Law students have always been an odd fit with the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU). Talking to our peers around the school, most have no idea what UTSU is or what value they provide to students. One might chalk it up to the natural disconnect between the law school and the rest of the university – UTSU, after all, is comprised mostly of undergraduate students, and law students seem loathe to care about petty undergrad campus politics. But dig a little deeper, and you might find that (1) the UTSU simply does not understand or care about professional faculty issues, and (2) the union is struggling to be relevant even to undergraduate students.
Each law student pays just over $67 per year directly to UTSU (and another $200 per year for the UTSU health and dental plan). With 600 law students, that amounts to more than $40,000. That is nearly the same amount that the SLS has for their entire yearly budget. Yet, law students rarely, if ever, benefit from UTSU’s services. We don’t benefit because most of the services are catered to undergraduates or are poor substitutions for things we already run (orientation week, book exchange, and club funding, for example). Without change, our money will forever be an investment with no return.
Services aside for a moment, the UTSU itself appears to be in shambles, with an increasingly vocal opposition from all political stripes around campus. A large portion of the undergraduates that UTSU represents are so dissatisfied with the union that they want nothing more to do with them. Consider this: three colleges (Trinity, Victoria, and St. Michael’s) and a faculty (Engineering) are independently holding referenda on the question of continued membership in the union, and all look set to succeed (as of this writing none of the referenda have registered “no” campaigns).
This is a culmination of years of dissatisfaction and failed efforts at engagement on the part of UTSU. And so far, UTSU’s only response to the referenda have been legal threats to elected student societies involved in each of these colleges and faculties.
But don’t take my word for it. Even UTSU’s allies and electoral candidates representing the incumbents have sent warning signals. The Graduate Students’ Union (GSU), long a vocal ally of UTSU and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), which UTSU is a member of, accused the UTSU in an open letter of being increasingly undemocratic, and had this to say about the “defederation” movement: “When members feel their student organization is being run in an undemocratic fashion and are blocked from creating meaningful change within that institution, calling for referenda to defederate is an appropriate response.”
Even more shocking was a letter of forfeiture from Sana Ali, an executive candidate for the incumbent UTSU slate. Sana decided to forfeit the election because of what she claimed were efforts to “squash dissent and individuality”. More scathingly, she went on to say that her “purpose on team RENEW is to bring visual cultural and social diversity, not my actual voice, individuality, or opinions.”
The final irony is that UTSU has fought these questions of legitimacy because they have become precisely what they claim to be fighting. They claim to be against undemocratic decision-making at Governing Council, and are against backroom politics at Queen’s Park. But they have themselves become an undemocratic and opaque organization that makes decisions from the top down.
We, as law students, should not continue to support such an organization. We should stop giving them our student fees and let this organization represent our interests. We can advocate for our own interests and serve our own students better without being held down by such baggage.
