SU Elections 2026 Q&A: East Campus Students’ Association Referendum

The University of Alberta Students’ Union (SU) 2026 election is giving East Campus residents the opportunity to vote on the potential creation of a student representative association membership fee (SRAMF) by the East Campus Students’ Association (ECSA).

The proposed SRAMF is $10 per semester and students would have the option to opt-out. Representing ECSA in this Q&A is Meagan Lang.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

For students who don’t know, what is ECSA?

Meagan Lang: ECSA is a student group that represents all residents that live in East Campus. So East Campus includes … Peter Lougheed Hall, Alder House and Linden House, and then we also have a lot of the upper-year residences, so Nîpisîy, Aspen, Maple, Pinecrest, Tamarack, those are all wrapped up in East Campus. We are separate from the university and from residence. We’re supposed to be a separate group so that if residents have any concerns, say, I don’t know, Residence Life is doing something and they’re like, “oh, I don’t like that,” then we are an autonomous body that they can come to so that we can take action, right? We’re just pretty much supposed to advocate for them. We have really focused this year on trying to build community. A lot of us coming from our first year residences found that once you hit upper year, there’s just like a huge crumbling of community. It doesn’t exist as much in the upper year residences, so that’s what we’ve focused on. So we put a lot more effort into events and programming and things like that, whereas ECSA in the past hasn’t really done that.

What is this referendum trying to accomplish?

Lang: ECSA is unique when it comes to residence associations in that we currently do not have a membership fee, so Lister, International House (I-House), HUB, they all have specific fees that pretty much pay for getting events. Last year we were able to bring in the stairmaster in the Nîpisîy gym, that was something that people wanted. So we’ve been able to implement things like that using money that you would get from a fee. East Campus had a little bit because the ECSA previously existed, they had a little bit of money left over and so that’s pretty much what we’ve been operating on this year. Obviously that’s not gonna last forever, so we need some sort of like revenue source and that’s what this [referendum] would be accomplishing is we are hoping that we can implement this fee. We’re wanting to keep it to just $10 which is at least $20 cheaper than most of the other residences, so $10 per semester I should say. That will only be for the fall and the winter semesters, and so this [referendum] is essentially asking students, is this something that you would endorse? And so if you would like to have more events, have more improvements to the resident spaces, if you want to keep us as an advocacy body, that’s the kind of things that we’re asking for. 

If the referendum passes, how much would students be paying and how was that cost determined?

Lang: $10 per semester. We are committed to having an opt-out fee. That’s something that we all said from the very start, or an opt-out option, and also if there is an excess of $1,000 at the end, then we would reimburse that to students. We came to the number of $10 per semester just based off of our budget this year. With our budget this year, if we were to do pretty much exactly the same thing, then it would work out to about $10 per semester per student, recognizing, obviously, that this is the first year that the ECSA has really existed and operated, so there could be fees that we encountered this year that there won’t be next year, there may be events or other things that happen in following years that don’t exist this year, so that’s not a stagnant number, it may change in coming years, but that was how we based it this year. We came with the number of $1,000 excess to be refunded to students because there’s over 800 students in East Campus so if it was like if we have $20 excess by the time you divide that over 800 people, it really doesn’t amount to much, so that’s where we came to the $1,000 refund. 

Why do you think students should care about the work being done by ECSA? 

Lang: I don’t know if you had the opportunity to go to the residence town hall, but during that you could just hear that there were so many concerns that students had where they didn’t feel like residence was hearing them. One of the most common responses I think residences gave us was that they would fix these things if they heard about them, and so the easiest way for students to make those concerns heard is to talk to us. 

They brought it up a couple of times that Paige [Wall], our president, she sits on the Council of Residence Associations (CORA) and through that they have weekly meetings that all of the residence associations meet with the folks that work in residence to answer all of their questions and bring up any concerns that they have. So we have an office hours right now, Mondays from 4:00–7:00 p.m., every Monday. That’s kind of the most successful way that students can reach residence and let their concerns be heard. So I think that’s really the main point that we have is if you would like to improve your residence experience, obviously we’re trying to do that through events and through programming and adding ping pong tables to lounges and things like that, but I think if you really have specific things, letting us know we can get them to residence. 

CORRECTION: A correction was issued at 12:27 p.m. on February 24 to correct that the ECSA fee is a referendum, not a plebiscite.