It’s been almost a year since Michael Wernick, a member of Carleton’s Board of Governors (BoG), likened myself and seven other students to Nazi paramilitaries for engaging in a peaceful protest. Now, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has appointed Wernick Clerk of the Privy Council, making him the top bureaucrat in Canada.
I feel the need to reiterate what the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) has been saying for months—Wernick should resign from the BoG.
In March 2015, we disrupted a BoG meeting—BoG task force report—full of unsubstantiated claims and incorrect information, which concluded that Carleton has no choice but to raise tuition fees.
The final report was drafted not by elected committee members, but by senior university administration—an obvious conflict of interest. Rather than search for meaningful alternatives to the cost of a tuition freeze, the report blamed students for their own financial hardship.
Wernick wrote in a mass email that our protest “has no place in a lawful democratic society—it is the tactics of Brownshirts and Maoists . . . the antithesis of free speech and open debate.”
As an unelected member of the BoG, it’s ironic that Wernick demonstrates such a poor understanding of democracy and free speech.
In contrast, Dr. Root Gorelick, an elected faculty representative of the BoG, described us on his blog as “a beautiful example of free speech and peaceful civil disobedience.”
Soon after, Carleton became infamous for demanding all governors of the public university sign a lifetime gag order, which Gorelick has refused. Our student unions, as well as the 38,000 member Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has backed him up. Even as CAUT threatened to censure our university, Wernick defended the move, telling the Ottawa Sun “personal blogs that attack fellow Governors and university staff and dissent on matters the Board has decided are simply not consistent with the role of a Governor.”
The notion that a board member be barred from publicly dissenting to board rulings is an autocratic policy common to corporations, not public universities.
When students like us protest and the story is reported by people like Gorelick, it hurts the university’s reputation and consequently their ability to attract new students (and their money). Rather than hearing out students’ voices, Wernick, and the BoG by association, is attempting to harm our reputation. If we’re seen as unreasonable and dangerous, then the blame falls on us instead of the university.
That’s why the BoG feels threatened by Gorelick’s blog, and why they haven’t spoken out against Wernick’s ridiculous comments.
I have taken $34,259 in student loans over three years, and this debt will shape the rest of my life. Rather than break the cycle of poverty that many immigrant families such as my own have been thrown into since arriving in Canada, I find myself in the midst of it.
Wernick has also come under scrutiny for his near-decade as Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs (INAC) under the Harper government. At INAC, Wernick supported the Conservatives by cutting funding to First Nations organizations, working against adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and setting up mechanisms to spy on First Nations and their allies, among other abhorrent measures.
Is Wernick’s vendetta against free speech in the best interest of anyone affected by board decisions? I renew the call for him to resign from his unelected position on the BoG, and I call on the other governors to condemn his comments.
