Some controversial referendum questions proposed at the Jan. 10 Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) council meeting have sent several campus clubs scrambling to protect their existence. The questions also prompted the Carleton Conservatives to call an emergency meeting to defend free speech on campus and inspired a talk show host on the Sun News Network to ask, “What is wrong with Carleton University?”
The three questions ask students if they would like to ban all anti-abortion groups from campus, ban all firearms groups from campus, and have CUSA call on the administration to divest from companies “complicit in illegal military occupations.” The question is believed to refer to companies allegedly linked to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
“[The questions] are violating people’s freedom of speech and expression and CUSA shouldn’t be taking a stance on political issues that are not directly related to students,” said Yaelle Gang, CUSA’s journalism councillor.
Any student can propose a referendum question provided they can collect at least 1,000 signatures. The questions (there are seven in total) were introduced at the Jan. 10 CUSA council meeting.
They will be discussed and approved or rejected by councillors at the next meeting, according to CUSA vice-president (internal) Ariel Norman.
Referendum questions are usually first put through a constitution and policy committee before being introduced to the full council, Norman said.
The committee hears arguments from the public for or against the questions and can modify their wording before proposing them to the whole council.
That step was forgone “for the sake of time” due to the short nature of the election period this year caused by CUSA’s legal troubles, according to Norman.
The lack of a committee hearing means that councillors saw the questions for the first time at the CUSA council meeting, leading several councillors to criticize the oversight.
“This is not a fair way to ask a question,” said Brandon Wallingford, a CUSA arts and social sciences councillor, adding that the questions were “leading students.”
Wallingford is also president of the Firearms Association of Carleton University (FACU), a group that organizes sport shooting events and is being targeted by one of the referendum questions.
He was especially critical of the wording of the question, which asked students if they would like to amend CUSA’s anti-discrimination policy to ban groups promoting “guns and gun violence.”
“We organize events to teach our members to use guns in a safe way. We’ve never had a single accident,” Wallingford said. “[These questions] are targeting people who shouldn’t be targeted.”
CUSA’s anti-discrimination policy bans groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Resistance, groups that “specifically target minorities,” Wallingford said. He called the policy itself “flawed.” It lists incorrectly added or missing organizations, he said.
The policy also lists the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in the United States that former president Ronald Reagan drew on for some of his policies, and a group called “Canadians for the Preservation of English,” according to CUSA’s website.
Wallingford also said that the words “gun violence” could refer to groups promoting video games like Modern Warfare.
“The wording is so ambiguous it may include a whole lot of other clubs,” he said.
Carleton’s firearms association is one of several groups who would face new restrictions should these referendum questions pass.
“We believe this is an infringement on freedom of speech,” said Taylor Hyatt, current president of Carleton Lifeline, an anti-abortion group on campus.
Hyatt said while Lifeline had no definitive strategy to defend itself against the referendum question, at the moment, they are in touch with other groups like the firearms association.
CUSA de-certified and de-funded Carleton Lifeline in December 2010, and the club currently depends on support from community organizations and other pro-life groups, according to Hyatt.
“CUSA is about bringing students together, and not dividing them,” said Michael De Luca, a CUSA public affairs councillor.
“We’re reaching out to students to see what their position is and ultimately the choice is the students’ choice, so that’s what we’re going to represent on council.”
De Luca alleged the proposed question to ban Carleton Lifeline and other anti-abortion groups from campus was proposed by Shelley Melanson, a former CUSA president and former Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) deputy chairperson. She currently works for Canadians for Choice, an Ottawa-based pro-choice group. Melanson could not be reached for comment.
“If you can ban a student club, you can ban a book,” said Jeffrey Pierce, president of the Carleton Conservatives. “It is a very dangerous road that we get on to when we start banning different clubs whose ideologies are not in the majority.”
Referendum questions
The following list of potential referendum questions, as they appear below, were distributed to councillors at the Jan. 10 CUSA council meeting. They will be discussed and approved or rejected by councillors at the next meeting, according to Norman.
1. Are you in favour of a mandatory universal transit pass for full-time undergraduate students at a cost of $180 per semester for each the Fall and Winter term, with annual increases of a maximum 2.5%, beginning in September 2012?
2. Are you in favour of the Bylaw and Policy amendments as recommended by the Governance Reform Committee?
3. Do you approve a $2 increase in the student levy for WUSC Carleton, a committee responsible for sponsoring refugee students facing war, persecution, and/or environmental devastation through the Student Refugee Program since 1978?
4. Are you in favour of banning groups such as Lifeline, the Genocide Awareness Project, Campaign for Life Coalition and other organizations whose primary purpose is to use inaccurate information and violent images to discourage women from exploring all options in the event of pregnancy from Carleton University campus?
5. Are you in favour of rescinding the levy of the Carleton Academic Student Government (CASG), a group whose sole purpose is to elect students to departmental boards, but spends half of their annual budget on honorarium?
6. Do you support Carleton University adopting a binding socially responsible investment policy that would require it to divest from companies complicit in illegal military occupations and other violations of international law, including, but not limited to: BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Motorola and Tesco Supermarkets?
7. Are you in favour of amending CUSA’s anti-discrimination on campus policy to include banning all groups that promote guns and gun violence?
