Letter: ASFA Asks You to Vote Yes

Association Elections from March 27 to 29

LettersThe ASFA Executive — Published March 26, 2018

We, the executive of the Arts and Science Federation of Associations, need your help. Tuesday, polling begins for our election. While you are voting for your next ASFA representatives, you will also be asked a series of referendum questions. We ask you to vote yes to all four.

We are asking you to vote yes to increasing the ASFA’s fee-levy. This 0.18$ increase to what has been the lowest fee-levy of all Concordia’s associations is expected to bring in $70,000 a year. With this funding, ASFA will be able to expand its services to students, kick-start leadership summits, and, most importantly, provide more resources for member associations so they can continue their amazing work.

We are asking you to vote yes to implementing a fee-levy for the Concordia University Centre for Creative Reuse. CUCCR provides supplies and tools, free of charge, to students and community members who need them for their projects. The proposed CUCCR 2.0 is a space that can serve to enhance artistic expression and personal development within Concordia and its community, and that is why we support the implementation of this fee levy.

Concordia University is located on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. We are asking you to vote yes to this bylaw addition which mandates that the ASFA would not oppose Indigenous sovereignty. The ASFA wants to add this provision to our bylaws because it will codify our respect for the peoples whose lands we stand on. For that reason we ask all Arts and Science students to stand in solidarity and support this referendum question and, by extension, Indigenous communities in and around Montreal/Tiohtiá:ke.

We are asking you to vote yes to a comprehensive bylaw reform. For years, we have received comments on the unnecessary complexity of our bylaws. We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’re proposing comprehensive reform to simplify the bylaws and allow ASFA to operate at its full potential. These proposed bylaw reforms will maintain the necessary structures of the ASFA but will allow us more flexibility when we work to serve the Arts and Science community. And so, we are asking you to vote yes to this referendum question to make representing our students that much simpler.

We are asking you to vote yes to these referendum questions because it is time that the Arts and Science Federation grew. We are ready to go further in providing what our community needs in a fair, equitable, and intersectional way. We are asking you to vote yes to these questions because we want to better represent you, Arts and Science students.

Yours faithfully,

The ASFA Executive