But this week, even though the drama on campus seemed to be just as big as every year (The Link this week was filled with election stories - PDF), nobody really cared off-campus.

Part of it is that the left-right divide that polarized student politics 5-10 years ago doesn't exist anymore. Looking at the two parties that ran this year, I couldn't figure out which party was on which side.

In the end, the party that was expected to win did so handily, with 73% of the student vote, 26 of 29 seats on the Council of Representatives, all four elected seats on the university's senate and both elected seats on the Board of Governors.

But that wasn't the big story of this election.

Instead, the big issue was on the referendum ballot, and questions about fees.

Free money

It's a perennial thing at Concordia that various groups will pester the CSU council to put a referendum question on the ballot demanding to institute or increase an independent fee levy on students. While student unions complain of non-tuition fees that have been steadily increasing over the past decade and a half, the CSU seems more than happy to add to those fees, usually by putting on the ballot misleading questions that sell an organization and then demand some small-looking per-credit fee (nowadays with a promise to refund students if they ask).

Two groups got questions on the ballot:

• Le Frigo Vert, the vegan food store that wanted to increase its levy by 50% - it says it wants to expand its hours and offer better discounts on food, but critics say it just wants to increase salaries of the people who work there. The vote failed 1,576-1,754.
• Cinema Politica, an activist movie screening group, wanted to increase its fee by 250%, for reasons that I'm sure it thought were justified. The measure passed by only 15 votes, 1,674-1,659.

A third question about fees also failed. The student union has been collecting massive fees for years to build a new student-owned building that would house extra-curricular activities. In order to speed up the process, the union asked to have the fee more than double, to a point where it would end up costing a full-time student $135 a year, and rake in more than $2 million a year total from Concordia undergrads. That question was soundly defeated, 931-2,348.

You can't leave me!

The big question on the ballot, though, was about whether Concordia undergraduate students wanted to maintain their membership in the Canadian Federation of Students.

In the past two years there has been a wave of student associations who have gone through the process of disaffiliating with CFS. Not because they disagree with the CFS's stand on tuition or social or economic issues, but because they feel the CFS is undemocratic, and their repeated attempts to reform the CFS's structure have failed.

In fact, the situation has gotten so bad that the CFS is now at war with its own Quebec chapter (tensions had been simmering for quite a while for years previously), and has banished CFS-Q from its organization (now demanding that it change its name).

As if proving their point about the lack of democracy, the CFS is refusing to allow student unions to leave, even after referendums are held with students voting overwhelmingly to disaffiliate from the CFS and stop paying fees.

How can they ignore the democratic will of students so brazenly? Well, it's in the CFS by-laws.

In a document poetically called Solidarity For Their Own Good, and posted to Stephen Taylor's blog, Titus Gregory spends 339 heavily-footnoted pages talking about the structure of CFS and the increasingly convoluted procedure put in place to disaffiliate from the organization.

The procedures put an insane amount of power in CFS's hands considering the obvious stake they have in the result.

Among the rules the CFS forces student unions to go through:

• A requirement that 20% of students sign a petition demanding to leave CFS (this is just to put the matter to a vote). For the CSU, this would mean more than 5,000 students, and about 10 times the number it would take to force any other matter onto a referendum ballot
• The CFS, not the student union, sets the date for the referendum
• A standardized question that makes no reference to what fees students pay to CFS
• Votes for disaffiliation by any one student association must be a minimum of five years apart
• Votes for disaffiliation cannot take place between April 15 and Sept. 15, or between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15
• No three student associations can hold disaffiliation referendums within the same three-month period. As a result of this (and the previous rule), the CFS refused to allow a referendum at Concordia until almost a year after the petition was delivered in October.
• A special body, with half its members appointed by CFS, decides on what campaign materials are allowed (and can unilaterally tear down posters it feels are not compliant). During a referendum at Dawson College in 2008 (this one to join CFS), posters arguing against CFS affiliation were declared illegal for incredibly dubious reasons (most alleging defamation against CFS), including the argument that one had "out of date" citations from student newspapers.
• The CFS has the right to appoint poll clerks, scrutineers, and one of two members of an appeals committee to deal with any disputes over these rules
• Campaigning of any kind is prohibited outside of the campaign period, but an exception is made for any material that describes or advertises CFS services so long as it doesn't reference the referendum directly
• All outstanding fees must be paid to CFS before choosing to disaffiliate. The CSU was shocked when the CFS calculated their outstanding fees to be more than $1 million, and outright deny that any such deficit exists.

