Last week, the Carleton University Students’ Association made a stir when they put forward a referendum question asking students whether or not they wanted to continue funding Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) Carleton.
OPIRG-Carleton receives a $6.84 levy from undergraduate students and another $3.34 levy from graduate students.
While it has been great fun to see left-wing people on campus push to maintain OPIRG-Carleton’s funding, student money should not be used to fund what is clearly a partisan group. While it is true that there is nothing at Carleton that pleases everyone on campus, money that comes from the student body at large should be used to support groups that don’t have an agenda when it comes to improving the student experience, let alone those that blatantly pander to a left-leaning base.
Yes, there are still people who maintain OPIRG isn’t a partisan group. On Jan. 30, Daniel Tubb published an opinion piece in the Charlatan arguing the point, saying OPIRG-Carleton is political, not partisan. However, from what I can tell, it’s at the very least supported by partisans.
For example, one of my professors, a contract instructor, has been campaigning students on behalf of OPIRG-Carleton for the past week. He has been arguing that the group does a lot of research and says that students should keep giving their hard-earned money to the organization. In the first lecture I had with this teacher, he informed the class that he is politically left leaning.
What’s even more interesting about his support is that, when I questioned him about his advocacy, he said the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Local 4600 urged him to campaign. Yes, CUPE— a group whose representative on our campus, Stuart Ryan, ran as the Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) candidate for Ottawa-Centre in the last provincial election— is in OPIRG-Carleton’s corner, too.
The partisanship even extends to campus politics.
Through the money it receives from students, OPIRG-Carleton funds the Leveller, a newspaper that doesn’t and wouldn’t be able to deny its left-wing bias. During the most recent CUSA elections, the Leveller openly slammed CUSA president Alexander Golovko and his slate, A Better Carleton.
It should be especially hard for anyone to deny the partisan nature of the group at this point of the year. Last week, OPIRG-Carleton used student dollars to help fund Israeli Apartheid Week on campus. Throughout the event, many Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist students said they felt as if they were being publicly criticized for their beliefs through displays, events, and arguably triggering posters.
In a recent article published in the Charlatan, OPIRG-Carleton board member Emma Slaney Gose even said the organization would welcome any group that is committed to social and environmental justice, but would not accept a group that supports the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Obviously, the Israel-Palestine debate is a divisive one that I will not get into. The point here is that OPIRG-Carleton uses a substantial amount of student money to support a partisan cause. (I would love to point out the exact amount of money the group sunk into this and other events but, as CUSA’s clubs and societies commissioner Brandon Wallingford said in the aforementioned article in the Charlatan, OPIRG-Carleton is “very secretive” with its budget and doesn’t often disclose the ways in which it uses the thousands of dollars it sucks out of students.)
It is true that students already possess the ability to opt out of funding OPIRG-Carleton. However, the small number of people lining up for refunds shouldn’t be read as overwhelming support. The default is for students to pay, so a majority will. From my experience, most people on campus don’t know about the refund program. Many don’t even know what the group does. If they did, the picture might not be so rosy.
So, when you see contract instructors, CUPE representatives, OPIRG-Carleton members or students in the halls arguing the group should be funded for its non-partisan work, make sure to cut through the garbage. After all, it’s your money that’s supporting their agenda.
— Ryan Husk,
second-year global politics
