Executives and councillors at the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) are preparing to launch a campaign to defederate the union from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).
Vice-president (finance) Michael De Luca announced at a CUSA council meeting on Feb. 25 that a petition will soon be circulated to determine if students are interested in defederation. The petition would be an initial step in a long process of defederation.
The notion of CUSA separating from Canada’s largest student lobby group is one Carleton students are familiar with. Since its creation in 1981 on Carleton’s campus, the CFS has been a perpetual and integral topic of discussion within campus politics.
The CFS was created “to provide students with an effective and united voice, provincially and nationally,” according to its website. Currently, more than 80 student unions representing over 500,000 students belong to the national union.
CUSA is Local 1 of the CFS, meaning it is a founding member.
A student referendum has to be held to defederate from the CFS, but a petition must first be submitted to the CFS to hold the referendum.
Steve May, CUSA’s vice-president (external) in 1980, recalled the first student referendum that took place regarding the CFS in that year.
“There wasn’t a lot of debate on the issue,” May said, adding that students were receptive to the formation of the national union.
Eleanor MacDonald, former vice-president (student services), sat on council the year the CFS was created and attended conferences at which the CFS’s constitution was written.
MacDonald said the founding of the CFS “was not particularly momentous” as many described the amalgamation between the pre-existing political voices of students— the National Union of Students and the student service-oriented Association of Student Councils— as an evolution.
The CFS was formed to ensure students had a voice on the federal level, according to MacDonald, who added that regardless of whether or not the CFS always fulfilled that goal, it played an important role in facilitating students’ political influence.
“My own hope would be that, if [the CFS] is declining, that it not be abandoned, but that measures be taken to strengthen it,” she said.
Thirty years after the CFS was founded, some student unions agree with MacDonald’s support of a collective student voice, while others are engaging in legal battles to defederate from the lobby group.
Unions at Simon Fraser University, University of Guelph, University of Victoria, and Concordia University have all run into legal disputes over CFS defederation drives.
Although CUSA is not currently involved in a legal dispute with the CFS, the Charlatan’s archives illustrate a shift in Carleton and the CFS’s relationship.
Not only did Carleton host the first CFS conference in 1981, but CUSA also gave a $5,000 advance to the CFS to keep it afloat while the organization waited for money from other student associations in its early days.
The same year, CUSA vice-president (external) May, wrote an opinion piece in the Charlatan regarding the CFS’s instrumental role in facilitating “student organizations from across the country . . . working together in a campaign.”
In contrast, CUSA executives over the past few years have attempted to distance themselves from the CFS.
In 2009, CUSA attempted defederation and even delivered a referendum-triggering petition to the CFS, however the CFS rejected their claim. Last year, the CUSA executive banned its service centres from carrying any CFS-provided campaign materials.
MacDonald speculated that differing CFS ideologies since her time at Carleton could be a response to the federal government’s limited role in post-secondary education, or it may spring from a more direct conflict between the two unions.
She also suggested the shift could be due to the changing landscape of student politics.
“Student leaders, unlike the leaders of industry or business, or union leaders, or even the leaders of most other social movements, are by definition only in place for a short period of time,” she said.
