The incoming Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) executive has promised students they will pursue a defederation campaign from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) in the upcoming school year.
The CFS is a national organization made up of undergraduate and graduate student associations from across the country who pay membership fees. CUSA was one of the founding members of the CFS in 1981.
The Charlatan spoke to members of CUSA and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) to find out more about defederation, and where CUSA currently stands in the process.
What steps are needed to defederate?
Student associations who are part of the CFS belong to both the national organization as well as their respective provincial organization. In order to defederate, student associations need to hold a referendum to leave both.
According to CUSA President-elect Zameer Masjedee, the goal is to defederate from both CFS-Ontario and CFS National.
Bilan Arte, the national chairperson for the CFS, said in an email that student associations must collect a minimum amount of signatures in order to hold a referendum on defederation.
But the requirements for both CFS-Ontario and CFS National are different.
“In order to opt out of CFS National, we need 15 per cent of students, and to opt out of CFS-Ontario, we need 20 per cent of students,” Masjedee said.
According to Arte, once the petition is verified, the National Executive team from the CFS and members of CUSA can schedule a campus-wide referendum.
Despite the minimum requirements set out by the CFS on the number of signatures needed, CUSA president Fahd Alhattab said most lawyers will recommend getting double that amount.
“The CFS gets to determine which signatures are valid and which are not,” Alhattab said. “So if there’s something they consider illegible, then it’s crossed off.”
Arte said that after the list of signatures is submitted, the CFS requests a registration list from the university to validate the names.
“We look up the students’ name and the students’ student number. If neither are on the list, this signature is obviously deemed invalid,” she said.
According to Arte, a signature will also be considered invalid if both the name and student number attached to it are unreadable.
Alhattab added there’s a discrepancy in which student signatures are approved, given that some students may have graduated by the time the CFS approves the signatures. Depending on when the CFS validates the signatures, some signatures may not be considered valid.
Arte said there is “no delay” in the CFS’ validation process and the CFS’ bylaws say it has to take place within 90 days of receiving the petition from CUSA.
Are there any obstacles to defederating?
According to Alhattab, CUSA first needs to reach an agreement with the CFS on the amount of unpaid student fees it owes the organization.
CUSA has withheld fees for the past two years, initially due to the CFS not releasing its audits. This amounts to about $380,000 in student fees per year, Alhattab said.
The CFS released the audits at its Annual General Meeting in November, but Alhattab said they will continue to withhold the fees until the CFS tells them how much they owe the organization.
“The difficulty with the CFS is that when you ask them how much fees are owed, they never give you an exact number,” Alhattab said.
“Generally, you have to go to court just so you can agree to how much money is owed, because a referendum will be invalid if there is money owed,” Alhattab said.
Arte said that the CFS can’t give CUSA exact numbers because they do not have access to the university’s enrolment numbers, but CUSA does, which the fees are based off.
“It is impossible for us to calculate exactly how many students have paid the CFS fee,” she said. “This is the responsibility of the member local, who does have access to enrolment data.”
Arte said CFS fees fluctuates each year because the number of full-time and part-time students changes from year to year.
Once a figure has been agreed upon, then the student association can proceed towards a referendum.
CUSA has already started collecting signatures from students, but according to Masjedee, there is no bylaw stating a timeframe within which the signatures need to be collected.
“It is never early to collect signatures,” Masjedee said. “You can start whenever you want as long as the signatures are still good.”
Currently, Masjedee said his team is consulting with a lawyer to make sure the process is done as cleanly and tightly as possible.
“We want to do more research into the defederation across the country, looking at why some schools entered litigation and why others didn’t,” Masjedee said.
Aside from the issue of unpaid fees, Masjedee added that in order to reach the signature requirements, it’s important to engage students.
“Twenty per cent might not seem like a lot, but at the same time there is no way you will reach that threshold if the majority of students are not brought into the conversation,” he said.
According to Masjedee, membership in the CFS isn’t worth what CUSA pays them in fees.
“There is a lot of good the CFS does . . . but at the same time there is a lot of mismanagement of student funds,” Masjedee said.
The CFS has been criticized by some of its members for a hidden bank account that was first discovered in 2014, according to an article in The Varsity.
“Students are not getting any value for their money,” Masjedee said. “Their programs are very cookie-cutter and systematic, we can modify and create our own programs to conform to the needs of our student body.”
– Photo by Amy Yee
