QPIRG-McGill is a student-run, student-funded social and environmental justice organization. QPIRG-McGill facilitates research opportunities for students that link them up with the broader Montreal community (through the Community University Research Exchange, the undergraduate student journal Convergence, an alternative resource library, and funding for summer research projects). QPIRG-McGill also empowers students to take action: by funding and supporting 20+ working groups, who take on different social and environmental issues in Montreal and Canada. QPIRG-McGill aims to support our community by funding events on campus and in Montreal, by putting on popular education event series such as Social Justice Days and Culture Shock, through organizing an alternative orientation (Rad Frosh), publishing School Schmool (an ad-free agenda and resource guide), and so much more!

QPIRG-McGill has been responsible for various important milestones on McGill campus such as initiating paper recycling in the 1990s, starting the first housing co-op for McGill students, and was integral in getting fair-trade coffee on campus.

You are! Every McGill student who has not opted-out is a member of QPIRG-McGill because you pay a membership fee at the beginning of each semester with your tuition. QPIRG-McGill is run primarily by volunteers who are both students and non-students.

Every year, at QPIRG’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), our 12-member Board of Directors is elected by the QPIRG membership (any student who has not opted-out of our fee, as well as QPIRG community members). The board, of which at least half are students, is responsible for making major decisions – such as granting discretionary funding and selecting working groups – and working towards the long-term vision of the organization determined by the membership. At the AGM, the membership also has the chance to voice concerns and emphasize priorities for the upcoming year. While the board makes many of the financial and structural decisions, and the staff keep the organization running day-to-day, our programming and operations are especially shaped by our many student volunteers, who serve on many of QPIRG’s committees.

QPIRG is funded primarily through an opt-outable student fee levy of $5.00 per student per semester. We receive some additional funding through our fundraising efforts, the Work Study system at McGill, and some government grants that fund student summer jobs.

Every year, QPIRG publishes an Annual Report, which includes a comprehensive financial report of what we’ve spent our funding on, as well as a summary of what we’ve accomplished over the last year.

This report is available each year at our Annual General Meeting (typically held in early April), and published online shortly after. To view our Annual Reports, click here.

All members are also welcome to reach out to QPIRG-McGill to learn more about what we do and the resources we provide!

As a member of QPIRG-McGill, you can vote in our Annual General Meeting and run for the Board of Directors. You have access to a plethora of benefits, including: 

• meeting space (QPIRG has three main meeting rooms available to any QPIRG member); 
• opportunities to be published or receive class credit for meaningful research (student members are welcome to participate in the Community University Research Exchange program, as well as submit their work to be published in our Convergence journal);
• support for your projects (QPIRG provides funding for one-time projects as well as for more sustained projects through Working Group funding); 
• the largest alternative library in Montreal (we have over one thousand titles, including books, journals, magazines, DVDs and videos);
• training (our board, staff and working group members offer specific training on organizational management, media trainings, and a variety of workshops); 
• jobs (QPIRG McGill hires work study students every year to coordinate the library, the CURE project, and help with campus outreach, as well as students in the summer to coordinate Rad Frosh and School Schmool);
• educational events (we invite all our members to attend educational events we organize, such as Culture Shock, Social Justice Days, and more!)
• the opportunity to get involved by volunteering with one of our committees, which provide valuable skills in areas such as event planning, outreach, non-profit structures, and accessibility

Learn more about how you can get involved with QPIRG!

From the very early days, students felt that that it was important that PIRGs should be independent from student unions, and PIRGs across the country have maintained this structure. The most central reason for this is that PIRGs have a mandate to bring the university community together with the greater Montreal community, whereas the primary responsibility of student unions is to their students. It is of vital importance to us that our space, resources, and support are available to SSMU students, PGSS students, and non-students alike, and this is what allows for students and community members to actually work together. Most of this work would be impossible under the restrictive funding and space use policies of the SSMU and the PGSS.

Students first voted to approve a QPIRG fee-levy in 1989. Shortly thereafter, QPIRG adopted a refund system to enable students who do not wish to fund our organization to get their money back and thus rescind their membership rights. Students would come and collect their fees at the QPIRG offices, and this system functioned successfully for nineteen years. In the fall of 2007, the McGill Administration unilaterally imposed an online opt-out system on Minerva, without consultation with QPIRG or any of the other affected student groups (including CKUT). Since that time, QPIRG has consistently tried to negotiate with McGill to bring the refund system back under student control; to this date, McGill has not backed down from their position, despite numerous student votes asking them to do so (see below).

