CFS Suing GSA for $936,000

Last year, the GSA filed a law suit demanding that the CFS respect the democratic will of Concordia graduate students in voting to withdraw from the CFS.  The CFS responded with a demand of their own: you can’t leave, and give us a million bucks.

In the response the CFS claims fees going back almost twenty years, including fees owed to CFS-Q, which a Quebec court has already declared to be a completely independent entity from the CFS (CFS-Q was renamed Rassemblement des assosications etudiantes, or RAE, in 2010). In a previous letter to the GSA, the CFS claimed that the GSA owed “over $200,000″, but this is the first time the CFS has made a claim using legal proceedings.

The GSA, along with the CSU and MgGill’s PGSS, filed suit against the CFS to have referendums withdrawing from the CFS recognized. The CFS has steadfastly refused to recognize referendums or otherwise sought to prevent the withdrawal of around a dozen student associations in recent years. Last month, Simon Frasier’s SFSS announced that they had reached an undisclosed settlement with the CFS which saw the end of SFSS’s membership in the CFS.

Victor Tangermann, manipulated by Adrian Kaats | The McGill Daily

From March 29 to April 1, McGill’s graduate students and postdoctoral scholars will be asked if they want to continue their membership in the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS). There are many obvious reasons to leave CFS: their policies are bad for graduates (they support taxing scholarships); they are notoriously ineffective at lobbying (they failed to do anything meaningful to stop the new tax on post-docs); their services are overpriced and scantily used by grads; they sue their own members, resulting in legal fees of thousands upon thousands of dollars; they are an autocratic, centralized bureaucracy that stymies genuine member participation; and they constantly and aggressively threaten journalists that report negatively on them.

Unfortunately, the litany of CFS’s awful behaviour doesn’t seem to be enough to convince a handful of self-proclaimed “progressive” and “radical” students. Ironically, these ill-informed students, by supporting a largely corporate bureaucracy, have descended into the ranks of corporate conservatives, and they don’t even know it.

In the world of activism, there is a special category of people I’ll call “slactivists.” Slactivists are the people who pontificate on Facebook about how radical and progressive they are. They rarely attend organizing meetings or rallies because getting arrested might get in the way of their morning latte. Make no mistake, there are many ways to participate in radical organizing (and not all involve a megaphone in hand), but slactivists participate in none of them. They are a sub-class of scenesters, not fringe enough to be hipsters, not committed enough to be hippies. Slactivists wear the buttons, but don’t make them. They have been sold the “cool” of activism without any context or content. They use weasel phrases frankensteined from the legitimate talk of gender advocacy and left politics to “self-identify” as progressive, an insult to those too busy to flaunt the “image” of radicalism because they’re living it instead.

But the worst part of this slactivism is that it lends itself so easily to co-optation by the corporate machine. Because the slactivists are too lazy to do research, they are easily bamboozled by slick-talking “cause salespeople” that need them to fabricate the illusion of popular support, and have the corporate cash to pay for it. Slactivists are one of the most horrific outcroppings of our material age and culture, posing a more existential threat to radical activism than the forces they fight. The slactivist erodes a movement from the inside out, creating an artificial division between “us” (slactivists) and “them” (anyone else) by adopting positions without serious thought. The machine has now made it stylish to “challenge the machine.”

As my grandfather once said, “The boss doesn’t need to walk around with a sign that says ‘I’m the boss.’” Real activists don’t need to participate in the spectacle. It is from the position of bona fide activism that a movement of hardworking, well-informed people from coast to coast and across the political spectrum have come together to challenge the ugly beast that is CFS.

CFS is an organization that is actively corporatizing and immobilizing our campuses, and doing so in a far more insidious way than Chartwells or Coca-Cola. By hiding more than $5 million in sales and merchandising from its members and masquerading as a “progressive” anti-corporate student lobby, CFS – national bastion of slactivism – has weaseled its way into our very student unions. The devil is in our kitchen.

It is from the perspective of the ill-informed that the very real national anti-CFS movement is being criticized. Slactivists need to do some actual research about CFS. They can start with the hundreds of campus papers nationwide that have consistently slammed this draconian organization for its downright evil corporate tactics and general ineffectiveness.

