Post-secondary education places an excessive amount of financial and mental burden on students. Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) was created to represent our interests in these matters. Unfortunately, CUSA has continually failed us—and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) defederation campaign is one of many examples of that failure.
The CFS is the largest student organization in Canada, representing 64 universities.
Currently, Carleton students are a part of their provincial and national group. They advise the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) on its policy and possess the only student seat on the roundtable on violence against women.
The CFS played an essential role in pressuring the government to redesign OSAP to make it more grant-friendly. They are recognized as the voice of Canadian students by the media and the government, and the perception of the public has backed that recognition.
In the past five years, the CFS has brought polling stations to campus, allowed international students to work with their study permits, and pushed for the creation of the Ontario Student Grant program to allow low-income families access to non-repayable grants, among other things.
The CFS does more than just fight for our right to lower tuition, but that particular aspect forms the basis of my belief in their organization. Coming from a lower-income family, I was able to attend university due to the changes made to OSAP in 2016, using grants rather than loans.
CUSA has talked about joining the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) as a preferred alternative. However, OUSA is much smaller than the CFS and represents 150,000 students from only eight Ontario student associations. The universities that left the OFS (the Ontario chapter of the CFS) to create OUSA were interested in increasing government spending by raising tuition.
OUSA has been criticized in the past for being too close to the government. That is problematic because we know student needs are very rarely in line with government interests, and we must trust our union to push for our rights rather than succumb to government pressures. According to the Ontario government, the CFS “provides students with a united voice, provincially and nationally.”
The CFS and OUSA agree on two of three priorities—these priorities being research, lobbying, and mobilization. OUSA doesn’t see the benefit of mobilizing for days of action or protesting. Students in Quebec stopped a 40 per cent tuition hike by uniting and ousting their government. They did this despite the risk of arrest and threats for the benefit of generations to come. These displays of student unity are ultimately what creates legitimate change in times of need. If OUSA is unwilling to do this based on their support for the government, they cannot adequately represent us at all.
CUSA has banked on students remaining uninformed, and the #CULaterCFS campaign has been incredibly toxic. CUSA refuses to partake in their campaigns. They’ve built up the idea that the CFS only provides “a few posters, buttons, and t-shirts promoting different causes,” according to their website. Rather than work with the CFS for the benefit of students, they’ve shunned them and have even refused to attend meetings in the past.
Last year’s CUSA president Zameer Masjedee’s post in the CUGC General Assembly said, “You just need to be willing to approach strangers asking them to sign a petition. And when it comes to asking strangers to sign up for stuff they’ve never heard about, who could possibly be better at it than us Greeks?”
This shows that they had no interest in educating students about the CFS and they would rather have us blindly sign a petition to bypass harassment during exam season than to make an informed choice.
I think we, as students, need to rethink what we want from our union—this is not what CUSA should be about.
