Seventy per cent of undergraduate students at Queen’s University have voted to remain members of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance for another three years, after the student union organization fee came up for mandatory renewal in last week’s fall referendum, held by Queen’s Alma Mater Society. One of OUSA’s founding members in 1992, Queen’s AMS parted ways with the alliance in 1995 but rejoined in 2004, when students passed over the larger, better-known, Canadian Federation of Students.
According to Joey Coleman, a Macleans.ca blogger on education, OUSA suits the structure of Queen’s large and policy-focused student union, whereas those of CFS schools are smaller and more political.
OUSA has a strong research and policy implementation record, calling itself member-driven, as members make their own lobbying decisions. OUSA also has a history of forming relationships with government officials and bureaucrats.
However, CFS represents over 250,000 students in Ontario, 80 student unions across the country, and has a strong track record in attracting media attention for lobbying campaigns.
Last week, the university-produced Queen’s Journal published an article by Queen’s official representative to OUSA, Julia Mitchell, attacking CFS’s operational tactics and lobbying strategies. Mitchell wrote that the CFS’s messages are about “flashy taglines, not implementable ideas,” and that their tactics “have lost them a great deal of credibility in the eyes of both voters and decision-makers.”
The allegations in the piece left CFS’s Ontario chairperson, Jen Hassum, fuming and in shock. “It’s laughable to think that the Canadian Federation of Students doesn’t have credibility, and it’s essentially not the reality of what students are working on across the country.” she said.
Coleman said he believes CFS and OUSA are two halves of a whole, and both are necessary for effective student lobbying. According to Mitchell,suggestions that Queen’s AMS join both OUSA and CFS have never been seriously considered.
