More than three months after University of Regina students voted in a referendum on whether to remain members of the Canadian Federation of Students, the results have been finally released. By a vote of 1,414 to 1,326, U of R students voted to reject a proposal to deferedate from the CFS and will remain members.
The source of the delay was over whether votes from First Nations University of Canada students should be counted. FNUC is a federated college at the U of R and students pay union dues both to URSU and the FNUC students’ union, while both organizations hold separate CFS memberships.
URSU had claimed that an agreement had been made that FNUC ballots would only be counted in the event that the results were close enough that those ballots would settle the outcome. The two sides, which met in court at one point, settled the issue by Dec 17 and agreed to include FNUC ballots after all.
However, URSU retained reservations about releasing the results, the Canadian University Press reports, but on March 11, the CFS made the outcome of the vote public, without the students’ union consent.