If the DSU don’t opt in to a more engaging democracy, students may opt-out of the system altogether.
Last week, the Gazette reported the DSU plans to embark on a process of democratic governance review over the upcoming year. Our union’s leaders have opted out of Students Nova Scotia’s upcoming independent review of member unions in favour of conducting their own process. This is a bold move, and if we want to ensure the long-term survival of the union, we need to get it right.
Democratic reform is long overdue. In recent years, the DSU hasn’t been able to claim anything close to a popular mandate. We reached a “high” of 21 per cent voter turnout for the 2007 DSU elections, and that uninspiring figure has only plummeted over the last few years. In our most recent election last winter, we barely managed to draw 10 per cent of the student population out to the polls. Of that already meager number, spoiled ballot rates ranged from a low of 12 per cent to a high of 20 per cent, depending on the position.
The disconnect between the union and the majority of its members cannot continue indefinitely. With DSU fees approaching $150 per year, increasingly large numbers of disillusioned students may soon find themselves asking why they are paying so much for an organization that has failed to engage them in a meaningful way.
A recent opinion piece in the National Post discussed the possibility of moving away from mandatory student union membership. As anyone who follows student politics knows, such a move would wreak havoc on union budgets and force us to reconsider our fundamental expectations of what services student unions should (and could) provide.
This isn’t a pipe dream either. It has happened in other jurisdictions under circumstances similar to the ones we face now.
Reacting to agitation from groups of disillusioned students, governments in Australia (2006) and New Zealand (2011) passed laws prohibiting universities from requiring mandatory student union membership. The result was catastrophic to the unions as they existed at the time – some reports had university union memberships dropping by as much as 95 per cent.
Many student activists criticize such legislation. They argue that it is nothing more than a cynical attempt by governments to capitalize on student frustration in order to eviscerate the student movement. Others feel that student unions are broken and simply cannot make the necessary reforms through internal processes – that unions have had decades to make such changes on their own, and student engagement has only continued to drop.
Whether one can stomach the outcome or not, it’s hard to deny the populist appeal of this argument. If unions are running things so poorly that 95 per cent of students decide to quit when given the choice, clearly something needs to change.
Government legislation isn’t the only way that student anger could bring about this result either. There’s always the chance that frustrated students could take matters into their own hands and challenge mandatory union membership in court. Such challenges have already happened on a few occasions, though luckily for the unions involved, the students in those incidents lacked the resources to hire legal counsel.
Despite these sporadic, uncoordinated courtroom flops, many believe there are compelling legal arguments in favour of abolishing mandatory student unionism.
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a right-wing think-tank, claims that mandatory student unionism violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and this argument has already found some limited success a real world legal setting.
In 1994, BC’s Commission of Appeals concluded that mandatory student unionism violated s. 2(d) of the Charter (freedom of association) and directed Simon Fraser University to stop requiring mandatory membership in its student union.
This decision was later set aside by the BC Court of Appeal, which held that the Commission had exceeded its jurisdiction. Though SFU escaped on procedural grounds, the Charter argument that persuaded the Commission could very well pop up again if student disillusionment continues to fester on campus.
Voluntary student unionism is a real possibility if we do not change our current course. Such an enormous shift in the way student unions are funded would force a radical internal restructuring and would likely result in the loss of services that many students hold dear.
This alone should impress upon our student politicos the importance of getting this democratic governance review right. If they believe in the DSU – if they believe that our strength comes from the stability of universal membership – they need to figure out how the union can empower and engage greater numbers of its students.
This process will be incredibly challenging. If the solution were simple, a previous generation would have fixed things before they got this bleak. Democratic reform is also only a part of the challenge. Student leaders need to evaluate whether they are using their resources as efficiently as possible. They need to make sure that they are running an organization that meets the needs and interests of the large cohort of students who rarely set foot in the SUB.
Even if the DSU aces this, we won’t singlehandedly reverse the tide of student disinterest that has washed over nearly every campus in the country. We can set an example though, and a DSU backed by a more engaged student population would be in a much better position to put up a fight for its continued existence.
There’s no telling how many more chances we will get at this. Unless we want to see a penniless DSU’s role reduced to organizing “wacky hair days” in a SUB building owned by the University, we’d better act now.
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