It discourages informed consent: The externally imposed system does not facilitate informed decisions– students can opt out of all opt-outable fees without ever finding out about the group from which they are choosing to rescind their membership. Regardless of how much outreach and publicity QPIRG and the other opt-outable groups do, it is very difficult to guarantee that students are fully informed before opting out. If students were able to speak to representatives from the affected organizations, they could make conscious and informed decisions about their student fees; these are the kinds of conversations we want to be having on campus.

Since McGill imposed online opt-outs on student groups, the number of students opting-out has increased significantly and across the board for all opt-outable fee-levy groups; there has been only a marginal (0.5 – 1.5%) difference in opt-out rates between QPIRG, CKUT, Referral Services (Nightline, Queer McGill, Union for Gender Empowerment) and Midnight Kitchen, indicating that students are blanket opting out, ie. opting out of all services. QPIRG continues to believe strongly in students being able to decide where their money goes; we simply want these decisions to be informed.

It undermines student democracy: Students have consistently voted to support QPIRG’s existence, whether through existence referenda (Winter 2007), a referendum for fee-levy groups to take back control over their opt-outs (Winter 2008), a GA motion for fee-levy groups to have control over their opt-outs (Fall 2007), and for a QPIRG fee-levy increase (Winter 2009). The McGill Administration has consistently ignored the student vote; QPIRG is committed to following through on students’ requests to have the system come back under student control.

Additionally, the Minerva on-line opt-out system makes it difficult for QPIRG to continue the work that the student body has mandated it to do, primarily because of the unregulated opt-out campaigning that occurs every semester. This campaign has used all kinds of tactics to convince students to opt out of our fee, from spreading misinformation about our organization, to trivializing our work by encouraging students to buy a beer and pizza with the money they would save from our fee. This kind of campaign, which is not accountable to any student or student organization, has serious consequences for an organization like QPIRG, and has very much been facilitated by an on-line opt-out system without any checks or balances. It is essentially as though QPIRG were forced into campaigning for its existence every single semester, without any rules to regulate the activities of the opt-out campaign.

The resources QPIRG and other student groups have to use to ensure that as many students as possible are informed about our services before opting out could be used to run even more programming for students!

Put simply, there is just way too much going on at QPIRG not to have staff! We have hundreds of actively involved members, 20 working groups, a library, a community research program, multiple publications, 3 major event series throughout the year, and ongoing training and development programs for student organizations. We simply could not maintain this work on a purely volunteer basis, and we certainly could not also meet our legal and financial responsibilities as a non-profit, such as preparing for an annual audit, meeting the criteria for incorporation, and managing the organization’s insurance. In fact, one of our biggest problems is being severely understaffed– having three full time staff for that amount of work is vastly insufficient.

Though the direction of the organization is decided by members of QPIRG-McGill, the staff are the ones who carry out these decisions and do all the hard behind the scenes work of making these events happen, and these programs function! This includes our three full-time staff, and a number of part-time student staffers!

As an organization committed to social justice, we also believe that this commitment extends to how we treat our employees. To begin, that means we believe that our staff should be paid a “living wage”, that is, a wage that brings them above the poverty line. Minimum wage does not pay enough for an adult to live above the poverty line in Montreal. As well, many of our staff are paid through grants such as Young Canada Works, Emploi Quebec, McGill Work Study, and Canada Summer Jobs.

McGill students value a diverse and lively campus community. Students recognize that education is more than what you learn in class – it’s about the people you meet and the experiences you have. From our programs (like Rad Frosh and Social Justice Days) to our projects (where we fight things like homophobia, racism and sexism on campus), QPIRG is an important part of campus life and an important home and resource to many, many students. Being a member of the student community means that even if you personally don’t plan to use a service, you still believe in the right of other students to do so.  It’s like any publicly funded service, such as health care – you might not need or use it very often, but you wouldn’t deny it to someone who did.

There are many student groups, clubs, and services that could not exist without everybody chipping in. However, if all of our services were only funded by the people using them that year, many of them would not exist. While you may not use QPIRG’s services personally, the importance of our existence on campus is significant to many students at McGill.