CUTV’s AGM was cut short as members questioned their years-long funding of independent media organization the Breach.
CUTV’s 2024 Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Nov. 4 was cut short as two participants hurried out of the Hive Café just as a vote to reconsider a $50,000 transfer to media organization the Breach was about to begin.
The Community University Television (CUTV) has been funding the Breach since its beginnings in 2021, and the final total of their contribution to the independent media outlet will add up to $360,000. This represents more than a year of fee levy revenue for CUTV, which received almost $235,000 from the student body in 2024.
A few days before the AGM, Board Member and Treasurer Mackenzie Smedmor announced that they won’t run for re-election due to the unfavorable financial situation that the station has found itself in and its inability to influence it.
During the AGM, multiple CUTV members expressed their surprise as the group discussed the continued funding of the Breach, an outlet unrelated to Concordia that focuses on coverage of national issues. They felt that the money could be better used to provide services to Concordia students and CUTV members.
Incubating the Breach
CUTV is Canada’s oldest campus-based TV facility and gets most of its funding from a Concordia fee levy. In February 2021, its board of directors signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Breach to help the organization launch its operations.
The MOU entailed that CUTV would financially support or “incubate” the Breach from its creation phase in 2021 until February 2025, with a total contribution of $360,000 over this time frame. The smallest and final sum of $50,000 will be transferred on Feb. 1, 2025.
The three signatures at the bottom of the MOU are those of CUTV Executive Director Dru Oja Jay, the Breach managing editor Martin Lukacs, and, at the time, President of the CUTV Board of Directors Marcus Peters.
Peters sat on CUTV’s board from 2020 to 2023, returning to the position after temporarily leaving because of cooperating troubles with various other board members, according to current CUTV members.
At the time, interest in CUTV was low. Membership numbers surged just weeks before the 2019 AGM, held in February 2020, and Peters was re-elected onto the board. That summer, a petition by CUTV members accused the newly-elected board of directors of having convinced their friends to become members in order to get elected.
“It was clearly a mandate that almost nobody within leadership positions at the station had an interest in upholding, so I felt like it was a constant uphill battle and I got burned out and declined to rerun the following year,” said Peters.
Peters was also a member of the Breach’s board until a few days ago.
The Breach became active in 2022. According to their presentation at CUTV’s Nov. 4 AGM, around one-fifth of their 2024 revenue came from payments from CUTV.
Jay, still CUTV’s executive director and now a publisher and member of the Breach’s board, explained the large amount of money going to the Breach. According to Jay, the outlet is still valuable to Concordia students because it covers topics that interest students, such as Pierre Poilievre’s “fake populist playbook,” climate issues, and current international wars.
Membership pushback
CUTV staff, as well as students and community members, believe there isn’t much of a connection between CUTV and the Breach outside of its financing.
“I have never spoken to anyone affiliated with the Breach other than, of course, Dru, the executive director of CUTV,” said CUTV Board Member Allison O’Reilly.
“No one from the Breach has ever come to a board meeting, has never expressed interest in what’s going on at CUTV, has ever given back any support to CUTV that I could see. It’s a complete separation of organizations,” said O’Reilly.
Peters argued that this disconnect was inevitable.
“It is incubating it, so obviously the support is mostly unidirectional like that’s what one would expect,” he said. “The chair of the board of the Breach [Jay] is giving regular updates at every board meeting of CUTV. Like, what more do you need?”
O’Reilly, like Smedmor, is choosing not to run for re-election due to the continued funding of the Breach.
Musician Vincent Stephen-Ong has been a CUTV community member for almost a decade. Unlike student memberships, which are free of charge, community memberships cost $20 per year. He was disappointed with the recent neglect of service maintenance, a prime reason for his membership renewal.
“The rental system used to be [open] five days [a week]; now it’s down to three days. Why is the staff who’s doing this not able to work all five days? Like, why is there not enough money for the staff?” Stephen-Ong asked.
In response to Stephen-Ong’s complaint about lack of investing in equipment, Jay replied in an email that the projected costs of equipment would approximate $25,000 by the end of the year.
Peters defended the choice to continue funding the Breach rather than putting more money towards equipment.
