Let’s be clear: One Carleton doesn’t believe in student action or social justice
In the current election for the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), the One Carleton team is campaigning on a pledge to defederate from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS). As someone who used to be with the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), and has worked closely with the CFS on many campaigns and initiatives, I’m pretty annoyed with Carleton One’s empty promises to do ‘better’ than the CFS.
One Carleton, of course, is the new incarnation of the team already in power, formerly known as A Better Carleton (ABC), and then re-branded as Your Carleton. This is the team that illegally broke a health plan contract, threatened to sue a blogger, hid a $700,000 deficit, voted for tuition increases, disqualified a candidate in a decision that was overturned by a judge, and redefined “referendum” to mean a vote of three people, among other scandals.
One Carleton has tossed around accusations of ‘corruption’ to justify leaving the CFS, but let’s be honest: the actual reason that the current CUSA leadership hates the CFS is because they have always been hostile to the idea that students should work together to transform society, to show solidarity in our communities, and to confront power.
As soon as they first came into power, One Carleton tried to ban CFS materials from campus, ordering Service Centres to throw their sexual violence resources in the garbage. Every year One Carleton says that they are not opposed to all of these campaigns per se, but that they can provide them more effectively on their own, without wasting students’ money. For all this talk, One Carleton has never shown any interest in doing so.
Let’s look at a few examples.
1. In 2016, a Somali-Canadian named Abdirahman Abdi died during an interaction with the Ottawa police, in an act of police brutality. In response, the CFS (and the GSA) provided their support alongside Black Lives Matter, the Muslim Students’ Association, the Student Alliance for Mental Health, and other community organizations by assisting with statements, rallies, solidarity actions, and organizing a community conference.
CUSA was nowhere to be seen.
2. In 2016, the CFS held a national Day of Action against tuition fees, bringing students across the country to show support the idea that education should be free and accessible to all. Throughout the year, student members work with the CFS to constantly lobby members of Federal and Provincial governments for concrete policy changes related to tuition, international fees and health insurance, research funding, and funding for indigenous students. This has involved meeting with scores of MPs, MPPs, Senators, and giving presentations to government panels and committees. It is ongoing pressure like this that compels governments to take concrete action, even if these don’t go far enough.
Carleton students have had a notable presence in these efforts, but not CUSA, which consistently fails to show up. To be fair, CUSA reluctantly endorsed the Day of Action (which surprised me) — I saw the President there, looking very uncomfortable — but they did not do any of the organizing work. I’ve also seen a recent post that suggests the VP Finance met with one opposition MPP, once, but with no clear idea of what they might have talked about. More typically, I’ve witnessed current and previous CUSA Presidents either vote in favour or (at best) abstain from tuition fee increases. I’ve gotten into an argument with a previous CUSA President who was vigorously defending a Board of Governors report he had endorsed, and which had claimed that there were no alternatives to tuition increases. I’ve seen CUSA executives promise to create their own tuition campaigns, which never materialized because they had “ran out of time.” I’ve never seen them express interest in learning about policy, let alone lobbying. Ever.
3. During the 2015 Federal Elections, the CFS ran a massive voter outreach campaign, involving policy proposals, banner drops, media outreach, and making sure that student priorities were on the agenda. Our on-the-ground outreach, leading up to and on voting days, led to a record high voter turnout.
Where was CUSA? Well, their electoral strategy consisted of releasing the “most embarrassing music video in Canadian history.”
4. Finally, the CFS has shown solidarity with student and cross-campus initiatives at Carleton, supporting our efforts to make the Board of Governors more democratic and to oppose the Board when they tried to remove a professor because of his blog. The CFS has also shown solidarity with Neuroscience students who are currently being evicted from their current location, a move which poses a serious risk to their research.
In both cases, CUSA has remained silent. In fact, they’ve worked to actively undermine these efforts by claiming that students were not telling the truth.
(By the way, didn’t CUSA promise to release a statement about the Neuroscience eviction, like, a month ago?)
The track record demonstrates that social justice and advocacy are simply not priorities for One Carleton. They are not interested in influencing policy; they are not interested in fighting tuition fees; they are not interested in supporting anti-racist work in our communities; they are not interested in doing anything that might be seen as confrontational, or that might put them at odds with those in positions of authority — after all, that would put their networking and resume-building at risk.
The sad fact is that CUSA has always shown deference to power. Rather than stand up for students, time and time again they have fallen in line with the university administration, repeating their talking points, and discouraging action.
Undergraduate students can make up their own minds about whether they want to participate in these initiatives as led by the CFS, but don’t let One Carleton pretend for a second that they will pick up that work after they leave. They won’t.
