Solidarity For Their Own Good — A review
Student politics blogger Titus Gregory
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” So wrote the late great Eric Hoffer, referring to the political and religious extremists he spent so much of his life studying. It was a depressingly predictable phenomena, in his mind, that even movements of the most honorable intentions would be eventually pulled in the direction of ever-greater corruption and sleaze; an inevitability stemming not only from the malevolent sort of control-freak leaders movements tend to attract, but also the sheer impracticality of believing an amorphous “cause” can ever be effectively led in the first place.
Anyone seeking evidence that the Canadian student movement is now firmly in the “racket” stage of existence would do themselves good service to read a recent essay by my pal Titus Gregory entitled Solidarity for Their Own Good. It’s a sickening exposé of the member fleecing, totalitarian tactics, and systematic chicanery routinely performed by one of this country’s most benign-sounding nonprofits, the Canadian Federation of Students.
Building the Pyramid
The CFS, as it is known, is a national umbrella organization seeking to unify as many college and university student unions as possible under its leadership, in the hazily purported pursuit of the national student interest. Like a national labor federation, whose traditions and culture the CFS apes without subtlety, student unions across Canada that choose to affiliate themselves with the CFS are declared “member locals,” branded with a number, and given seats at the annual congress. Students who happen to be attending a school whose student union (at some point in history) opted into the Federation are charged semesterly CFS member dues as part of their tuition.
That’s essentially the entire story of the CFS. The organization does officially purport to “lobby” politicians on various education matters, its national assembly passes all sorts of crazy, lefty motions, and, depending on what school you go to, you might get a CFS day-planner or coupon book out of the deal as well. But fundamentally, there’s really little more to the organization than an ongoing process of fee-taking and student union absorbing, and it’s all the sordid inbetweens of this pseudo-Ponzi scheme that Titus’ essay so lovingly chronicles.
The P-word is an apt analogy, because the organization of the CFS is rigidly pyramid-shaped, with a vast fee-paying “membership” at the bottom, topped by progressively smaller and smaller layers of fee-eaters and decision-makers.
Provincial law in Canada allows a “student union” to be formed with minimal hurdles on any college campus, and once properly registered, obtains the right to charge union fees to all attending students, regardless of their personal interest in membership. And interest is indeed low. If a campus can manage to wrangle up a 20% turnout in its student council elections it’s likely to be celebrated as a beacon of incredible engagement and activism. Most are lucky to scrape up a percentage in the high single digits. At a CFS-affiliated school, that barely representative council will in turn send delegates to the various CFS national conferences, at which point the upper-echelons of the CFS’ own executive council will be picked.
On top of those guys, in turn, is the CFS “permanent staff,” hired by the executive council to hold office seemingly indefinitely, thanks to the absurdly one-sided collective agreements that govern Federation employees (yes, unionized employees within a student union. It’s common). Like so many senior-ranking non-profit bureaucrats, it’s these folks who compose the true star chamber of the CFS governing system.
Concludes Titus:
The CFS is therefore governed by a leadership class consisting of political bureaucrats. Unlike the German Social Democratic Party of the early 20th century or the average American trade union in the 1950s, this leadership class does not consist of elected politicians who use the bureaucracy to further their own power. Bylaws, collective agreements, and the ultra-transient nature of student leadership ensure that it is the CFS’s Office Collectives, and their loyalist allies in various students’ unions, that effectively govern the organization. And this leadership class subscribes to an ideology that Weber and Michels argue is characteristic of bureaucrats: an abiding faith in the CFS as an institution, a staunch desire to maintain its continued existence and to increase its membership and its wealth, and a desire to preserve the institution’s stability.
As he documents, far from being sensitive to their extraordinarily dubious democratic legitimacy to spend students’ money and make decisions on their behalf, the CFS bureaucratic ruling class is exceedingly paranoid and defensive in the protection of their power. In practice, this means “freedom of speech, freedom of the press, transparency, non-partisan civil service, and respect for provincial and local self-determination are all sacrificed in the name of building the institutional power and wealth of the CFS.”
The manifestations of such sacrifices are creepy and numerous.
The CFS’ crack legal team is routinely sicced on student journalists who “state inaccuracies” about the organization, a charge generally interpreted in the most sweepingly Orwellian way possible, essentially forbidding the interpretation of documented facts in anything but the most flattering light. Yet if “accurate information” is not exactly permeating in abundance, the CFS can only blame itself. The organization has consistently resisted posting its minutes, financial documents, policy statements, and even staff roster online. Enemies are everywhere, you see, and the CFS seems to operate on the jaded assumption that allowing anyone to learn anything substantial about the organization will spawn even more of ‘em.
Not that anyone would want to get on the CFS’ bad side. When potential competitors to the CFS have arisen, the bureaucrats have hatched hilariously jealous schemes to co-opt them in their infancy, through petty tactics such as squatting on their desired URLs or incorporating sham organizations in the same name. A 1996 attempt to found a new organization called the “British Columbia and Yukon Students Association” by students in those regions, for instance, was hastily subverted when a gang of CFS bureaucrats founded an identically-named organization in one of the staffers’ apartments.
Even the dopey symbolic resolutions churned out by the CFS national assembly appear to be dreamed up by staff and handed to the member locals to propose, lest the CFS’ most stage-managed event of the year stray from the party line for even a moment. Indeed, once you’re branded with a local number the CFS seems to prefer you run your student union as subserviently as possible, assenting to a handful of pre-packaged CFS campaigns and slogans, (“Rally to Reduce Tuition Fees!”) rather than going through all the bother of dreaming up your own. Considering the laze and lack of creativity that tends to characterize many student politicians at the local level, this one-size-fits all approach to “student issues” can gain a pretty receptive audience in some sectors, but even then, Titus argues, there’s still evidence suggesting the CFS actively meddles in local elections anyway.
