At the end of this month, the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) will be holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM). Crucially, the UTSU is looking to eliminate college representation on the Board of Directors, ostensibly to comply with the Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act, and to open the body up to underrepresented minorities.
After a nine-hour board meeting, representatives from the union managed to eradicate both attempts to incorporate under Ontario law, instead of Canadian law. They also axed a proposal by Engineering director, Ryan Gomes. Gomes hoped to re-establish college and faculty representation under a new Board of Directors model. These developments are especially egregious given that the UTSU’s president, Yolen Bollo-Kamara, had promised publicly that any proposals would go directly to a vote at the Annual General Meeting at the end of October. In my perspective, to put it succinctly: they lied.
This new proposed board structure is self-serving, because it will eliminate representation for dissenting faculties on the Board and consolidate the union’s current power base. The system by which the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario faction maintains in control of the UTSU is remarkably simple, relying on large numbers of supporters from certain divisions to ensure that it can dominate elections and continue to ignore dissenting voices.
Appropriately then, typical Board of Directors meetings feature the UTSU’s elected representatives dominating the conversation, and constituency directors from dissident factions — often Trinity College, Victoria College, and the Faculty of Engineering — are forced to complain about the will of the majority. By replacing those directors with “issues” representatives elected U of T wide, the UTSU can effectively disenfranchise dissenting constituencies.
The last best hope to stop this plot is at the UTSU AGM. At that meeting, the union will use the threat of impending legal complications to force students into voting for their proposal, which, remember, is the only one up for discussion.
Nobody should buy this argument. Nothing bad can result from the UTSU failing to properly incorporate before its deadline one year from now. The most serious possibilities are that the U of T administration will withhold money from the union, or that legal action will be taken against the UTSU. Either option will drain the financial resources the union devotes to their political objectives instead of student services. If groups of students in the minority want to make sure they are not utterly crushed, then they must assemble and say no to those who want to take away our rights.
Jeffrey Schulman is a second-year student at Trinity College studying classics.
