Canadian Federation of Students

At last week’s national general meeting of the Canadian Federation of Students, delegates rejected a series of motions put forward by members participating in a coordinated defederation campaign against the student organization.

Months ago, I wrote about workshops the Conservative Party was organizing across the country, training their members on how to defund progressive campus groups like Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) and defederate from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).

Since then, petitions have been circulating on numerous campuses to defederate from the CFS – the student version of the Canadian Labour Congress – which federates over 80 students’ unions across the country.

A more surprising development has been the recent participation in these defederation efforts from self-described progressive students.  An “Open Letter from the Left to the Canadian Federation of Students” was published online by Concordia University student Lex Gill in October of this year, supporting defederation campaigns against the CFS.  The letter was written in response to an article penned by Toronto Coalition to Stop the War activist James Clark, in support of a pan-Canadian student organization.

But was this open letter actually coming from the left?

The letter put forward arguments against the CFS that students are used to hearing from conservatives on their campuses, advocating the depoliticization of student organizations.

Here’s an excerpt: “No matter what we think about Palestine, copyright, gender, Cuba, abortion, or land claims it is unrepresentative to speak for all students on such divisive issues.”

I’m not exactly sure what’s so divisive about copyright, but I guess it would be irresponsible for the student movement to alienate the recording industry in favour of students’ right to access information.

Brian Latour at Canadian Dimension does a great job refuting the article from a left perspective, so I’ll just link to his response.

A few students signed on to Lex Gill’s open letter, most of them members of the Concordia Students’ Union.  That student union supported a series of resolutions at last week’s Annual General Meeting of the CFS in a so-called “reform package,” ostensibly to democratize the organization.

However, most of the motions are just as right-wing as the so-called “open letter from the left”.

Several of the motions would have removed decision-making powers from elected representatives and placed them in boards selected by lottery.

Other motions attempted to undermine the working conditions of the organization, where staff members are unionized with CUPE. One of the “reform package” motions was to fire a unionized staff member and another was to pay minimum wages to the national executive.

In order to avoid union grievances filed by their staff, the elected leadership of the CFS ruled one motion out of order for violating the collective agreement.  They asked the movers of this motion to sign an agreement stating that they would assume responsibility if their motions or actions during the meeting resulted in a union grievance.

“Open letter” signatory Beisan Zubi was one of the Concordia students asked to sign this agreement, in response to the anti-worker motion seconded by her student union.  In her recollection of the meeting, she refused to sign the agreement, which she deemed “inappropriate.”

Although the Concordia Student Union seconded the “reform package,” it was officially submitted by the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) of McGill University.

To support its motion at the meeting, the PGSS sent three delegates who were not members of their student union to represent McGill graduate students.  One of them was Jose Barrios, a University of Victoria defederation activist flown in from British Columbia; another was Dean Tester, a conservative student at Carleton University and owner of www.alwaysright.ca.

Some PGSS members were surprised to learn that their student union was paying delegate fees for an unholy alliance of grievance mongers who weren’t even McGill graduate students.

“PGSS Council never approved the outside reps being brought, nor has PGSS Council ever approved the reform package,” says McGill graduate student Paul Sutton.  “It’s anti-democratic by definition.”

For a student union that is eager to offer suggestions for democratic reform, it looks like they have a lot of work to do reforming their own practices.