The ‘civil service’ of committees around McGill Student Council played an important role in researching and promoting new ideas about the relation of English Quebeckers to the new Quebec, about democratizing the university, and about changing the classroom to put students in charge of their own education.

McGill Student Society president Sharon Scholzberg fails to mobilize students to fight a fee increase. She then loses a referendum to join the unilingual French-language Quebec national student association (UGEQ). But many students are moving leftward, and many are open to supporting a new Quebec, where the francophone Quebecois exercize power proportionate to their (large majority) size of the population.

A conservative Council for 1966-67 is elected in Spring 1966. Ironically, it is on their watch that McGill students eventually vote to join UGEQ. An attempt to punish the student newspaper editor Sandy Gage for allowing publication of an article on a McGill professor’s research, that is used to aid the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, backfires on the student right. The SDU is created out of the student body defence of press freedom.