11.03.26
Editorial Note
Canada’s University of British Columbia (UBC) is currently holding its annual elections by the Alma Mater Society (AMS), a student-run organization. According to the AMS website, the UBC Elections help students to “hold UBC and governments accountable and make sure their voices are heard – by electing people they trust to fight for them.” Students are “running for leadership positions that make sure students work together and fight for their rights. Student leaders and their ideas can influence every area of student life, while pushing for changes that makes UBC a better university for everyone.”
Worth noting that the UBC does not have an anti-Israel agenda.
However, coinciding with the elections, The Ubyssey, the UBC students’ newspaper, has been pushing hard its anti-Israel stand. Its latest article titled “Student referendum calls on AMS to pressure university to cut ties with ‘apartheid’ supporting universities,” promotes a students’ referendum that “will require the AMS to call on the university to cut ties with Israeli institutions that organizers say uphold apartheid. The referendum, recently endorsed by the AMS, was brought forth by a coalition of pro-Palestinian advocacy groups on campus.”
The Ubyssey describes the groups behind the referendum as a “coalition of pro-Palestinian advocacy,” urging to “cut ties with all institutions upholding apartheid, including Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv University, by writing an open letter to UBC and the UBC Vancouver Academic Senate.”
During the elections, The Ubyssey cultivates selected anti-Israel students whom it interviews who run for the Board of Governors (BoG) of UBC. For example, Dayla Hart, described by The Ubyssey as “a third-year honors history student with Palestine Solidarity Action UBC, one of the groups that organized the referendum,” and Chaand Balaji, who is described as “a fourth-year political science student with the Social Justice Centre” who said students are “tired” of attending a university that is “complicit in crimes against Palestinians in Palestine. I think we don’t want to be associated with that anymore”. She also said, “Some things are just basic human rights. And I think [cutting ties] is something that we have the responsibility of doing.”
The Ubyssey promotes Bryan Buraga, a candidate to serve on the UBC Board of Governors, who discussed how “Divestment from companies’ complicit in Palestinian human rights abuses has been a contested topic within UBC administration, despite years of student advocacy.” Buraga supports divestment efforts. He said that “the genocide of Gazans is the moral crisis of our time” and a seat on BoG would allow them to bridge the gap between activists and board members… At a recent AMS Council meeting, Buraga pushed for the approval of a referendum that would require the AMS to call on UBC to cut ties with Israeli universities.”
The Ubyssey also promotes Sultana Razia, a candidate for the Board of Governors. According to The Ubyssey, “Students and other UBC community members have called on the Board of Governors to divest from organizations alleged to be complicit in Palestinian human rights violations since 2022. Razia supports divestment efforts related to Palestine.”
Zarifa Nawar is a candidate for the Board of Governors. According to The Ubyssey, “For several years, students have also called on the Board of Governors to divest from companies they say are complicit in Palestinian human rights abuses. When asked about the issue, Nawar said she supports the university being held accountable to its responsible investment commitments.”
Drédyn Fontana is a candidate for the Board of Governors. According to The Ubyssey, “Over the past couple of years, students have called on the Board of Governors to divest from companies complicit in Palestinian genocide. Divestment is one of Fontana’s main priorities. He believes there could be significant progress within the next 18 months if students keep putting pressure on the board and there’s a governor in the room willing to hear them out.”
In another interview, Luca Jenkin is a candidate for the Senate. According to The Ubyssey, Jenkin is interested in “the current movement to cut institutional ties with Israeli universities due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.” He said, “I know in the past, there was a motion to divest and cut back from ties with Israel. I know that failed in the Senate, which I think was very unfortunate.” he said. Recently, “students garnered enough signatures to put a referendum item on this year’s ballot that would commit the AMS to call on UBC to cut ties with what they describe as ‘Israeli universities that Uphold Apartheid.’ Jenkin found discrepancies between UBC’s emphasis towards acknowledging Indigenous land and its continued partnership with Israeli universities, and never having worked with Palestinian universities. He said he intends to progress these motions by lobbying senators to reconsider this issue.”
The Ubyssey noted that “With an upcoming UBC contract with Hebrew University set to end in 2027, Jenkin expressed interest in petitioning for UBC to cut ties with this school.”
For The Ubyssey, the “UBC has been seeing students carry out action after action condemning genocide in Palestine — perhaps we just need the right candidate to push things over the edge.”
The newspaper has been criticized before. HonestReporting Canada, an organization that combats ideological prejudice in journalism and media as it impacts Israel, wrote in 2024 that an “opinion column in The Ubyssey, a Canadian government-funded student newspaper at the University of British Columbia,” was “sharing demonstrably false and unsubstantiated anti-Israel misinformation.”
As a government-funded student newspaper, the Ubyssey should provide its readers with balanced reporting, so that the Israeli side of the equation can also be heard. Needless to say, the paper has failed to live up to its obligation by ceaselessly promoting an anti-Israel agenda. All the more so, given the current developments in the Middle East triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, unprovoked and brutal attack on Israel. The paper had not condemned Hamas, a member of the Axis of Resistance cultivated by Iran to destroy Israel.