“I can think of three sources off the top of my head, just at Concordia, that would happily fund expanding the fleet of equipment of CUTV,” he said.
“What kind of funding exists for developing radical alternative media to the scale of the Breach? There’s nothing out there unless some billionaire wakes up tomorrow and decides that he wants to fund media that literally is categorically opposed to his own class interests.”
This year’s AGM and spending with a deficit
CUTV ran a deficit of almost $93,000 in 2024, which was absorbed by a surplus, though the cash reserve has lowered. CUTV is foreseen to run a $15,000 deficit this coming year at worst, which will be absorbed by the same surplus, further eating into the reserve.
There were three different events in early 2023 concerning the misallocation of funds to the Breach, including instances where the Breach’s expenses were covered by CUTV due to credit card issues. Both CUTV’s and the Breach’s finances are handled by the solidarity cooperative Populus, which is staffed by former CUTV and Breach members.
After discussing the funding of the Breach at length during the AGM on Nov. 4, members motioned for a vote to ask the board of directors to consider rupturing the MOU and relocating the final sum of money for other internal purposes.
At 9:48 p.m., 12 minutes before the Hive Café’s space booking time expired, Peters shot up from his chair and scanned the root, intently counting heads.
“Quorum?” asked Grassroots Coverage Fund’s Executive Director and CUTV Board Member Nicolas Chevalier.
“I call for quorum,” said Peters to the meeting’s chair.
He promptly gathered his belongings and left, soon followed by Chevalier, ensuring that the meeting would not meet the quorum. Nine members sat in the Hive Café and seven on the Zoom call.
From that moment onwards, the AGM was void, as it failed to meet the 20-member quorum. The other items on the agenda, including the election of a new board of directors, were pushed to a Special General Meeting.
“The democratic process isn’t just about voting,” said Peters. “It’s about being informed, right? It’s not about blindly casting a vote, especially along polarized lines,” said Peters. “So 16 out of 20 is like an incredibly low threshold for making decisions that have massive impacts over the course of a year in an organization that has hundreds and hundreds of members.”
Chevalier joined the CUTV board in 2022. They say they haven’t been present enough on the board, and to compensate, they observed the AGM with intent and skepticism.
As members critiqued the Breach MOU, Chevalier argued that rupturing the MOU could invite legal pursuit, sending a collective murmur throughout the cafe.
They agreed with Peters that the financial statement presented at the AGM wasn’t approved by the board, leading to what they saw as an under-informed membership and an undemocratic AGM. The CUTV finance committee had not met since April.
“I got that people were adamant for new equipment. But as a board member, we have responsibilities,” they said. “It seemed a bit chaotic by the way it was brought over.”
A tentative date for the Special General Meeting is set for Dec. 5, at which time the board will revise official data and make a final decision. At the AGM, some members expressed worries that people with strong feelings about the Breach funding might rush to sign on new members who would vote alongside them.
Members must join at least 14 days in advance in order to vote to elect board members. Documents obtained by the Concordian show that, since the AGM, almost 30 new members have signed up, foreshadowing a surge of members who may vote to elect partisan board members. Before the AGM, there were a total of 18 new members in the 2024 term.
“You can’t pretend that something is anti-democratic because you disagree with it and forget that democracy is actually literally a popularity contest,” said Peters. “Instead of having a motion introduced on the floor in a sort of blindsided way in a meeting that didn’t even meet quorum, we’re having an actual conversation about it beforehand.”
Cameron MacIntyre is the program director of CJLO 1690 AM, Concordia’s campus radio station. MacIntyre joined CUTV’s membership this summer and originally put forward the motion to breach the MOU after looking into its situation. He is campaigning to be elected to the board in December.
“If students want to decide how that $50,000 is spent, come to the AGM. I believe student oversight over fee levies is absolutely central to what the levy is, and I think that this memorandum of understanding is a way of getting out of that oversight,” he said. “This is a nightmare scenario for any fee levy, in my mind.”
Editor’s note: Some members of the Concordian’s staff are involved with CUTV through l’Organe. They did not participate in the reporting and editing of this article.
A previous version of this article stated that CUTV would only spend $10,000 in equipment this year. This represented the fiscal year ending in April 2023. The Concordian apologizes for this error.
