By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 20, 2013
What is it?
The little brother to the U-Pass, the My Safe Ride Home (MSRH) program was initiated in September 2009 and will run until April 30, 2013. The program guarantees each UFV student one $25 cab ride within Abbotsford or Chilliwack, but only with the usage of the old U-Pass card after it’s been activated through the SUS website portal. If you no longer have that card, you’re out of luck.
The My Safe Ride Home program was a risk mitigation service. It was meant to be a way for inebriated or endangered students to extricate themselves quickly from awkward or dangerous situations with zero consequence for themselves or their wallets.
The Student Union Society sank a lot of money into the program, almost half a million dollars over three years of operation. The SUS also initiated the signing of two separate contract amendments, and eventually decided to shut down the program short of its original five year term.
This is goodbye to My Safe Ride Home. This is also your last chance to understand what the program was, who created/initiated it, and why it didn’t work at UFV.
What is MSRH? Why not just call a cab?
“You could just call a cab, but what we did in our business model is we went a step further and we said to the cab company, ‘Let us reward you for making us a priority customer Let us pay you more for that cab ride, and when you have a student from UFV call you, we want to have the ability to track that cycle time and make sure that if that girl’s in a bad situation, [if] she can get to the washroom in the bar and call you, we want to know that, if [she calls] a cab and it typically takes 45 minutes we’d like to think that you’re there in nine.’ So there’s the qualitative difference…”
–Steve Paul, president of Aislinn
Who operates it?
UFV’s MSRH program is operated by the MMC Software Canada Corp with the supervision and partnership of the non-profit Aislinn Education and Safety Foundation. The service took the tangible form of the old U-Pass cards, which were a product of the MSRH program. The distribution of these cards was orchestrated by the UFV SUS, who also negotiated the initial 2009 contract with MMC and paid for student involvement in the program. Currently, UFV is the only major MSRH contract MMC operates.
MMC
The MSRH program was originally created by a team of four individuals: Steve Paul, Jason Keeley, Terry Johnson and Alex Stuart. Stuart is currently president of MMC while Paul is president of Aislinn.
MMC is the business end of MSRH. The contracts with both the SUS and Central Valley Taxi (the only MSRH affiliate in Abbotsford) are contracts with MMC. MMC handles the finances of MSRH, developed the software which allows MSRH to function, and facilitates usage of the program and the data surrounding that usage.
When will SUS get statistics for MSRH usage among UFV students?
“There are a whole lot of unknowns here, but what is quantifiably going to become very clear is that come April 30, [SUS will] have very succinct numbers on how many students have actually used the service. I still won’t know how many students who registered have in fact left the program a year earlier. But that doesn’t matter, because if they were originally on with the program and they didn’t use their ride that will fall under the non-redemption category and the Student Union will be given back effectively 50 per cent of that fund in support of student scholarships and bursaries as was per the original agreement.”
–Alex Stuart, president of MMC
Aislinn Education and Safety Foundation
Aislinn is the non-profit foundation which provides the secondary incentive for SUS participation in MSRH (the primary incentive being risk mitigation). If a student doesn’t use the $25 dollar cab credit within the contracted period, the money is transferred by MMC to a “non-redemption” fund, which is then considered profit. When dealing with non-profits such as SUS, MMC turns a certain percentage of that fund over to Aislinn (in SUS’s case 50 per cent), to be donated back to the participating organization. Aislinn is supervised by a Mentorship Advisory Team consisting of several notable individuals including: Peter Podovinikoff (former CEO of Envision Credit Union), Dr. Lee Summers (former executive director of BC School Trustees Association), Dr. Arvinder Bubber (former chancellor of Kwantlen University), and Ken Goosen (former senior vice-president operations for Air Canada).
The MSRH is a fledgling program and UFV is MMC’s only major contract. What kind of protection did/does SUS have for their hundreds of thousands in the program?
“Everything was transparent here. There wasn’t at any time, a saying or suggesting to SUS that we weren’t new with this idea that it [wasn’t] something that we were creating and crafting. All of that was upfront. You can ask a Jay Mitchell or a Jack [Brown, both former SUS presidents], they knew right at the outset that we were trying to create this thing and that this was our first attempt to try to get this connected to a post-secondary that could benefit with a relatively low cost unit price of a My Safe Ride Home. At no time did we come in and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got 30 years [of] experience, lots of bench strength here’. We didn’t embellish or misrepresent the reality, we came and said, ‘Look, we’ve got a concept here that we’d like to conjunctively work with you folks on to undertake this U-Pass initiative.”
–Steve Paul, president of Aislinn
Why survey the UFV student body?
“What constitutes success when it comes to MSRH? Does it mean that we’ve prevented one injury? Several major injuries? Worst case, did we in fact actually prevent a possible fatality, and if so, why? We’re eager to get that statistical evidence because UFV SUS was our first institutional account. It became our most important in terms of an incubator for the service model in an institutional environment, and we were so delighted to see that students were using it.”
–Alex Stuart, president of MMC
Your UFV SUS
In 2009, SUS (under the oversight of financial administrator Luis Guevara) signed a contract with MMC agreeing to a partnership in which SUS would provide MMC with $25 per each UFV student to cover the cost of that student’s potential usage of the MSRH program. In late 2010 into 2011 and again in 2012 SUS renegotiated portions of the initial contract in response to “misinterpretation” of the operation of the program by the SUS board. SUS’s role was to distribute Aislinn’s MSRH cards (the former U-Pass card) to first-year students, and to inform and enable students to use the program effectively.
What happened then?