Canada deserves a balanced higher education system and should make sure that student newspapers, the Board of Governors, and the Senate are not hijacked for anti-Israel activism.
REFERENCES
March 10, 2026
AMS Elections 2026//
Student referendum calls on AMS to push university to cut ties with ‘apartheid’ supporting universities
On this year’s ballot, students will be voting on a referendum that — if approved — will require the AMS to call on the university to cut ties with Israeli institutions that organizers say uphold apartheid.
The referendum, recently endorsed by the AMS, was brought forth by a coalition of pro-Palestinian advocacy groups on campus. It calls on the AMS to push the university to “cut ties with all institutions upholding apartheid, including Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv University, by writing an open letter to UBC and the UBC Vancouver Academic Senate.”
In an interview with The Ubyssey, Dayla Hart — a third-year honours history student with Palestine Solidarity Action UBC, one of the groups that organized the referendum — said the AMS’s endorsement at the Feb. 26 Council meeting was an unexpected surprise. “The week before that meeting, someone was told, ‘Hey, the AMS might reject this referendum.’ So that was why we showed up.”
“We weren’t expecting it to be ‘OK, they’re deciding to endorse’.”
Hart said they felt a change in the room at the Council meeting where the referendum was endorsed. “A lot of people showed up, and something changed, and it changes how you feel in the community.”
Palestinian advocacy and recognition have been at the forefront of many social justice organizations on campus. Demonstrations — such as the solidarity encampment, an AMS-supported student strike and a vigil held outside of a UBC Senate meeting — have occurred on campus in the past few years, often with heavy police presence.
In 2024, Senator Jasper Lorien put forth a motion calling on UBC’s administration to cut ties with Israeli educational institutions, which overwhelmingly failed.
Chaand Balaji — a fourth-year political science student with the Social Justice Centre — believes that the high turnout at Council and the referendum itself represents how the student body feels. She said students are tired of attending a university that is “complicit in crimes against Palestinians in Palestine. I think we don’t want to be associated with that anymore. I think the student body is ready for change.”
Hart said this time, the support behind the referendum is different. “We’ve done a lot more organizing with a lot more people. To have this referendum, we needed to get so many petition signatures” — more than 1,000, to be exact. The petition received 1,485 signatures. They noted that while canvassing, “nobody was opposed [to the referendum]. People of all sorts of different spaces at UBC … were all signing and so I think we have this real cultural shift on campus.”
The cultural shift may be felt by some, but students have also expressed discontent with recognition of pro-Palestinian advocacy from campus organizations. Before the referendum was endorsed, a Jewish student who spoke to Council said, “demanding an academic boycott of Israeli institutions of higher learning has no effect on the state of Israel … this referendum will not change foreign policy, and it will not end conflict, but it will divide our campus.”
Notably, a “Students First” campaign is petitioning to reject the referendum; it is also no longer listed on the AMS’s website. The Ubyssey did not hear back from the campaign by press time.
Their website says if the referendum were approved, it would “narrow institutional collaboration and academic opportunities, shift student government away from its core focus on campus priorities and risk creating division among a diverse student body.”
Balaji said that “an academic boycott is such an important step” that UBC can, and should, take. She noted that the Dahiyeh Doctrine — an Israeli military strategy that focuses on large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure — was “generated by these universities.” Tel Aviv University, one of the three institutions the referendum identifies as having ties with UBC, hosts the Institute for National Security Studies — a research institute that openly expresses their support and role in creation of the Doctrine.
“I don’t think we can separate this from the genocide of the Palestinians are facing. We can’t say that it’s separate from the so-called conflict,” Balaji said.
Hart said that advocacy groups on campus are continuously overlooked and undermined by UBC’s administration. They also noted that the administration has often shied away from directly commenting on the ongoing war in Palestine in an attempt to remain “apolitical.” Balaji agreed, saying, “they’ll [Senate] specifically say conflict. They will say Gaza, but they will not say Palestine … How is that neutral?”
In a statement to The Ubyssey, UBC Media Relations Director of University Affairs Matthew Ramsey wrote “UBC is committed to upholding the rights to freedom of expression and fostering an environment where diverse viewpoints can coexist peacefully and productively — an essential foundation for our academic and societal missions. The president and the university’s leaders have discussed these issues formally and informally many times with students and other UBC community members over the past few years.”
He noted that international academic partnerships are overseen by the Senate, and that “any review of academic partnerships at UBC is conducted in accordance with our established processes and with a commitment to academic freedom.”
Balaji said, “some things are not political. Some things are just basic human rights. And I think [cutting ties] is something that we have the responsibility of doing, more than it being a political decision that is contestable. Multiple organizations have agreed that it is a genocide and apartheid. So why are we still supporting institutions that are complicit in the oppression of Palestinian peoples?”
Balaji and Hart also both noted that UBC has quickly cut ties with other academic institutions and regimes implicated in human rights controversies — and divested — in the past. “UBC tries to present itself in this way that is more progressive and anti-racist … when Russia invaded Ukraine they [cut] ties with Russian universities, so they know how to do it,” said Hart. They pointed to UBC’s partial divestment in South Africa and the severance of ties from students and constituencies, saying “a cultural boycott matters.”
