec. The event budget was brought to the Finance Committee for the first time a week before the concert and after they decided to extend the event. The budget was hardly realistic as it still projected a profit and estimated ticket sales at 8,000, even though only 2,000 have been sold by that point (and there was never an explanation for why they thought 8,000 people would show up when UMSU has historically had really low turnout to events). The responsible thing to do in a situation like that is to talk to more people to make sure all options are considered and there is a risk management strategy to reduce losses as much as possible. But that didn’t happen, and that meant the exec made a decision that Council is ultimately liable for. That’s not a decision that should be made lightly, and it’s definitely not something you should do to your friends.

In total, just over 3,000 tickets were sold for the entire event. After everything was done, UMSU spent over $500,000 on the music festival, meaning the event cost over $160 per person who attended. I had high hopes when they said that this was supposed to be the biggest frosh concert in the country and I have a hard time describing how reckless it is to send that much money on an event. It makes me think about how much of a bigger impact it could have had if that money had been given to student groups instead. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but when the exec were questioned about the finances for the event, it seemed like they – and Amanda in particular – were fighting really hard to keep those numbers from Council. At no point before the concert were event budgets made available to Council, even though people asked for them. When Council members pressed to know how much they spent and lost and why certain decisions were made, Amanda and Al became aggressive and tried to defend their decisions as if it wasn’t the Council members who had to carry the risk. At the end of the day, we’re the ones who are responsible for any deficits UMSU has. To top it all off, Justin still got paid over $25,000 even though the event lost so much money. He worked on the event part-time for three months and didn’t meet any of his targets for sponsorship, artists, attendance, or revenue, leaving students to pick up the tab on all of the losses. This is exactly why not following an open process and hiring your friends is a bad idea.

Health and Dental Plan

Lots of people have talked about the health plan switch this year, but there are a few things that I’m really concerned about. The biggest is the lack of transparency in the process of selecting a new provider. In Council, Amanda and Al talked about how thorough their process was, but I know through conversations with both of them that they really weren’t all that interested in following a process. They said they just wanted it to look legitimate, but they had already made up their minds. What I’m particularly frustrated with is that Amanda went on several health plan-related trips across the country, including Montreal and Vancouver, before any of this was discussed with Council, and I’m still unclear whether students paid for all that or whether it was the insurance companies trying to win her over. Either way, the secret trips are pretty sketchy and we have a right to know if her support for a particular provider was affected by them. This is in addition to the trips she made with Thao Lam, UMSU VPSS, to Montreal and Toronto, which students did pay for.

For those who aren’t aware, the first company (ACL) that they were going to select isn’t even licensed in Manitoba. You’d think that something like that would come up in due diligence, but when asked about it, Amanda simply said that they’d build that in for next time. If you acknowledge that the process you followed was flawed and incomplete, why would you ignore it like everything was fine? Well in this case, it’s because the exec had already signed a contract with a new insurance company—the one we have now, StudentCare—before bringing anything back to Council. I would be interested to see what correspondence and due diligence there was between the exec and StudentCare before that secret decision was made. Health insurance is one of the biggest and most important services that UMSU offers and can have a big impact on a student’s year. And given all of the complaints I have heard around worse coverage, this seems like yet another example of how not having an open and transparent process is a really bad idea. When students’ concerns around not being able to get their prescriptions filled were brought up in Council meetings, Amanda insisted that there was no difference in the plans. The truth is that we now have less coverage than we used to for prescriptions and lots of people are forced to pay for things directly when they used to be covered. I’m appalled that Amanda and Al would lie about this when students’ health is at risk.

Legal Fees

Another example of the exec going way over budget is how much money they have spent on legal fees this year. The budget originally had legal fees set to $6,000, but by October over $26,000 had been spent. Any time someone on Council asked for clarification, Al claimed that it was because some of the staff had unionized. That doesn’t actually explain why the assumption was so off, since the exec were involved in the budget process after they got elected and Al acknowledged that they knew about the unionization of the staff on their first day of office. But even so, I get that lawyers can be expensive and sometimes things come up that you need to get legal advice for. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, then they should be able to provide at least a basic outline of the work that was done. Unfortunately, when a motion was served to Council to get them to do just that, Al fought very hard against it and pressured everyone to vote it down. I didn’t feel comfortable bringing this up in the meeting, but if the expenses are legitimate, then I don’t see why there would be any problem explaining them. His reaction and refusal to give any details on why they are overspending on a line item by over 400% seems very weird. At the most recent Council meeting, the Finance Committee brought forward an amended budget that included an increase in the legal line to $57,000. The only reason they gave, and one of the reasons why I finally decided to say something, was that “dynamics have changed” at UMSU. Anyone who cares about financial accountability needs to be concerned with this kind of unexpected and unexplained spending, particularly when the exec get secretive when people ask questions and ask them to be accountable, like they had promised to be.

Intimidation and Secrecy

Whenever Council members have asked the exec to be accountable this year, they have been met with aggressive answers or denials that anything was done wrong. I get that nobody is perfect, but if you’re elected to a role like this, you need to take responsibility for your actions and to actually be answerable to Council and to students at large. Continuously failing to follow a transparent process in decision-making and trying to hide how much money was spent on events or projects isn’t the right way to run an organization. This exec team ran on a platform of making decisions that reflect what students want, but so far they’ve just made decisions behind closed doors and refused to answer for them. They’re doing exactly what they were critical of back in March, and I’m so disappointed with how they’re behaving.

Getting angry with Council members who ask questions and trying to shut them down doesn’t foster accountability. Insisting that the exec has the power to make all of these decisions and refusing to release the details of expenses is the opposite of transparency. Every time a Council member who dares to ask a question is pushed aside or ostracized, students lose control over their own organization. I can’t stay quiet on this any more given that all of the financial liabilities and failures to follow the right processes rest on my head as a member of Council. It’s not fair for us as a Council and it’s not fair for students that the current exec refuses to be accountable for their actions.

The attitude that has been built around Al, Christian, and Amanda in particular is this: you’re either with us or you’re against us. That’s a far cry from their promise to be diplomatic and it’s insulting to those of us who actually believed them and helped them get elected. I hope that, by putting this out there, something can be done about the exec’s unchecked actions and refusal to answer Council members’ questions openly and honestly. As I said before, it should be easy enough to provide clear explanations for these issues without getting defensive and without trying to shut people down.

More than anything, I hope that by writing this, the exec gets their act together and stops making decisions about spending and about contracts behind closed doors. But if that doesn’t happen, I hope that someone braver than me will step up and do what so many Council members are afraid to and demand some real answers for their actions. My experience with this exec has left a bad taste in my mouth, to say the least. I’m just happy that the other places I’m involved with have people with integrity and responsibility, because there’s certainly none of that at UMSU.

**It’s worth noting that, while I specifically name Al and Amanda on a number of these issues, the reality is that they always claim that these discussions and decisions happen with the entire UMSU exec. So even though the other three aren’t expected to answer questions in meetings about the finances or contracts, they are still part of the exec and are still part of making these decisions and need to be just as accountable as Al and Amanda. Because if they disagreed with any of these decisions, they had every opportunity to say so in meetings or in personal conversations but never have.