The committee that was formed to evaluate the Carleton University Students’ Association’s (CUSA) membership with the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) has recommended that defederation be put to students through a referendum.
The committee’s report, complied over the past three months, was presented at an emergency CUSA council meeting Oct. 16.
The report does not recommend immediate defederation, but simply that the question be put to the student body for their consideration, according to John Mesman, CUSA science councillor and chair of the review committee.
“The committee is not offering to run a defederation campaign, but we are recommending that one be run and that the question of membership be posed to our student membership,” he said at the meeting.
The committee was formed to determine how the CFS and its Ontario counterpart, the CFS-O, utilize students’ fees, to evaluate the effectiveness of the federation’s campaigns, and to determine the value of the federation’s cost saving programs.
The 10-member committee consisted of six council members and four students at large.
Despite recent tensions and lack of communication between the CFS and CUSA, the CFS gave a lengthy and detailed presentation to the committee concerning its programming and materials and their usefulness to students and student life.
“The CFS was very welcoming and helpful,” Mesman said when the report was introduced to council.
The committee also put out a call for students, student groups, and student governments from other schools to respond and share their experiences with the CFS with the committee.
“I believe that the review process was incredibly thorough,” Mesman said via email.
He added that the committee’s report was not exhaustive of all the work the committee did but was instead “created as a summary.”
A number of councillors spoke out against the report at the meeting.
Adam Carroll, a founding member of the Carleton University Students’ Action Movement, said after he was not able to present his report to the committee, he sent a document outlining his group’s use and need of CFS materials and programs.
“These materials were of absolute value,” Carroll, also a CUSA Arts and Social Sciences representative, said. The materials are currently free as CUSA is a member of the CFS, he said. If the student association defederates, the action movement would have to pay instead, he said.
Gennesse Walker-Scace, CUSA Public Affairs and Policy Management councillor and member of the CFS review committee, did not attach her name to the recommendation to begin the defederation process.
She cited a lack of time to properly review all programs, materials, and financial considerations.
“The committee has taken good steps to start investigating but I personally feel we have not fulfilled our terms of reference,” she said.
Anna Goldfinch, the executive representative of the CFS-O, was among other CFS supporters tabling in the Unicentre atrium Oct. 20 and 21.
While in many cases the report indicated that programs and campaigns of similar effectiveness and cost were already being run by CUSA, Goldfinch said these are not necessarily redundancies.
“It’s important to acknowledge that working together works,” she said. “The work that we do is incredibly complimentary to one another.”
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