They believe that UBC’s lack of action on cutting ties with Israel is “very much Islamophobia, and [with] most Palestinians being brown, I think [it’s also] just plain old racism,” Hart said.
“We raise our voice and we get bureaucratically snubbed, they [Palestinians] raise their voice and they face bullets.”
Palestinian advocacy groups are looking to continue their momentum with a Senate motion pushing the university to follow in the AMS’s path of endorsement in the upcoming months. Balaji noted that “if the Senate motion passes, that’s not the end of our fights … we shouldn’t stand silent ever.”
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March 4, 2026
AMS Elections 2026//
Bryan Buraga
Candidate profile, Board of Governors
Amy Sheardown with photos by Saumya Kamra
Bryan Buraga is running for one of two positions on UBC’s Board of Governors (BoG), promising tenant protections for students in residence, long-term funding for the Food Security Initiative and advocating for a tuition freeze.
The Board of Governors — comprised of 21 members including the chancellor, president, 11 governors appointed by the province and eight elected by faculty, students and staff — oversees UBC’s annual budget, investments and property management, among other administrative duties.
A first-year Master of Community and Regional Planning student, Buraga is currently the Graduate Student Society councillor on AMS Council. During his undergrad, Buraga served as president of the Student Society of McGill University and held seats on McGill’s Senate and Board of Governors — all experiences that Buraga says put him in a good position “to advocate for students as priorities.”
Buraga’s key campaign promises reflect both his personal passions and the issues they see UBC students facing — specifically around housing policy. He cited B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act, which has an exemption applying to “accommodation owned or operated by an educational institution.” Buraga claimed this exemption has allowed UBC to “evict any student at any time for whatever reason.” Buraga promises to ensure tenant protections for students living in residence and plans to do so by sitting on the Property Committee — responsible for determining land use, rezoning and building approvals.
Although UBC’s 2025-26 budget predicted a surplus, there have been spending constraints across B.C.’s post-secondary institutions due to the federal caps on international student visas. Many universities, including UBC, have already implemented measures to mitigate the issue like hiring freezes, administrative budget reductions and program restructuring. Buraga says lack of funding is negatively impacting campus life — specifically for graduate students.
If elected, Buraga plans to fight for long-term funding for food security initiatives, instead of the university renewing its allocation. He said, “there are hundreds, thousands of students on campus that rely on these food security initiatives” and that if not increased, the limited food security funding will be detrimental to all members of campus.
Buraga said that he will fight for “increased access to co-ops, internships and research” and graduate student stipends at a livable rate. “They [graduate students] are being paid starvation wages right now … Graduate students make up a disproportionate amount of [food-bank] users, somewhere in the realm of 50 per cent when they only make up 20 per cent of [the student body].”
Buraga was not wrong. The 2024-25 AMS Services Report confirmed that 49 per cent of food bank visits were made by graduate students. UBC announced on Feb. 26 that funding for PhD students will be going from $24,000 annually to $40,000, but this does not include any commitments to masters funding. Buraga expressed interest in sitting on the Finance Committee to advocate for student financial needs, saying UBC needs to ensure that “where we’re cutting doesn’t materially impact the basic needs of its community members. We cannot cut.”
Buraga is also against any tuition increases and wants to establish a tuition freeze.” “The university needs to look at freezing [or] cutting salaries of senior administrators, making an active decision to pull more money from the endowment, and continuing to advocate for greater provincial government funding” to lessen the financial burdens placed on students, explained Buraga.
Divestment from companies’ complicit in Palestinian human rights abuses has been a contested topic within UBC administration, despite years of student advocacy. Buraga supports divestment efforts. He said that “the genocide of Gazans is the moral crisis of our time” and a seat on BoG would allow them to bridge the gap between activists and board members. There are “various arguments from a financial, legal, reputational perspective that I think board members would be more amenable to.”
At a recent AMS Council meeting, Buraga pushed for the approval of a referendum that would require the AMS to call on UBC to cut ties with Israeli universities, saying at the meeting that the AMS “should continue to amplify the voices of our students that have been fighting for this year after year, and not stand in their way.”
Buraga’s campaign focuses largely on affordability measures for students, and he thinks that his education in community planning has given them “a really unique perspective, both from the student advocacy point of view, as well as the skills that [he is] learning within the program itself.”
“I really care about my peers, and seeing everybody suffer doesn’t bring me joy, but fighting for them does.”
First online March 4, 2026, 8:58 p.m
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March 4, 2026
AMS Elections 2026//
Sultana Razia
Candidate profile, Board of Governors
Stephen Kosar with photos by Saumya Kamra
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Editor’s Note: Razia also serves on The Ubyssey Publication Society’s Board of Directors. The board has no control over The Ubyssey’s coverage.
Sultana Razia is running for one of two student positions on the Board of Governors.
A fourth-year student double-majoring in economics and cognitive systems, Razia previously served a term on Senate and is a current Arts Undergraduate Society councillor.
