This week, Carleton students will head to the ballot box to vote in a referendum that will determine the future of Carleton’s relationship with the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS). Many students—including myself—are urging Carleton to ditch this organization that is taking $440,000 out of students’ pockets every year.
Perhaps one of the greatest human weaknesses is to prefer to be right than to be effective. The CFS has, through its own political self-righteousness, fallen prey to an obsession over how right they are, rather than how effective they may be.
Students who have spoken to pro-CFS campaigners have undoubtedly heard of the numerous lofty ideals that the CFS seeks to champion. They tout more affordable education, improved student services, better health insurance for students, and combating campus ills such as sexual violence. Hearing the many objectives of the CFS could understandably lead one to believe that continued ties to this organization is what’s best for Carleton students.
The problem with the CFS is not their objectives as a student group in particular. The problem with the CFS is their lack of effectiveness in improving conditions for students.
Many students want to achieve the utopia of student life that the CFS claims to promote. What most students don’t know is how the actions of the CFS make a farce out of these ideals, and even worse—promote an institution that is so out of touch with the students it claims to represent that it is no longer able to see past its own self-interests and self-preserving ambitions.
Indeed, after decades of mismanagement and corrupt leadership at the top, the CFS has morphed into nothing more than a rent-seeking, high-spending, insider-driven, and ethically-challenged group of elitists who spend more time wasting students’ money on lost causes than championing the genuine concerns and issues of students.
The malfeasance that runs rampant throughout the CFS can be discovered by a quick Google search of the organization that will turn up articles spanning decades, that point to instances of hidden bank accounts, unaccounted funding, and costly litigations against students and schools who disagree with them.
When you actually try to find any record of positive differences the CFS has made for Canadian students, all you will find is a track record of political grandstanding. This record consists of CFS executives organizing ineffective protests for pie-in-the-sky goals, such as free tuition, that have not once proved effective in changing public policy.
One example of unethical practices by the CFS is an audit which uncovered a hidden bank account controlled by the CFS with over $260,000 inside. The CFS failed to release the full forensic review as to what these unauthorized funds were spent on between July 2010 and December 2014.
Dozens of referendums have been held at Canadian universities that pose similar questions about ditching the CFS. In instances where students have voted to leave the CFS, the federation has opted to use student money to sue said schools for democratically choosing to abandon them. This is perhaps one of the CFS’ largest budget line items of recent years, litigating the results of democratically determined elections so that they can continue to leech off of mandatory student fees year after year.
A student federation that truly put students’ interests first would not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars taking students to court when they attempt to flee the wasteful and lacklustre grasp of the CFS bureaucracy.
You may agree in principle with the values that the CFS claims to represent, but you likely won’t agree with the catastrophically ineffective and ethically bankrupt method that the CFS has employed to achieve them—and it is action and track record, not intention, that are important here.