It’s all done in the name of solidarity, of course, but considering how little substantial progress the CFS has actually made over the last 30 years in the pursuit of its impossible goals (it is CFS policy, for instance, to favor “negative tuition” for students, which is to say free university plus a guaranteed “living wage” handout), the CFS’ unique brand of solidarity ultimately becomes little more than, well, solidarity for their own good.
And as far as the recipients of all that good — the CFS higher-ups — well, it’s hard to avoid the impression that they’re a little bit… odd. Indeed, the single most interesting and readable portion of Titus’ entire report may be his Appendix G, which chronicles the lengthy career of Philip Link, a longtime senior CFS staffer who today serves as one of the Federation’s biggest bigwigs. The tale is told of a man who has been endlessly promoted in open spite of the seemingly endless accusations of corruption, incompetence, intimidation, and physical assault that have dogged virtually every stage of his career. (His common-law bride is also on the senior payroll, natch).
So why has nothing been done?
These days, the CFS usually purports to have somewhere around half a million members at over 100 schools, a number of extremely dubious validity, not only because a term like “member” seems to imply some degree of free will, and not the forced, mandatory fee-paying CFS “membership” actually entails, but also because at any given moment significant chunks of the CFS membership are engaged in legal action to opt-out of the organization. The CFS’ never-ending crusade to impose its solidarity by any means necessary, on campuses that are at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to such efforts, is one of the great underreported scandals of contemporary post-secondary education in Canada.
Here’s a story: From 2002 to 2008 I was a student at Simon Fraser University, which entailed my automatic membership in the Simon Fraser Student Society, which in turn entailed my automatic membership in the Canadian Federation of Students (“local 23” since 1981). In 2008 the SFU student council grew tired of the CFS, and asked me to run a campus-wide referendum to gauge whether or not students were interested in forgoing their mandatory membership in the organization, and cease paying into it.
I did what the council asked, because running student referendums was my job in those days. When the dust had cleared, the tally was 2,979 in favor of going over 1,469 who wanted to stay, or about 67% to 33%. On a campus of over 25,000 the turnout wasn’t great, but about as good as you can reasonably hope for with these kinds of things. A 17% mandate was certainly better than the 5% mandate the CFS requires for a school to join, in any case.
The SFU student union declared its independence in the aftermath of the vote, and has not paid CFS membership fees in the years since. Yet if you visit the CFS website, you’ll still see good old Local 23 listed as one of its proud member schools. This is because of the CFS’ obstinate Hotel California-esque attitude towards checking out of the organization — it can theoretically be done, but very rarely in practice.
As Titus chronicles, the CFS ruling class has, over the course of many years, established ever-more elaborate policies governing the precise parameters of exactly when, where and how a student community that wants to opt-out of the CFS will be permitted to do so. You can’t just have the neutral campus director of student elections administer a vote, God help you. No, it has to be done through a special four-member referendum committee, two members of which will be appointed by the CFS directly. And the CFS will decide exactly when the vote will be held, and there will be a CFS-appointed poll clerk at every voting station. And the CFS reserves the right to flood the voting campus with CFS campaigners from other provinces during voting time, and the CFS’ “annual report, financial statements, research and submissions to government shall not be considered a campaign material,” so don’t bother bringing any of that up.
“It cannot be rationally argued that this barrage of rules and restrictions is needed for administrative or logistical reasons,” writes Titus, concluding that the only real justification is that without them, the CFS might lose. Which they do often, anyway. There’s thus something of a mad rush at anti-CFS schools across the country as they clamor to hold separation referendums before the CFS has a chance to tighten its withdraw regulations even further. By the Federation’s impractical standards, almost none of these separation referendums are ever flawless enough to consider legitimate, but thankfully the Canadian legal system tends to disagree.
The issue
If you’re even remotely involved in student politics at a CFS school you’ll know that the organization is basically the beginning and end of all discussions. It’s an issue that polarizes on a level that is hard to fully fathom unless you’re already waist-deep in the subculture. Those who hate the Federation hate it fanatically, and those who love it do so blindly (and often self-servingly, since, as Titus illustrates, CFS fidelity at the lower levels tends to correlate quite positively with subsequent employment in the organization’s higher echelons). When I was employed at my student union, the board was in the fanatically anti camp, and very few decisions were made about anything with out first determining how such efforts would hurt the CFS in some manner, or at the very least not undermine the crusade against them.
It’s an obsession that is tiresome, wasteful, and — if you believe student unions actually have some legitimate business to perform — hugely distracting. But it’s also necessary, in the sense that any student official elected to a position of power should possesses some impetus to prevent the active fleecing and extortion of his contemporaries.
I used to be fairly indifferent to the CFS, viewing it as merely one source of waste amongst many. Slowly the damning evidence began to pile up, however, and now the idea that anyone could be neutral on an organization as systematically crooked as this one seems unfathomable. As a longtime student politician and bureaucrat in his own right, Titus Gregory has done an immense service in drawing on his wealth of knowledge and years of research to provide Canadians with a comprehensive, unvarnished summary of the grim reality of the Canadian Federation of Students in the 21st century. Solidarity for Their Own Good is a must-read not just for those within the parochial world of Canadian student government, but for anyone interested in interested in observing a distressing case study of the sort of bureaucratic rot that inevitably arises in any organization more consumed with maintaining its own survival than the interests of its purported clients.