Razia wants to be a governor so she can “speak up for those who don’t have that platform to speak up.” The decisions the board makes, she said, “really impact our lives.”
Razia believes that her experience on Senate gives her the expertise required to effectively work on the board. “I learned how to talk to [UBC administrators], negotiate [and] discuss issues with them … being the student senator and being on the Senate committees,” she said.
She cited her time on the Senate Library Committee, where she pushed for librarians to “make it a priority that students want more extended hours.”
“For anything that we want to accomplish, it’s very important that we start somewhere. It’s gonna be slow. We might not see the results, but then, if we have the conversation started someday, I believe we will see [change].”
Students and other UBC community members have called on the Board of Governors to divest from organizations alleged to be complicit in Palestinian human rights violations since 2022. Razia supports divestment efforts related to Palestine and also major fossil fuel emitters.
“Why is it so hard for them to divest? There’s so many other companies in the world that you could invest your money [in],” she said. “I don’t know why [the board is] so hard-bent on investing in companies that have … solid proof of links to human rights violations.”
Razia supports UBC’s responsible investing framework, but said that work has progressed too slowly.
The university has had a responsible investing policy since 2013, but advocates have criticized the policy for years, saying that it does too little, too late. In 2024, UBC set up a working group — including Board of Governors representatives — to oversee the development of a new social risk framework. In February, UBC said that the working group’s work is still ongoing.
Razia also opposes tuition increases, but conceded that student governors are most likely unable to block increases at the board — at the last board meeting where tuition increases were up for debate, governors voted overwhelmingly in favour. Still, Razia said she wants to advocate against increases.
“Our priority is student affordability,” she said. “We want everybody to have access to education. And tuition fees are the biggest barrier to [that].”
At a board meeting last December, UBC Vancouver’s Provost and Vice-President, Academic Gage Averill said that tuition increases are necessary to preserve UBC’s financial situation as the university continues to face funding challenges.
To fix these funding issues, Razia said that the university needs to push the provincial government to increase funding to UBC, even as the province did not commit to substantial post-secondary funding in its most recent budget.
“The board’s job is literally to negotiate with the government,” she said. If the financial situation does not improve, Razia will not support budget cuts.
“I don’t think budget cuts [are] something anyone wants.”
Razia acknowledged that the board moves slowly on its goals. To implement her priority areas, she said that “getting the conversation started” is essential.
“It’s really slow. It takes a long time to get things done … the crucial point is getting something started, getting the work started, and then try your best to finish it as soon as you can.”
First online March 4, 2026, 8:58 p.m.
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March 4, 2026
AMS Elections 2026//
Zarifa Nawar
Candidate profile, Board of Governors
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Zarifa Nawar is running for the Board of Governors opposing tuition increases and pushing for further funding for food security initiatives and UBC’s Work Learn program.
Nawar has served as the AMS vice-president academic and university affairs (VP AUA) since January 2025 and is also a student senator-at-large. She says over the past two years she has secured $2 million for undergraduate research opportunities and pushed for mandatory statements on Gen AI in course syllabi to reduce ambiguity around academic misconduct.
“I have a very thorough understanding of the way the university governance works and the way that university advocacy works, and I’ve always, since my first day in office, delivered for students,” said the third-year standing political science major.
If elected, Nawar said she would focus on affordability, specifically in the areas of food security, housing, tuition and extra support for international and graduate students.
Nawar said she wants UBC to commit to multi-year funding for food security initiatives, instead of the current annual approvals.
On housing, Nawar said she would push the university to prioritize lower-cost, higher-density student housing. She additionally argued UBC should consider more “creative” funding approaches to keep construction feasible, even as costs rise, such as third-party partnerships used at other universities. She also wants to advocate for developing more than the 3,300 student beds committed to UBC’s Campus Vision 2050. Nawar also wants to leverage donor opportunities, but did not explain how she would do so.
Nawar opposes tuition increases. UBC has continued to raise tuition despite student backlash; post-secondary institutions across B.C. are facing significant financial hardship.
“I think this is one of the most fundamental mandates the student body has ever gifted its student leaders, and I very much intend to continue opposition to tuition,” said Nawar. With the federal government’s cap on international student permits, Nawar argued UBC needs to find alternatives to tuition-driven revenue. Nawar said international students are “the [financial] backbone of this university,” and 22 per cent of UBC’s 2025-26 operating budget came from international tuition. She argued UBC’s reliance on international tuition developed in response to insufficient provincial funding for post-secondary institutions and is now proving unstable.
She said that she will ensure that “student priorities cannot be on the chopping block.” Nawar wants to expand financial aid for international students, and develop a system to assess financial need across different countries. She did not elaborate on what the specific of this financial assessment system would look like.
Beyond affordability, Nawar said she would prioritize academic and career support. She argued undergraduate research funding should be sustained beyond short-term programs and more firmly integrated into UBC’s long-term academic planning, positioning research access as a core part of the university’s identity.
Nawar said expanding UBC Work Learn funding could create more student jobs and would push for a $2 million increase in the program. “We know that demand is incredibly high, and we know that the funds and the investment into the program from UBC is not nearly on the same level,” said Nawar.
