2008 day of action inactive
‘The rally really wasn’t for students’: King
Chelse McKee, staff
Early in February, the typical time for the Canadian Federation of Students’ National Day of Action, the steps of the University of Manitoba’s Administration Building, rather than filled with sign-wielding protesters, remained empty.
UMSU has been a member of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) since 2005 and began participating in the Day of Action in 2004.
The Day of Action, arranged by student unions across Canada, is a rally gathering post-secondary students to protest high tuition fees in the hopes that both provincial and federal governments will listen and keep the current tuition freeze going.
Amanda Aziz, national chairperson for the CFS, said that student have been protesting high tuition fees for what have seemed like ages and that the federation couldn’t pinpoint an exact year when the rally began.
“Like, students have been, like, organizing rallies and protests forever, right? Like, the ’20s I imagine or before that. I don’t know.”
Aziz said that the reason the lobbying campaign wasn’t used this year was because it wasn’t suggested at the National General Meeting (NGM) held in May 2007.
“In 2007, so last May, we adopted a campaign strategy, for the 2007-08 year and the people, they were just like, ‘No.’ Instead of National Day of Action, people just had other ideas of whatever, so there just wasn’t a National Day of Action that was brought forward and voted on by membership.
“I think people just were looking for other activities. Like, I think, I mean a huge amount of work. I think people were really satisfied with the outcome. Like, there was a very, very successful Day of Action, umm, in raising the profiles of issues,” said Aziz.
Aziz said that CFS wanted to focus more on the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which is nearing the end of its decade-long mandate. They have since, in lieu of a Day of Action, adopted a national petition campaign.
She continued on to say that just because nothing was made a national campaign project by CFS that didn’t stop individual memberships from pursuing their own day of action, adding that the CFS-Ontario executive had just decided to hold a Day of Action for the following year. Despite that, many universities like the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba did forgo the specific Day of Action campaign.
The Lakehead University Students’ Union in Thunder Bay, Ont., which did hold a Day of Action, were surprised at the other inactive institutions across Canada.
“We had just assumed everyone was going to do it,” said Jennifer Morrison, vice-president (student issues) for the Lakehead students’ union “It’s a little frustrating because I feel that just because the CFS doesn’t mandate something, like, we don’t have to do it. That’s what it looked like. CFS said we don’t have to do it, so let’s not do it rather than we should be doing campaigns that each campus would like to do and feel strongly about.”
Nathan Peto, president of the Brandon University Students’ Union (BUSU), felt that a Day of Action was important but that they chose to keep it local by campaigning for $5,000 of emergency laboratory funding from the government.
“We really wanted to focus locally ’cause we felt that we could affect more locally than nationally. I could imagine other campuses might feel the same.”
All the same, Peto took a forgiving stance to other universities’ choices to abstain from the project. He said that a lot of the material for the day comes from the national office and could be a large detriment for smaller campuses to create their own day of action.
Devin King, co-host of CKUW’s student politics radio show and podcast The Fishbowl, says that he believes the lack of a Day of Action is more a matter of embarrassment than changing motivations.
“Students weren’t turning up. So the poor turnout, I think, is the one [reason]. That’s the obvious one that people go to. Declining participation has been a problem with the reality for the last couple years. So, I think, to save face and not have students show up, that was probably a likely reason and probably the more obvious one [for no Day of Action].”
In 2004, the first year U of M students protested at the Legislature, approximately 500 students in total participated. In 2005, the year that UMSU sought prospective membership in the CFS, there were about 1,000 participants in a protest held on the U of M campus, according to a report in the Manitoban.
In 2007, according to Rachel Gothliff, then-vice-president (external) for UMSU, at least 200 U of M students participated in the campaign held at the Manitoban legislature with students from the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and the U of W.
King continued on to say that he was happy that CFS recognized that the day wasn’t successful and that they moved on to different tactics.
“The rally really wasn’t for students, I don’t think, or about students. It’s for the media . . . Essentially just to get their names on the CBC or CityTV or whatever, and I don’t think that was working, either. I think they recognized that their tactics weren’t working as well as they wanted.
“If [the CFS] really wanted to engage in serious debate to try and change policies or issues or ideas, they wouldn’t be doing protests one day of the year.”
CFS-Manitoba, which includes both the U of M, the U of W, BU, and CUSB, chose to begin a provincial campaign this year called First Aid for Student Aid (FASA) instead of the National Day of Action.
For FASA, the CFS-MB membership polled “thousands of students,” according to Peto, to see what they considered to be the major issues with the student aid system.
Afterwards, they compiled the information into five key priorities into a report, which has since been finalized and presented to the provincial government.
The presidents of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union and the University of Winnipeg Student’s Association did not return numerous phone calls to their offices.