The original MSRH contract drawn up by MMC and signed by SUS gave each student a year to use their $25 credit before that money was translated into profit and half of it returned to UFV SUS through Aislinn. Due to what former SUS Communications Administrator Jhim Burwell labeled “a misinterpretation” of the contract by several of the signing SUS members, many didn’t realize that MSRH coverage would last only for a year, and not for the entirety of a student’s time at UFV.
The misunderstanding was only discovered after SUS received and spent a check for $105,000 at the end of the first contracted year in October, 2010. At the time, then-SUS President, Jay Mitchell, stated at the time that the check presentation “represents a U-Pass partnership that is obviously working – our partnership with the My Safe Ride Home program.” This shows how contradictory SUS’s understanding of the program actually was. Within months the SUS board (under a new president) would be negotiating with MMC to amend the contract, without returning the money they had received in October.
According to Steve Paul, he and Guevara discovered the problem with their respective interpretations during the ride back from the check presentation in Chilliwack. The question of why SUS accepted the check (or cashed it) is a mystery to the current SUS executive; neither the timing nor the amount fit with the contractual understanding Burwell claimed SUS had at the time.
Where did SUS get that $25 per student?
Originally, SUS reserved a $5 portion of the semesterly U-Pass fee for the MSRH program. While SUS would pay the entire $25 to MMC in the first semester of a student’s enrolment, that student would repay SUS in semesterly $5 increments. After five semesters of enrolment that student would have paid off their MSRH credit and any further semesterly charges would be rolled over into other student programs.
Did the renegotiation work?
The contractual agreement reached at the beginning of 2011 adapted the MSRH model to cover students for the entirety of their time at UFV–or at least attempted to. What SUS needed was a way to determine when students left UFV, either through graduation or unenrolment, and the tentative model SUS proposed (if a student “hadn’t registered for three or four consecutive semesters” according to Burwell), was obviously not financially viable for MMC. Then SUS attempted to restart the program, which also proved unsuccessful, and led to a second amendment in Spring 2011 which provided for the program to end in April 2013.
What happens now?
On the first of April, SUS will invoice MMC for the amount owed to them under the terms of the contract (exactly half of the non-redemption fund). This fund is composed of the $25 credit for each student entered in the MSRH program who does not use that credit before the April 30 program termination. SUS will determine the number of students who have used the program (and therefore the size of the non-redemption fund) using numbers provided by MMC.
Earlier in the year, MMC asked SUS to survey the UFV population on their awareness and usage of the MSRH program. SUS president Shane Potter agreed to survey the student body as soon as MMC provided SUS with the number of students who have used the program since its beginning in 2009. As of press time, those numbers have not been provided to either SUS or The Cascade, however, Steve Paul stated that 609 students out of the 8,990 registered in the first year used the program, and Alex Stuart claimed that “2000 plus” have used it altogether.
The Hard Money
How much has the SUS paid to MMC Software since signing the contract in 2009?
Roughly $481,101.96 (roughly $225,000 in 2009-2010, and another $256,101.96 since then).
How much has been returned to SUS by the Aislinn Education and Safety Foundation?
$105,000 in October, 2010.
How much is still owed to SUS?
This is hard to calculate without knowing exactly how many students have used the MSRH program, but it will be exactly half of what is unused after the end of the contract in April. If program usage remains static at roughly 600 students a year, the SUS should receive a little over $100,000 (not including any interest accrued).
As a student, where has my $5 a semester been spent since SUS stopped paying into the MSRH fund last April?
It’s been used to pay for other portions of the U-Pass program. The MSRH program was not part of the original U-Pass referendum and therefore a referendum was not required to end the program.
Interview with Shane Potter, Jan 25, 2012
On various occasions, I asked SUS how much money goes into the MSRH program, how many students use it, what the contract was like. Why were you unable to answer?
Unfortunately the contract which we have with MSRH has a privacy clause in it, so it prevents me from disclosing those details.
I would argue that it is probably in the best interest of the students who are paying for this program to know details like these.
It would not be in the best interest of the students to violate a contract. We are expecting a check from MSRH, and to violate that contract would therefore obviously decrease the possibility of obtaining that check.
This program has been running for three and a half to four years now. You’re saying SUS has never asked for that information before a month ago?
Unfortunately, I’ve just been elected as interim president, so as soon as I was elected I looked into this program as much as I could. I will say that I feel that there should have been more, there could have been more dialogue between MSRH and the SUS, but that’s the nature of changing boards. Unfortunately I have all the data I could get, perhaps more questions should have been asked, but we asked the questions when we came in.
The Aislinn corporation which runs MSRH guarantees on the website that with contracted partners they will provide all data on how many people use the system, how it operates and so forth. You are telling me that the data has not been provided to you. Has Aislinn then violated that portion of the agreement?
No, because there is no timeline with which they have to present me with that data. They are telling me that they are gathering the data and I have to take their word for it. They have told me that they are prepared to give me the data, and I have to take their word for it at this point.
When was the last time someone from UFV SUS talked to an Aislinn representative on the phone or in person?
We had a meeting a month ago and we’ve exchanged a couple emails since then. We’re just waiting to hear back on the information.
Aislinn met your request for data with a proposed survey of UFV students, but you turned down their offer. What was the reasoning behind the survey and your denial of that survey?
Well, basically we didn’t deny the survey. They requested information of our students, which was in their right to ask. I merely requested the information that I asked from them before the survey was conducted. That was all I asked. We’re waiting to get the information that they have to us, and then we will allow them to do any survey they wish.
What kind of information did they want from the student body?
I don’t think my contract allows me to disclose that, but it was pretty basic data for marketing purposes.