As a longer-term proposal, Nawar raised the creation of an exam testing centre for deferred, standing deferred and accommodated exams.
On the extensive delays associated with exam accommodations, Nawar said “I don’t think that meets the calibre and rigour of academic standards that we have at this university. A student should not have to wait an entire term to write their final exam.”
For several years, students have also called on the Board of Governors to divest from companies they say are complicit in Palestinian human rights abuses.
When asked about the issue, Nawar said she supports the university being held accountable to its responsible investment commitments.
“There’s been a lot of things that the student body wants, and I want to ensure that UBC is listening to them, and, you know, doing its due diligence when it comes to this work,” she said. However, she said divestment is a long process and would focus on “timely updates” and transparency.
“When it comes to advocating for students, I have dedicated pretty much my entire time at UBC towards doing this … and I very much intend to continue that,” said Nawar.
First online March 4, 2026, 8:58 p.m.
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March 4, 2026
AMS Elections 2026//
Luca Jenkin
Candidate profile, Senate
Luca Jenkin is running for one of five spots on UBC’s Vancouver Senate with his top priority being to ensure that the Senate’s approaches to future programs and university connections reflect the wishes of the student body.
The first-year linguistics major pinpointed this problem with what universities UBC has ties to and wanting “the universities we are working with [to] reflect … the position that students want.”
“With the current political climate, education is unfortunately no longer an apolitical place,” Jenkin said. He specifically mentioned the current movement to cut institutional ties with Israeli universities due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. “I know in the past, there was a motion to divest and cut back from ties with Israel. I know that failed in the Senate, which I think was very unfortunate,” he said. At a 2024 Senate meeting, a motion to discuss cutting ties with Israeli universities overwhelmingly failed; during the meeting, there was also a vigil being held outside by protesters from the Palestinian solidarity encampment. Recently, students garnered enough signatures to put a referendum item on this year’s ballot that would commit the AMS to call on UBC to cut ties with what they describe as “Israeli universities that Uphold Apartheid.”
Jenkin found discrepancies between UBC’s emphasis towards acknowledging Indigenous land and its continued partnership with Israeli universities, and never having worked with Palestinian universities. He said he intends to progress these motions by lobbying senators to reconsider this issue, but did not specify how we would sway senators. With an upcoming UBC contract with Hebrew University set to end in 2027, Jenkin expressed interest in petitioning for UBC to cut ties with this school.
The 2024 Senate meeting was also done primarily in private, since senators voted to close the public gallery. Jenkin added that he wanted to ensure there is transparency when the Senate is making decisions about these things and that “dealings are done ethically.”
If elected, Jenkin said he is committed to transparency and student outreach and would be grounded in making his position “more openly available” by “talking to students” and “getting to know them.” Other than speaking to students, Jenkin did not include other ways he would reach out to the student body.
With experience in the Iowa Youth Congress, “I’m really passionate about education, access to education, and how education can control the information and what we learn, and how we perceive society,” said Jenkin. “The Senate is an important thing,” especially as it concerns what students are learning at university, which is “one of the main motivators students have,” he said.
When asked what Senate committee he would like to sit on, Jenkin could not name a specific committee, commenting that he needs “to do more research.”
Regarding instructors’ concerns on harmful, vague and discriminatory comments in student experience of instruction (SEI) surveys, Jenkins said that while he believes SEI’s are the most efficient way of gauging the educational environment, there “needs to be fail-safes.” To do so, Jenkin suggested communicating more with instructors and setting up an anonymous forum for them to create an “open discussion space.”
Additionally, Jenkin raised the ongoing issue of generative AI in education as important to his candidacy. Commenting on AI’s economic and ecological downsides, “I think the way AI is being approached at university [is] much too neutral,” said Jenkin.
Jenkin remarked that he wants to focus on and propose more “hard- set rules” regarding AI use in the academic setting. “Rather than just treating it like this big, scary thing that we can’t comprehend, actually working and trying to come up with a more concrete policy” is one of Jenkin’s goals. UBC currently has principles and guidelines on how to use AI in the classroom; in February, Senate also passed a revision to the university’s syllabuses policy, now requiring a statement on how AI use will be allowed, which will go into effect in September.
Jenkin acknowledged positive uses for AI in terms of efficiency, but suggested that the use of tools like ChatGPT is “counterintuitive” when it comes to doing physical research. “You are paying part of your tuition to access a large library of sources,” Jenkin said. “I think it [AI] should just be helpful as a tool, not something that is used to actually create the work that you’re trying to put out there.”
First online March 4, 2026, 8:58 p.m.
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March 4, 2026
AMS Elections 2026//
Drédyn Fontana
Candidate profile, Board of Governors
Drédyn Fontana is running for one of the two student seats on the Board of Governors, the university’s top decision-making body on finances, land use and projects.
If elected, he plans to push for increased faculty-level financial transparency and facilitate the development of a human rights investment framework for the university by the end of his one-year term.
