An executive member of McGill University’s Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) has received an answer to his lawsuit against the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) regarding a referendum of the PGSS from the CFS.
The Quebec Superior Court decided Sept. 7 that the CFS should hold a referendum on the PGSS’s defederation.
Ge Sa, internal affairs officer of the PGSS, said he independently sued the CFS in March after they ignored his petition for a referendum, despite the fact the petition contained signatures from over 20 per cent of the PGSS’s members, as required by CFS bylaws.
These bylaws indicate the organization has 90 days to issue a referendum date after receiving a petition, but Sa said this period went by without anything happening.
“They are not respecting their own bylaws [and] they’re not respecting our right of association,” Sa said.
In 2010, the PGSS held a referendum on defederation, voting 86 per cent in favour of disassociation, Sa’s lawyer Nicolas Plourde said.
However, according to internal co-ordinator of the CFS, Brent Farrington, the CFS had a right not to recognize this referendum because they held the vote online rather than on a paper ballot and they extended the voting period of the referendum beyond what bylaws allowed.
Farrington said since 2010 the PGSS have acted as though they left the CFS, even though they still consider them a member. He said the PGSS haven’t paid their membership fees and have ignored their duties to the federation.
A separate, ongoing PGSS lawsuit from after the 2010 referendum contradicted Sa’s current efforts, according to Farrington.
“Here you have the PGSS saying they’re not members, and a member of their executive is saying they are members and want to hold a vote on whether or not they’re going to continue to be members of the organization,” he said. “Our position is, ‘are they members or aren’t they members?’”
Farrington said the CFS would be willing to issue another referendum once the two sides had resolved the PGSS’ first lawsuit.
“They should meet the conditions of their membership [so] we can proceed to a vote on their campus,” he said.
According to CFS bylaws, there are two types of members. There are voting members, such as student unions, and individual students.
Sa said while the PGSS no longer consider themselves a voting member, his petition represents graduate students at McGill, who are still considered members.
“I am an individual member of the PGSS and I still see that the CFS continues to represent [us], continues to put us on their website, and continues to claim that PGSS owes them money, even though the status is still in question at court,” Sa said, adding the PGSS has accumulated more than $270,000 in unpaid fees since 2010.
“Personally, I don’t agree with their tactics,” Sa said.
Sa said he thinks the CFS hasn’t represented Quebec students, and used the 2012 Quebec tuition protests as an example.
“How can you claim to be the biggest lobbying group of students and not get involved in things like that?” he said. “They don’t do enough for us.”
