The Ontarion attempts to make a convoluted issue simple and clear

Written by Daniel Bitonti

A small percentage of students already think it really is a big issue: the university’s student government pursuing legal action against both the provincial and national components of the Canadian Federation of Students, Canada’s largest student lobby group.

Last week, the Ontarion ran a front-page news story that detailed the current legal proceedings between the CSA and the CFS.

It was dry. It was filled with legal jargon.

It was perhaps interesting to only those who understood what had happened, how it got to this point, and where the story was going.

Ironically, the same week, we ran a centre story that questioned student apathy towards student politics. Our news story was clearly an ineffective way of curbing this very apathy.

So this week, the Ontarion looks at what the CFS is, what has transpired between the federation and the University of Guelph, and some of the criticisms of the organization. Basically this is a “dummy’s guide” to the issue.

The CSA, your student government, is one of over 80 student unions that make up the Canadian Federation of Students. The CSA belongs to both the national and provincial components of the federation and each semester, every undergraduate student pays CFS membership fees – $3.30 to CFS-Ontario and $3.97 to CFS-National.

“Basically they have a three-pronged approach. They do lobbying, research and campaigning,” said Momina Mir, the CSA’s external commissioner. “And believe it or not, the amount of contribution students pay for CFS is outnumbered by the benefits they receive. Students are getting a lot of what they individually would have never been able to accomplish without being part of the CFS.”

The CFS’s best-known initiative is reducing tuition, lobbying the government on behalf of students. In Ontario, the Drop Fees campaign culminated in a day of action against tuition hikes, a showing of solidarity more than anything else. According to the CFS, national efforts to reduce and freeze tuition have had success over the last 15 years. Tuition fees in British Columbia, for example, were frozen between 1996 and 2002. In Manitoba, fees were reduced by 10 per cent in 2000-2001, only to finally thaw last year. Students in Quebec, as well as Newfoundland and Larbrador, have also benefited from tuition freezes in the past decade.

Beyond fighting for affordable education, the CFS provides students with services such as the International Student Identification Card and the Travel CUTS program, promoting student-oriented products and services, such as student fares on airlines and trains, and student tour packages.

But what gets Mir particularly fired up are the wide range of social justice causes taken up by the CFS, such as the Task Force on Racism and the Task Force on Islamaphobia, a program Mir was personally involved in.
“Those students have no other avenue,” Mir said. “This report [on islamaphobia] was done provincially and nationally so you get to see what’s happening at other campuses that are better than you and ones that are not as good as you.

“You can share that information and improve on your services. I took this report to all the administrations across the province and I worked with administrations on improving services that impacted students locally.”

Erin Millar, a journalist who has been covering the CFS since 2002 and a founding editor of Maclean’s On Campus website, agrees with Mir on the effectiveness of a national student lobby.

“[The] CFS has access to so many ministers. They have the ability to put in opinion on the budget. They have all that structure. They have done a hell of a lot over the years,” she said.  “If you look at some of the things they have done on campus, not to do with tuition, they are really important.”

Millar points to the No Means No campaign as an example of this, a CFS-run initiative that raises awareness about rape, something that “nobody on campuses wants to talk about.”

But the CSA has taken legal action against the CFS, in the name of democracy.

In the fall of this year, student organizers, frustrated with the federation, sent petitions to the provincial and national component with student signatures requesting a referendum. According to both CFS-Ontario and CFS-National bylaws, in order for a referendum to take place, petitions must be sent to the federation six months prior to an intended referendum with signatures of 10 per cent of the student undergraduate population.

CFS-Ontario has denied students a referendum because petitions were sent in past the deadline. Issues over the validity of student signatures on the petition sent to the national component have stalled the process there. The CSA has asked the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to decide whether a referendum will take place. It will do so on Mar. 23.

A smooth referendum process has seemed elusive at other universities, as well. The Post Graduate Students Society at McGill is currently asking courts in Quebec to set a referendum date. In the spring of 2008, the B.C. Supreme Court decided that Kwantlen University College would get to vote on the issue of membership after the CFS tried to delay the vote until the fall of that year. Similarly, the CFS had previously asked the provincial courts in Ontario to rule on the Guelph petitions this April or May, a development that would have effectively postponed the referendum to the fall.

What has happened over the last several years continues to be a matter of interpretation; some students have argued that litigations between the CFS and students unions reflects the heavy-handed tactics of an over-zealous and greedy organization, bent on putting barriers up to democracy. Other will argue that bylaws are bylaws, and in the case of the Guelph petitions, the bylaws were not followed.

Whatever the case, Millar has picked up on a trend over the last eight years: “I guess the thing that has been consistent over the years has been this ends justifies the means thinking that is really, really harmful,” she said. “I think they [the CFS] honestly believe in it [their mission]…people who want change are kind of seen as just foolish students. So they [the CFS] justify the crazy tactics they have in the name of the issues that are so important.”

Millar points to several anti-democratic practices of the CFS she believes has led to a “backlash” over the last several years. While government and university transparency is one of the CFS’s key lobbying platforms, student media has found it difficult to attend CFS annual general meetings over the years. This past December, the Concordian reported that the CFS granted media credentials to only two reporters for their Annual AGM, one being the Ottawa bureau chief for the Canadian University Press.

The CFS has also explicitly tried to silence dissent in the past, according to Millar. In 2007, in perhaps the best-known example, the CFS threatened Ryerson’s student newspaper with a lawsuit if it printed certain statements about the organization. In a joint letter to the editor last week, the Guelph Campus Conservatives, University of Guelph Young Liberals and Guelph campus Greens outlined their own issues with the CFS and demanded that the Canadian Federation of Students “demonstrate financial and administrative transparency, take a non-partisan stance during elections, acknowledge student right to choose through a referendum and cease unjust litigation of your own students.”

Again, the claims that the CFS is against democracy are a matter of how you interpret events that have taken place over the decade.

Mir, however, still remains confused on where anti-CFS rhetoric is coming from.

“There hasn’t been a single student out of 18, 500 students who have walked in here to my office and said ‘I have a problem with the CFS being not transparent and asking about issues over litigation.’ This is the first time I have heard of any issue. This is a new concept that [the] CFS isn’t democratic.”

Student media across the country continues to report weekly in a way that highlights the transgressions of the CFS. But being such a complex issue, if students wish to truly grasp the issue, we must become journalists, ensconcing yourself in the hundreds of articles written over the last five years. All we have to say is good luck!

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