[Student] Union Political 'Activism'

Unions have work to do in representing their members' best interests. To advocate on their behalf, to ensure that their well-being is never forgotten, to provide services to their members and support where it is needed, and it is often enough needed. The responsibilities of student unions, similar to their workplace counterparts, range from funding student clubs, representing student interest to university administration and various levels of government, along with administering health plans.

Illustrative pho otof protesters urging a boycott against Israel (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

And in Canada, union fees, both in the federal workplace and at publicly-administered-and-funded universities, are not voluntary, but mandatory; no one can opt out. And this is to the great advantage of many fringe minority groups whose political activities are of little-to-no interest to most university students, busy plodding along trying to capture as many of their academic credits as they can as their first, second and third-level interests.

But student funding can and is used to fund activities that are controversial, and in good part bear no relation whatever to post-secondary education. Student unions in Ontario fund the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, an official-sounding name indeed, but which group supports Israeli Apartheid Week, along with causes aligned with anti-capitalism and decolonization and anti-oppression. The students' union at Ryerson University led the Ontario Branch of the Canadian Federation of Students  to unanimously pass a resolution to boycott Israel this week.

That funding is representative of dollars that should be redirected to improve services for students, inclusive of student food banks, and the provision perhaps of bursaries aimed at low-income students requiring, practical, additional assistance within a society focused on equality and anti-capitalism. Student activists are able to old their entire membership captive to their interest-specific causes which are of no interest to, nor use for the membership whose disinterest enables the activists to prevail.

Concordia Student Union conducted a vote to strike with the use of a casual show of hands. Student election voter turnout stands at around ten to 15%, leaving the field to the hard core of engaged activists claiming to represent the entire student body. The Carleton University Students' Association saw fit to discard a cystic fibrosis charity as a recipient of a fundraising campaign when the student representatives stupidly thought of CF as a typical white man's disease.

The Student Federation of the University of Ottawa voted against a motion to broadcast the 2014 Olympics on campus insisting it would validate anti-gay legislation enacted in Russia, while most students felt the need to support Canadian athletes, which had nothing to do whatever with support for Russia's official anti-homosexual politics. Fees collected by universities to fund unions should not fund political activities organized by student unions, as simple as that.

If New Zealand and Australia, faced with similar problems, could solve the issue by making student union memberships voluntary at all their institutes of higher education, there is no reason, in all fairness to all university students, that it cannot also be done in Canada by altering the Education Act, province-to-province.