Fontana, a sixth-year dual degree international relations and electrical engineering student, isn’t a new face to institutional politics. He was first elected to the Senate in 2024 as the applied science student senator, and also served as the AMS’s VP academic and university affairs. He was fired from the latter role by AMS Council in November of that year — the first executive to be fired in the student union’s history — after it concluded he made misrepresentations to councillors. Fontana has disputed that claim, saying he was fired for going against the grain in a toxic workplace. He has since brought a suit against the AMS for wrongful termination — and has served as a student senator at large since 2025.
On tuition, Fontana breaks with student governor orthodoxy: “’I’m running on maintaining sub-inflationary tuition increases.”
“I know a lot of people have run on tuition freezes. I can’t in good conscience run on [a] tuition freeze, because I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Post-secondary institutions are facing a financial crisis across the province. In November, the Ministry of Post-Secondary Affairs and Future Skills announced it was initiating a review of the post-secondary sector, citing decreasing domestic enrolment, inflation and the federal government’s “unilateral” reduction in the number of international students admitted to Canada annually. UBC’s enrolment report, however, reports increasing domestic enrolment. This year’s provincial budget holds post-secondary funding steady, with funding rising below the rate of inflation.
The province’s review is due on March 15, and the AMS and other student unions have expressed concern that it might justify the government allowing domestic tuition increases beyond the present two per cent limit, which has held since 2005. The limit does not apply to international tuition.
Referring to his own program, Fontana said UBC engineering’s tuition is lower than the University of Toronto’s. He argued that given inflation was around 2 per cent last year, “keeping tuition the way it is” is his goal.
Asked about the AMS’s Academic Experience Survey that reports widespread financial hardship among the student body, Fontana says both the post-secondary sector and students are in a tough situation. “I myself have been a recipient of emergency bursaries, and it really helped me when I needed it.” But, he says, “how do you square that with the budget?” He noted that tuition essentially decreases based on the value of money if increases are sub-inflationary.
Fontana said the key differences between himself and the current student governors will be his focus on greater faculty-level financial reporting. “I think there’s a lot going on in the faculties that just doesn’t get seen as much,” he said.
He said he’s reviewed 20 years’ worth of UBC budgets in the AMS Archives. Over that period, he noticed that the budget “got a little more unstable” when universities began to rely on international student tuition revenue. “We’ve tied our revenue stream to a market.”
Fontana also has an interest in seeing more centralized financial planning across the university.
“If we can do more and more resourcing at a central level, I think that will help to save a … lot of labour costs,” he said.
Fontana also supports the ongoing work to develop a human rights framework for the university’s wholly-owned investment management firm. He’s confident that work will be done — the challenge, he said, will be aligning “spirit and principles that students have in mind when we’ve been asking for it.”
Since 2023, UBC has faced renewed calls for a human rights framework to govern its investment, precipitated by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and UBC Investment Management’s holdings. The student group UBC Divest has identified a list of 30 companies connected to the genocide that they want UBC to cut ties with.
When he says the investment framework will be “done” by the end of his term, ending April 2027, Fontana said “done” means a framework “which will eliminate certain companies,” from UBC’s holdings. “I think this year it will get done,” he said.
Fontana also wants to expand the Universal Design for Learning Fellows Program, a program of the Provost’s Office that helps faculty redesign courses to reduce accessibility barriers. He said it currently operates drawing on an annual fund, but he wants it to be a permanent fixture.
First online March 4, 2026, 8:58 p.m.
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https://ubyssey.ca/opinion/editorial-buraga-and-fontana-win-the-board-experience-wars/
March 9, 2026
Editorial Endorsements//
Editorial: Buraga and Fontana win the Board experience wars
Students are dramatically outnumbered on the board, so we need our two governors to agree with each other.
Ubyssey Editorial Board
The Ubyssey endorses Bryan Buraga and Drédyn Fontana for UBC’s Board of Governors.
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
Much of this debate — and our conversations with the candidates — revolved around who had the most experience and connections to powerful people at the university. Sure, there’s value in having big names and advocacy wins under one’s belt, but candidates generally have similar governance experience. When student governors bring opinions and issues to the board, rarely do decisions pan out in their favour, as evidenced by countless years of tuition increases or the resistance to a widely supported call to divest from companies complicit in genocide. While Buraga, Fontana and Zarifa Nawar all bear notable experience, the former two bring new or overlooked ideas to the table that might have more to offer students.
Buraga hopes to collaborate with students doing on-the-ground advocacy work, inspired in part by the student walkout for food security in October 2022 and the $800,000 allocation toward food security initiatives that followed in early 2023. This was a “student-focused movement” in which the governors had to “use their position and privilege to drive home the need for that increased funding.” It was an anomalous year, as there hasn’t been that kind of dialogue between students and governors in the past couple of years, but Buraga is set on mobilizing the “students on the ground” to bring this back. It’s an approach he found quite effective during his time serving on the McGill University Board of Governors.
Similar to Buraga’s emphasis on collaboration, Fontana was adamant on advocacy being a “team sport.” Fontana aims to prioritize working with faculties. He claimed “42 per cent of every international student dollar goes toward faculties,” implying they will suffer particularly badly from international student reductions. He plans to advocate for more transparency in faculty budgets, which he described as “essentially a black box.” This leads us to believe he will, compared to previous governors, have a more constituency and faculty-focused approach.
