Day of Action one year later ….
The CFS' reduce tuition fees campaign is more flash than substance
The CFS wonders why its campaigns have difficulty in succeeding? It may have something to do with them being a lot like a flash, it is all you see for one second, there is a lingering “spot” in your eye for a few seconds and then it is done.
Come to think of it, like a professional camera flash, the CFS flash is overly expensive, goes up in price every year, and is really no different than the most cost-effective model.
Case in point, the Reduce Tuition Fees campaign of last year’s Day of Action. For one day, February 7 2007, they got headlines – all you could see on part of the lawn in front of Parliament were a bunch of people holding picket signs in one of the more expensive protests of the year. The next day, it was over.
The CFS ReduceTuitionFees .ca website quickly went dead. It was supposed to be updated in the Fall of 2007, according the site itself. It’s now the second month of 2008, and the website has not been updated.
Millions of dollars a year are collected by the CFS from students and they can’t even update their most important campaign’s website.
No wonder why they rarely get results – they don’t bother to do the hard follow-up work necessary to secure success.
One question I have been asking for quite a while is why students in Ontario would be less likely to mobilize than Québec (or BC) students in most situations. You would notice most student unions in Québec or BC holding successful general assemblies, while in Ontario GAs have lost importance and in some places disappeared due to lack of interest.
I remember being in CÉGEP (pre-university and technical college) at the start of the Afghanistan war and within a week they organized an emergency general assembly with more than 15% turnout (around 500 of 3000 students) and voted to suspend classes in the afternoon to walk to Ottawa (1 hour-walk) in protest the war… about half of the people at the general assembly actually went to the protest.
Compare that with organizing for months to get around than 10% of your student population out for one day of action, which is what we got at U of O in February 7th. One consequence is that you can quickly exhaust your volunteer capacity in the buildup of that one protest, and lack momentum for the followup.
So there are two (non-exclusive) strategies I heard many people bring up from this observation:
1- We need to envision a long-term cultural change so that the student body in Ontario becomes as politicized as in Québec. Easier said that done, of course. However the improvements of student empowerment we have seen at U of O in a few years are very interesting.
Objection: The main problem with that is that tuition and student debt keep rising, and obviously higher costs mean more part-time work and less connection with a community on-campus. Thus it might mean that we don’t have the time to change the culture to more Québec-like, grassroots student activism.
Counter-objection: What’s the point of having any social movement that doesn’t empower its individual members?
Counter-counter-objection: Maybe the Québec students aren’t inherently “more politicized”. Maybe they participate more just because the stakes are more important. You are more likely to go out to a general meeting if there is something important, like a strike vote. In that case we shouldn’t wait for mass mobilization to act. Actions create that mobilization.
2- Whether we can change the culture or not, we should still develop alternatives to mass mobilization. One great idea I heard from other local student unions was that of bringing together profs and students to develop an “alternative budget” for the university. In any case, we can expect many of these new tactics to use new media, which allows for quick dissemination of information and networking. See for example the recent campaign launched by U of O Law Professor Michael Geist: Fair Copyright for Canada.
Or…maybe we do not want to be like Quebec. The fight for keep tuition rates at an unsustainable level has created a system of the most underfunded universities in Canada. Students in Quebec are a lot more activist but they are fed one side of the issue.
Whether or not we agree with the goal, the fact remains that they have been more efficient achieving it.