Students from 15 schools affiliated with the Canadian Federation of Students have announced their intentions to defederate their unions from the CFS, which currently represents 500,000 students in Canada.
At York, the students are working towards defederating the Graduate Students Association CFS, according to an email response from Ashleigh Ingle, spokesperson for Ontario, Central, and Eastern Canada chapter of this group of students, which currently does not have a name.
“Students are realizing that their interests are not served by [CFS]”
There are also students at the three biggest CFS member schools — York, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto — aim to split their unions from CFS, announced by a group of organizers from various CFS schools in a press release on Tuesday night.
The group plans to use petitions aimed at student unions who are a direct part of CFS to “end [CFS]’s’ control over local campus affairs, but also to begin discussions about alternatives for provincial and national organizing that keep decision-making power in the hands of students.”
Ingle wrote, “Students are realizing that their interests are not served by [CFS]. We are not walking away from organizing at the national and provincial level; we are creating the space for that to happen effectively.”
The press release also mentions a potential new lobby group, at the national or provincial levels to represent those schools who would leave the CFS table. This would involve the creation of a new national student lobby group who would join CFS, as well as the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, who were similarly created through a mass CFS exodus in 1995.
With the latest push to split from CFS, the national group could soon find itself without support in Quebec, British Columbia, and Manitoba in addition to the lack of support it already has in Alberta and many Maritime provinces.
More to come on this.
Divyesh Mistry
Copy Editor