Over the past couple of years, students have called on the Board of Governors to divest from companies complicit in Palestinian genocide. Divestment is one of Fontana’s main priorities. He believes there could be significant progress within the next 18 months if students keep putting pressure on the board and there’s a governor in the room willing to hear them out.
Buraga holds a similar opinion. He’s optimistic about change being on the horizon if a candidate is willing to make divestment a priority and, like Fontana, emphasized the importance of continued “student momentum.”
To explain her stance on the matter, Nawar referenced UBC’s divestment from fossil fuels in 2019, nearly a decade after the first Climate Action Plan was developed in 2010. She says she’s passionate about moving forward on divestment, but believes that it is unattainable in the near future. We disagree. In the debate, she said progress needs to happen at a “significantly speedier pace,” and we think this is possible — but not from a candidate who resigns themselves to accepting the past as the only answer. It’s also worth reflecting on the context around UBC deciding to divest from fossil fuels. Amid thousands striking at UBC and millions taking to the streets around the world for climate protests, it would have been a bad look for the university not to take action. UBC has been seeing students carry out action after action condemning genocide in Palestine — perhaps we just need the right candidate to push things over the edge.
Unlike other candidates in this year’s race — and many governors past — Fontana is not running on a promise to fight for a tuition freeze, instead proposing a push for maintaining sub-inflationary tuition increases. UBC’s budget, he says, is not in a place where we can afford to freeze tuition without making cuts to affordability measures currently in place for students. By keeping increases sub-inflationary, tuition actually decreases relative to the value of money, which he says will lead to “essentially a free tuition” for both domestic and international students. Fontana has had to access emergency aid bursaries himself. He sees these increases as a more “fiscally responsible” way to go about making tuition more affordable without sacrificing any services along the way.
Both Nawar and Buraga will push for tuition freezes. To avoid making cuts, Buraga proposed using money from the endowment as a “rainy day fund.” Nawar’s proposal relied on recruiting more international students, specifically from the US — to her, the current political state is an opportunity, but we’re concerned that continuing to fund our university with international students is short-sighted.. Students have yet to advocate successfully for tuition freezes, but perhaps these alternate funding proposals will prove more persuasive. If Buraga and Fontana were to be elected, they would need to compromise on tuition increases.
We found candidates Jacky Xue and Sultana Razia did not rise to the level of the other three. Both candidates were not particularly knowledgeable about the board in its current state. Like other candidates, they proposed limits to annual tuition increases and divestment from companies complicit in genocide, but their proposals for achieving these goals were unconvincing. They had neither the experience and connections nor the inspiring approach required to put them on par with Buraga, Fontana or Nawar.
Xue proposed alleviating upcoming budgetary strains by creating micro-credentials to increase university revenue. While the idea itself isn’t all that bad, he did not express concrete ideas regarding how it might be implemented — and even if this happened, it would be unlikely to make a significant dent in our budgetary difficulties, especially given the additional resources needed to run these programs.
Razia’s approach to budgetary constraints was to “just venture out and get more funding,” not specifying what this would look like. She admitted to having fewer connections than Nawar and Fontana, but claimed she could “do it better than them” if given the chance.
Students are dramatically outnumbered on the board, so we need our two governors to agree with each other. Nawar has got wins in the past, but when asked how she would find success on the board, she took a hostile approach to asserting her superiority over candidates. She ended her debate by, yet again, listing her accomplishments and reinforcing that “no one else can say the same.” Among fellow candidates who have previously sat on a university board or held positions as an AMS executive and senator, we consider that simply untrue — and it’s certainly not the attitude we want to see one of our student governors bringing to advocacy work.
While voting for Nawar is reasonable — unlike voting for Razia or Xue — we’ll be casting out ballots for Buraga and Fontana. Their experience on university bodies and willingness to work together will benefit students across our campus.
Editor’s Note: Razia also serves on The Ubyssey Publication Society’s Board of Directors. The board has no control over The Ubyssey’s coverage.
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.
First online March 9, 2026, midnight
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May 31, 2024
UBC president reaffirms university’s anti-BDS stance on Parliament Hill
On May 28, Palestinian solidarity encampment organizers People’s University UBC released a response to the UBC president’s May 16 statement on the encampment’s demands and May 27 speech on Parliament Hill.
UBC President Benoit-Antoine Bacon joined university presidents from Concordia University, University of Toronto and McGill University at a House of Commons standing committee on Justice and Human Rights to discuss antisemitism on campus.
“UBC supports freedom of expression and demonstration, for however we do not condone behaviors that affect the safety, security of our university community or threaten or interfere with our operations,” said Bacon at the meeting.
People’s University UBC wrote Bacon’s May 16 statement and May 27 speech show UBC is not “acting in good faith and … have cast doubt among students, faculty, and community members regarding the sincerity of his invitations to ‘constructive’ conversations.”