Enough is enough. Members of PGSS, vote no – only no – just no to CFS.

PGSS members can cast their ballots online at ovs.pgss.mcgill.ca from March 29 to April 1. Adrian Kaats is a PhD3 Biomedical Engineering student. He’s a PGSS councillor, but the views expressed here are his own. Write Kaats at [email protected].

Here is more about how the CFS ruins schools

sourced from here at :

http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/2012/05/17/student-government-taking-college-to-court

Student government taking college to court 41

Student government representatives at St. Clair College Thames Campus are getting an unexpected lesson on legal proceedings.

Thames Students Inc., made up of elected students, has commenced legal proceedings against the college in the Ontario Superior Court, after it was abruptly shut down and replaced by the student government at St. Clair’s main Windsor campus.

Tanis Mathieson, who took over as president of TSI in May, told The Chatham Daily News the merger had been discussed in previous meetings and the college indicated it “was going to happen smoothly and it would happen May of 2013.”

She added there was another meeting, where the college stated it planned to carry out the merger in September 2013 to give TSI more time to prepare.

“Then it happened April 30, 2012, so it really did catch us off guard, because we thought we had a year to let them know how (TSI) would do a better job just being on our own,” Mathieson said.

She said members of TSI board of directors showed up on April 30 expecting to conduct its annual general meeting.

She said they received a letter from college president Dr. John Strasser that as of 8 a.m. that day, TSI is no longer the body representing students at Thames Campus and the Windsor student government is taking over.

She added the college handled the situation in a heavy-handed approach, telling the board if they didn’t leave the TSI offices immediately, they would be escorted off the property.

Mathieson said the Chatham-Kent Police Service had to be called so they could get into their offices and get their personal belongings, because the locks had been changed.

Strasser said TSI may have worked well when it was created in 1978, but added, “it certainly hasn’t worked well in the time that I’ve been here” for the past 13 years.

He said the college has been “chatting” with various TSI boards and executives over the years about merging the student governments.

Strasser said he met with TSI on Feb. 9 and told them discussions about a merger is not new and the student government was given more than a year to get together with Student Representative Council (SRC) in Windsor and work out the merger.

He noted the Downtown Windsor Campus agreed to work with the larger SRC government.

He added that left 7,000 students under SRC and 1,000 students under TSI.

Lauren Bultje, who was serving her last day as president when TSI was shut down, said they were aware of the deadline.

“But, we still weren’t sure as to what we were going to do yet. We had no idea if we were going to go with it or not,” she said.

Bultje said when the college withheld student fee funds TSI was to receive, that’s when they decided to take legal action.

Strasser said it was decided to speed up the process because there is a lack of good governance and there’s no fiduciary responsibility in terms of looking after student’s money. He said this included having no rationale for a huge draw on resources and TSI attempting to bring in the Canadian Federation of Students when it is part of the College Student Alliance.

When told the TSI board figured it had a year to make an argument for remaining independent, Strasser said, “if that was the case they should have put that in writing and let’s have a chat about that. None of that’s happened.”

John McNair, one of the lawyers from McKenzie Lake Lawyers LLP in London, representing TSI, said the basis if the claim is TSI is “the duly constituted student government at St. Clair College Thames Campus.”

He added the provisions of the Ontario College of Applied Arts and Technology Act recognize the role of a duly constituted student governing body.

“That legislation provides that a college of applied arts and technology, of which St. Clair College is one, is required to recognize such a student governing body,” McNair said.

“TSI asserts in the Superior Court that St. Clair College is not entitled to merge TSI into another student governing body or remove it or take away its authority to represent the Chatham campus students,” he added.

The matter is scheduled to be heard in a London courtroom on May 31.

However, McNair said, “it’s also our expectation there may be some discussions between the parties prior to that date in an attempt to resolve it.”

Bultje said TSI has worked on things they want and things they might be able to compromise on if there are discussions with the college before it goes to court.

Strasser said the college is always willing to talk this out.

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