TORONTO (CUP) — Debate is brewing within the Canadian Federation of Students over a motion to be presented at their upcoming semi-annual general meeting.
The motion seeks to make it more difficult for members of the CFS to leave the organization, and impossible for them to do so en masse.
The meeting’s agenda was leaked to the public last weekend.
The sixth motion presented in the agenda, authored by Carleton University’s Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) executive — local 78 of the CFS — was written in response to the high number of defederation referenda currently being pursued by member locals across the country.
“We did it because we realized that the recent defederation attempts really weakened our movement in regards to the time we could allot to other campaigns, especially our Drop Fees rally,” said Kimalee Phillip, president of the Carleton GSA.
Close to a dozen student associations across Canada have delivered, or are organizing, petitions to re-evaluate their membership with the CFS.
“It was a coordinated attempt; it wasn’t one or two attempts by locals. So we decided it was time we review our bylaws because it is a loophole that we felt may have been abused to an extent,” said Phillip.
“The spirit of the motion was to ensure stability within our movement and to ensure that our bylaws had no loopholes that could be abused in the future.”
If passed, the motion would limit the number of defederation referenda across Canada to two in any three-month period and limit the number of signatures needed to initiate a referendum — doubled to 20 per cent. A student association would also only be able to attempt to leave the federation via referendum once every five years, as opposed to the current two.
According to the preamble attached to the agenda, Motion 6 was inspired by a perceived “co-ordinated effort to destabilize” the Canadian Federation of Students by “a small group of individuals, including some non-members.”
Current bylaws allow for the CFS to send staff members to a campus attempting to leave the organization and run a campaign for continued membership. With so many referenda ongoing at the same time, however, such campaigns would be nearly impossible to conduct on multiple campuses across the country.
The preamble argues that “forcing all referenda to be held within the same, small window of time is fundamentally anti-democratic” as it does not allow the federation to “present a case for continued membership.”
But before the motion even has a chance to be debated by the organization as a whole, some groups are making pre-emptive strikes against what they see as an attack on their ability to represent their members’ wishes.
An open letter of opposition — penned by the University of Calgary’s Graduate Students’ Association — was circulated on Nov. 20 to CFS locals via their student media outlets. It encouraged members to question their own representatives about their voting intentions, as well as discuss the rationale behind the motion put forward by the Carleton GSA.
“It’s a pretty bad motion to actually pass. I can see it being a deterrent for anyone interested in joining this organization in the future,” said Matthew Musson, director of campaigns for the U of C GSA.
Musson will be attending the AGM later this week and hopes to speak to as many member locals as possible, as well as speak to closing plenary if given one of the three five-minute speaking slots allotted to each motion at the meeting.
The Carleton GSA is confident the motion will pass.
But the U of C GSA doesn’t see the current wave of defederation referenda as a bad thing.
“Deciding as a student body that you want to review your membership within the CFS or question what the CFS has done for you does not mean you’re ill-informed or part of a small group of people with questionable motives,” read their open letter.
“It means you care about your representation.”
That particular motion won’t be the only hotly debated topic at the meeting. The students’ association at Kwantlen Polytechnic University have submitted a motion that would open up all CFS AGMs to any member of the student press who wishes to attend.
CFS meetings are currently closed to media unless special permissions are extended by a majority vote of the organization’s national executive. In recent history, special permission has been granted to one Canadian University Press bureau chief to attend to provide coverage that is national in scope for distribution on its newswire.
