HAVING BEEN INVOLVED in event planning these past two years through my volunteering within the Health Sciences Student Association, I am surprised to see most political aspects of the upcoming election remaining unknown to your average University of Ottawa student.
Having worked within the executive of a student federated body, a clearer picture of what was happening in “student politics” could be seen. Stories of wasteful spending on behalf of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) have been circulating within the execs for the past two years, but these issues would rarely be openly known to the general student population.
It might shock some students to hear some figures on how much of your money regularly goes toward sending executives to conferences, as well as many larger political protests happening outside the city—outside the province!
The same could be said about the budget allocations to different components of the SFUO, most notably the fact that over the past couple years the budget allotted to campaigns was as much as two times the budget put towardsocial events. It’s at this point that we may start to notice very peculiar political tendencies in the various campaigns happening on campus, often strong political views also adopted by the CFS.
Upon reading a bit more on the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), one will notice their recent involvement in campaigns of very one-sided political views, across many lobbying and activist movements. And these campaigns are then passed along to our very campus, with the coordination by the SFUO, with tens of thousands of our student dollars.
So what happens with the continuous campaigning? Well, your elected executive members, who are all paid a salary of at least $30,000 for their one-year term, are stuck having to spend all their time on the seemingly CFS mandated campaigns; some more by choice than others.
The end result of these changes: Less campus-wide events and most notably a significant drop in U of O school spirit. Meanwhile, your elected representatives of each of the federated bodies are tirelessly working at bringing back student life and school spirit on as little as 10 per cent of the same budget allotted for campus-wide SFUO events, and on volunteer basis.
So now the big question: Who will you vote for in the next elections? I’m not here to encourage you to vote one way or the other, but if you don’t like the idea of having the majority of your money spent on CFS campaigns, then it’s important to take special note of where each candidate has had past experience and whether they’ve been more involved in campaigning or in student events planning.
I don’t know about you but I’m not up for paying some undergrad students to play politics within their CFS lobbying movement. With all this in mind, I encourage all those who care where their student dollars are being spent to inform themselves on each candidate’s (at http://sfuoelectionsfeuo.ca/) and, most importantly, to go vote!
Patrique Begin
Vp Francophone affairs, HSSA