Imagine any other organization imposing these kinds of rules for someone wanting to leave that organization, and one word comes to mind: undemocratic.

It's easier to leave a cellphone contract from hell than it is to leave CFS.

Which brings us back to the entire reason these student associations want to leave.

But they can't leave. Instead, the CFS is suing or threatening to sue any student union that dares try, finding some violation of the CFS-imposed rules to argue that the union is violating CFS by-laws and hence a contract between the two organizations.

Other battles are going on with the McGill graduate association, as well as Concordia's Graduate Student Association, which CFS also argues owes it a lot of money. If all the disaffiliation campaigns are successful, the CFS will be left with virtually no presence in Quebec, Canada's second-largest province.

At Concordia, even though the question was simply whether they wanted to remain part of CFS, the students voted 72% against. Not only did members of both parties running for the executive support leaving CFS (one made it a primary platform point), but the issue seemed to unite (what's left of) both sides of the political divide, proving once again that corruption is not a partisan issue.

And so, like that psycho ex-girlfriend who insists your relationship isn't over until she agrees to end it, the CFS will be using its lawyers to convince student associations to stay (Heck, I expect a lawyer's letter threatening me for this post any day now). And all the money being sunk into this battle (from both sides) is money that won't be used to advocate for student causes and provide services to students at universities.

The CFS might even win some of these court challenges, successfully finding some loophole that invalidates months of work on the part of a student association that just wants to leave.

But just because the CFS might win doesn't mean it shouldn't be ashamed of itself.

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For all the media attention it received, the Netanyahu riot didn't cause much lasting physical damage. There were no serious injuries, and the 2008 Habs riot caused much more in the way of property damage than the two windows and emptied fire extinguisher cost Concordia. But the political and media fallout was enormous. The riot led to an unprecedented ban on all organized events related to Middle East issues on campus. After that ban was lifted a few weeks later, the Concordia Student Union pounced on a controversial flyer and some amateur legal analysis to hastily suspend the Jewish student group Hillel. The next spring, students voted en masse to expel the left-wing radicals in charge of student politics. For the next half-decade, students continually decided that a corrupt moderate student government was still better than bringing the leftists back.

Two documentaries were produced about the Netanyahu riot and the political conflict around it.

One was called "Confrontation at Concordia", by Martin Himel, which aired on Global TV. There's no official version online, but it was uploaded to Google Video in its entirety (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) by a white supremacist group (it's unclear whether they take the side of the Jews or Palestinians in this debate - one would assume they despise both). Himel's documentary makes Michael Moore look reasoned and unbiased. He clearly takes the side of Hillel, even comparing actions of Palestinian supporters on campus to actions in 1930s Germany that preceded the Holocaust, asking rhetorically how far Concordia's tensions could escalate in comparison. The film invites experts from only one side of the debate, and includes a lot of voiceovers in which Himel makes bold statements based solely on his own opinion. Himel even appears multiple times to talk into the camera.

The documentary caused outrage among Concordia's left, and even moderates (such as myself) decried it as biased. It was the subject of complaints to both the Quebec Press Council and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. Both dismissed the majority of the complaints, finding only that Himel and Global should have made it clear to viewers that this was a point-of-view opinion documentary and not a news piece.

The other documentary, called Discordia, was a production of the National Film Board and the CBC. Directors Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal took a radically different approach to their film, focusing it more on three figures involved and the personal, emotional rollercoaster they went through in those months. Addelman and Mallal do not appear in their own film, and there are no voiceovers. Only a few subtitles give dry, matter-of-fact statements. All the opinion is given by the three stars: Noah Sarna of Hillel, Samer Elatrash of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, and Aaron Maté of the Concordia Student Union. Though it is slightly biased to the pro-Palestinian side because two of those three are on one side of the debate, the film makes no grand hyperbolic statements and gives no clue to its directors' political views.

Neither documentary, of course, tells the whole story. Such a thing would be impossible in an hour-long film. But the latter, at least, gives a slice of the nuances of the debate, while the former shows the real (if outrageously exaggerated) fears that Israel's supporters had about what was going on at the activist university.

Concordia has calmed down considerably in those seven years, so the closest the younger generation will get to the "viper's nest" is through such historical documents.

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Meanwhile, the CSU says it spent $200,000 on legal fees alone in the past year.

Good thing I'm not a student there anymore. I can laugh about their misfortune instead of crying at the massive waste of money.

