The offices of student-run groups across the Carleton campus shut down on April 3 as part of a Campus Blackout campaign to raise awareness of the effects of the Student Choice Initiative (SCI).
The campaign included the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), and the Carleton chapter of the Ontario Public Research Interest Group (OPIRG).
The SCI allows students to decide whether they want to pay certain ancillary fees for services offered by student organizations, which was previously included within tuition payments. The change was proposed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Conservative administration and will take effect in September.
According to David Oladejo, CUSA’s president, the blackout is a way to inform students about the impact of the initiative on the services they’re offered.
“The campus blackout is essentially to show what would happen if a lot of the services students pay for aren’t able to be present on campus next year,” he said. “It’s kind of a follow-up to the walkout we hosted a couple of weeks ago, to continue to educate students but also to show how realistic this effect might be.”
A province-wide walkout saw students walk out of their classes to protest the Ontario government’s changes to university tuition, OSAP, and the ancillary fees on March 20.
Diana Idibe, CUSA’s vice-president (student services), said the blackout is about responding to the student walkout.
“In order to keep sustained pressure and make sure that an issue doesn’t stray from public view, it’s important to get creative with your resistance,” she said. “I know that some students have expressed that it’s inconvenient, but it helped them understand and contextualize how the provincial decision might affect their day-to-day on campus.”
Brad Evoy, the volunteer, outreach and programming coordinator for OPIRG Carleton, said the blackout is a way to show students what they will be missing when all the services are closed.
“We want to take a moment to show students what campus would be like if our services are otherwise defunded through this initiative,” he said. “The blackout is definitely a difficult thing to do, as we always like to be present and showing students the various things that we do as an organization. But, when it comes to the Student Choice Initiative, we are faced with a pretty notable existential threat in the form of forced defunding of our organization.”
Oladejo said he hopes the blackout will serve as a learning experience for students, especially those who still aren’t aware of what’s going on.
“The biggest hope for me is the education of students,” he said. “I’m not the biggest fan of having to close our door for a day, but I think it is important to be able to spread that message to students.”
Evoy said he hopes this event will encourage students to continue to voice their concerns of the future of student life on campus.
“Students have the ability to build their own spaces to combat these kinds of things,” he said.
“It’s really important for students to get involved however they can, wherever they can, not just to preserve the spaces that we have, but to build the broader fight back against the austerity of the Ford government.”
Photo by Temur Durrani