MP Anthony Housefather representing Montréal’s Mount Royal riding asked the university administrators if their universities would support the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by the federal government, and the application of the IHRA’s handbook on campuses.
“This is one of the tools we consider going forward on cases of antisemitism,” said Bacon.
The IHRA’s definition includes any rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals, their property, or Jewish community institutions and religious facilities
The IHRA said examples of antisemitism include claiming “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” or “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”
People’s University UBC wrote the IHRA’s definition “has been widely criticized by scholars, academics and human rights groups globally for conflating legitimate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-semitism.”
In 2022, Independent Jewish Voices Canada released a statement opposing the IHRA’S definition.
Housefather also asked the presidents if their administrations oppose the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Bacon said UBC does not support BDS.
“It is imperative for the administration to demonstrate its commitment to such dialogue by meaningfully addressing our demands instead of pre-emptively taking an anti-BDS stance,” wrote People’s University UBC.
In Bacon’s May 16 statement, he said universities “stand strong against all forms of violence, exploitation, intimidation, discrimination, harassment or any other form of harm directed at individuals or groups on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or any other characteristic or label.”
People’s University UBC wrote UBC condemned Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, and that “this selective application of principles serves only to further the oppression of Palestinians rather than support free expression and academic inquiry.”
People’s University UBC also called on Bacon to release a statement on May 29 by 8 a.m. to “Publicly condemn Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel … Denounce the invasion of refugee camps and protected zones in Rafah [and] Condemn the scholasticide, including the bombing and destruction of every university in Gaza.”
As of May 31 at 1 p.m., Bacon has not released a statement in response to this request.
“We believe our demands represent the minimum actions necessary in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” wrote People’s University UBC. “We will not stop until Palestine is free.”
On May 30, People’s University released another statement reinstating their demands to Bacon and called on him to respond to their demands by 8 p.m. today.
The Ubyssey did not hear back from UBC Media Relations by press time.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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Government-Funded UBC Student Newspaper Features Column By Anti-Israel “Jew On Campus” Who Calls Zionism “White Supremacist” and Accuses Israel Of Genocide
April 2, 2024
In a March 21 opinion column in The Ubyssey, a Canadian government-funded student newspaper at the University of British Columbia entitled: “Why Hillel makes me feel less safe as a Jew on campus,” author Jess Goldman led readers down a meandering path of self-reflection, all while sharing demonstrably false and unsubstantiated anti-Israel misinformation.
According to the newspaper’s biography of the author, Goldman “is a queer Jewish writer, comics artist, amateur puppeteer, and half-baked Yiddishist.”
In the commentary, Goldman wrote that “to oppose Zionism is to oppose a settler-colonial project rooted in white supremacist expansionism. It is not anti-Semitic. In fact, I’d argue it’s the opposite.”
Beyond the faux-academic gobbledygook used by Goldman in an attempt to defame Zionism as something nefarious, nothing about it is “settler-colonial,” or rooted in “white supremacist expansionism.”
Zionism is the Jewish People’s national liberation movement which holds that Jews have the right to pursue self-determination on a collective scale in their historic and ancestral homeland.
To oppose Zionism, consequently, is to accept historical revisionism and deny the three thousand years of Jewish habitation in the Levant, an ignorance that Goldman is apparently enthusiastic to embrace.
As for Goldman’s bizarre take, that opposing the Jewish People’s collective right of self-determination is somehow “the opposite” of antisemitism is simply unintelligible nonsense. In fact, by any reasonable definition of antisemitism, denying Jews the rights one would give to others would fall under the rubric of Jew-hatred.
Seemingly unsatisfied with attempting to bastardize the meaning of Zionism, Goldman twice accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza as part of its counter-terrorism campaign against Hamas.
While such allegations are often favoured by anti-Israel activists, such claims are ridiculous to the point of absurdity.
Israel, though it possesses the military capacity to effectively wipe Gaza off the map in minutes, has obviously not done so. In fact, even after six months of high-intensity urban warfare, where Hamas terrorists – with hundreds of Israeli hostages in tow – have hidden amongst civilians, Israel has taken extraordinary measures to minimize civilian casualties.
Israel has provided repeated and ample warnings to civilians, has placed Israeli soldiers on the ground to fight, rather than simply striking targets from the air.
As a result, the proportion of civilian casualties in Gaza is far lower than in virtually any other armed conflict in modern history, a fact that has received virtually no mention in Canadian news media coverage of the Hamas-Israel war.
Goldman’s column also defended the now-failed effort by anti-Israel activists to force the University of British Columbia to effectively expel Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization, by ending the institution’s lease with the group.
Fortunately, the hateful effort was a catastrophic failure for those who sought to expel Hillel, but Goldman defended the attempt, ostensibly because they “have never felt represented” by Hillel, and citing the group’s temerity to have a soldier from the Israel Defense Forces speak on campus.
Jess Goldman’s opinion column in The Ubyssey is a rambling anti-Israel screed which shows little respect for factual accuracy, and attempts to condescendingly twist the meaning of Zionism into a nefarious movement, when it is the exact opposite.
israel-academia-monitor.com 