A Cape Breton University (CBU) student is starting a petition to try to renew momentum for defederating the school’s student association from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).
Earlier this year, an Ontario court ruling struck down a bid by the Cape Breton University Students’ Union (CBUSU) to leave the CFS. The student union lost the bid for failure to comply with CFS bylaws.
The school’s students voted in a referendum with 92 per cent supporting defederation in 2008. CBUSU president Brandon Ellis said the union is appealing the decision.
Brandon MacDonald, the fourth-year student who started the petition, said the Ontario court ruling is unfair and the issue deserves to be revisited.
“CFS itself is now an organization I hold no faith in and likely will never hold any faith in again,” MacDonald said.
“I should say that I have not heard of the organization prior to the lawsuit,” he added. “To me, that says quite a lot about how little their involvement at CBU has actually been in my years there and in the years since the referendum.”
More than 700 people have signed the petition, about 30 per cent of the student body, according to MacDonald.
CBUSU was forced to pay $293,000 in unpaid dues to the CFS along with legal fees as a result of the court’s decision. Ellis said the fees accumulated over the six years went unpaid because the court’s decision was still pending.
Ellis said the CFS has “polluted the water” on CBU’s campus by forcing the union into bankruptcy. While people had not heard of the CFS before, Ellis said everyone at the school now has an opinion on it.
“For lack of a better term, the [students] are really pissed,” Ellis said. “They don’t like how this big organization is going after a student union.”
CFS national chairperson Bilan Arte said the CBUSU did not follow the rules when it tried to defederate.
“The court’s publicly available ruling clearly determined what we knew to be true all along,” Arte said. “Members of CBUSU executive at the time knowingly misled students about the validity of the referendum and could have prevented this process.”
The future of the student union is murky, Ellis said. He said with the $293,000 fee outstanding, they are exploring many different legal options to pay the fee off. Bankruptcy was discussed, but eventually ruled out, he said.
“It feels as though we are being bullied for merely existing,” MacDonald said, “and this plays into why nearly 30 per cent of students have been willing to sign the petition.”
Arte said this was never the intention of the CFS.
“I want to make it clear that the federation has always negotiated for resolutions that avoid these situations,” she said. “There is no reason for students at CBU to lose any services as a result of the ruling.”
