If she’d known about the Student Choice Initiative (SCI) sooner, Book Ravens executive Brook McArthur would have done more to prepare.
“We’re celebrating literature, Canadian literature,” said McArthur. “As a group at Carleton, in Ottawa. We’re not going to be able to do that because we didn’t get the funding we thought we would.”
McArthur said the Book Ravens, which is Carleton’s sole on-campus literary club, has struggled financially in the aftermath of the SCI, a short-lived policy proposed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative administration last year.
The SCI allowed students to decide whether they want to pay certain ancillary fees for services offered by student organizations such as the Graduate Students’ Association, the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), and the Charlatan, which were previously included within tuition payments.
The change took effect in September of last year, causing student unions at Carleton such as the Carleton Academic Student Government (CASG) to make major changes, like cutting compensation for execs.
Announced last January and implemented two months later, student organizations had little time to prepare for the funding cuts that came as a result of the SCI—cuts that clubs like the Book Ravens are still recovering from.
McArthur said the SCI has been disappointing because the Book Ravens charge a lower membership fee than some others on campus.
“We have a $3 membership fee at the start of the year that helps us buy books. We’ve been told it’s one of the lowest fees on campus—you pay the price for two coffees and we give you more than that,” she said.
The impact of budget cuts has meant that certain events have been changed, or even cancelled altogether.
“We had planned to do things that we won’t be able to do this year, like for our March Canada Reads, we wanted to have a bit of a pizza party send-off,” she said.
In November of last year, the Divisional Court of Ontario ruled that the SCI was unlawful after a collective of student organizations filed a case against the province. Ford has pledged to fight the ruling in the courts. But unlike other universities, Carleton chose not to charge any fees retroactively. This means that while students will no longer be able to opt-out of any fees previously deemed to be optional non-tuition fees under the SCI, these fees were not added to the tuition they paid for the winter 2020 term.
Service centres run by CUSA have also been affected. Tinu Akinwande, the programming coordinator of the Womxn’s Learning, Advocacy, and Support Centre, said the centre had to reduce the amount of hygiene products it provides to students, and seek sponsorships to keep the centre’s work going.
“The resources that we provided are very costly,” Akinwande said. Hygiene products like tampons, pads, high quality condoms, diapers are “very, very hard to access if you’re low income,” she added.
“With the Student Choice Initiative, it created a blockade in order for us to be as accessible to the Carleton community as we can.”
Akinwande said providing these products and resources to students is important because of the financial stress so many of them face.
“Some of the people that walk through those doors, they come from low-income backgrounds,” she said.
“We offer stuff like beverages and hot chocolate and coffee as well. It’s little stuff that could brighten someone’s day. And that could actually provide stability to a maybe unstable environment.”
Rosabel Akagbosu, the administrative coordinator with CUSA’s Food Centre, agrees. The Food Centre provides food and household items to students, staff and alumni, and according to Akagbosu, keeping the work of service centres going is important because of the role they play in alleviating some of the stresses students experience.
“We really try to make the environment as comfortable as we can because there is a stigma around food insecurity and it’s unfortunate because every student, as far as I know, goes through some level of food insecurity,” said Akagbosu.
“We’re just trying to break that stigma and make it a comfortable space so that people aren’t afraid to come and use the space.”
George Owusu-Mensah, CUSA’s vice-president (student services), is responsible for the association’s service centres. Even with changes to budgeting in light of the SCI, Owusu-Mensah said in an interview that service centres continue to thrive as spaces for community and coming together.
But according to McArthur, the after-effects of the SCI remain.
“It’s really hard to stay accessible when you have half as much funding as you normally do.”
Featured image by Lauren Hicks.