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From my archives in 2004: On the right, the thrill of victory; on the left, the agony of defeat

In 2003, a slate of moderate (what their opponents would label as right-wing) student politicians called "Evolution, Not Revolution" achieved what had seemed impossible: winning Concordia University's biggest student vote of the year and taking control of the Concordia Student Union executive against an established radical left-wing that had controlled it for years. Even though public opinion was clearly on their side, the mainstream of the student body didn't vote, because they didn't care.

When the corrupt left controlled Concordia

A little bit of history.

In March 2001, after it came about that a vice-president (Sheryll Navidad) had been embezzling close to $200,000 of student money (through blank cheques signed by the president, whose name rather ironically was Rob Green), a political opponent of that president named Chris Schulz couldn't ride that outrage to electoral victory. Instead, the leftists would continue to control the student union, thanks to a large bloc of support from Palestinian activists, anarchists and left-wing radicals (of which there was certainly no shortage at a university like Concordia).

By this time, Concordia politics had been consumed by the Palestinian/Israeli debate, thanks mostly to the Second Intifada that had begun the previous fall. The two factions of politicians were defined not on their position on taxes, abortion, gun control or social services, but on whether they believed the Palestinian freedom-fighters were fighting a just cause against an evil, racist Israeli oppressor or whether they believed that the only peace-loving democratic state in the Middle East was defending itself against terrorists who wanted to drive all the Jews into the sea.

The Link's grammatically-imperfect cover of Jan. 30, 2001.

The Link, the student newspaper I wrote for at the time, had been the subject of a petition for dissolution because it chose not to cover a protest organized by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, which was then Concordia's most active student group. A tense couple of months, highlighted by a bold statement of defiance from editors at the paper (the cover above, which was quickly parodied by leftists who attacked the Link as undemocratic) culminated in a referendum endorsed by the CSU which sought to give the union the power to remove student funding to the paper (and other independent organizations) if it didn't meet certain democratic criteria. That referendum was contested by both the Link and its competitor The Concordian, and so the ballots were sealed after other votes were counted. Hearings on that contestation never took place, and to this day nobody knows for sure what the result of the referendum was.

A few weeks later, the leftists banded together and took over the Link's annual general assembly, appointing members of their cabal to the paper's board of directors. The ensuing conflict forced the paper's shutdown over the summer. In the end, very little changed, and the natural turnover at a university meant that the issue was just about forgotten by the next year.

The backlash

In the fall of 2001, 9/11 hysteria combined with an over-the-top radical leftist handbook and a huge overreaction to it in the media prompted the first student backlash. Only a few weeks after the terrorist attacks, the CSU called a general assembly of its members to vote on a motion to ban three companies from campus. Bell Helicopter, Bell Canada and Nortel were seen as evil because of their involvement in exterminating peasants in Colombia or something like that. Cooperating with the evil military industrial complex was enough to make them evil. But, surprisingly, students actually showed up, especially those in engineering and commerce (with some nudges from the university administration) who wanted jobs with these companies and couldn't care less about leftist conspiracy theories or anti-capitalist rhetoric. Not only was the motion defeated, but the students started adding motions to the agenda to restrict the CSU's powers and give more to the engineering and commerce student associations (for example, the ability to appoint students directly to the university's board of governors). The left suddenly started panicking that the democracy they held so dear had suddenly turned against them. They had to start coming up with excuses (like that the meeting had lost quorum) to ignore its orders.

At the same time, a petition was being passed around demanding a new election. It took advantage of a bylaw that provided for the recall to election of a president (and her executive) if a petition was submitted by 10% of electors, or about 3,000 students. The petition was a huge success, but the president (Sabrina Stea) resigned before it could force a new vote. Appointed interim president while a new election was called was her only remaining executive, a man named Patrice Blais. Schulz tried again to run for president, but one of his executives was caught on tape offering a patronage appointment to a third party in exchange for that party pulling out of the race. The chief electoral officer disqualified his entire slate based on a tape she had been handed only hours before the vote was to begin. That decision was quickly reversed when lawyers got involved, but not before about 500 students had already voted with Schulz and his team crossed off the ballot.

Schulz won the election anyway, but the CSU's judicial board overturned the results on a 3-1 vote, supposedly because the number of disputed ballots was more than the margin of victory. (The opposing minority pointed out that Schulz won even though his name was crossed off 500 ballots, so he would only have gained votes had those ballots been marked differently.) The CSU's council of representatives decided that another election in February was a waste of time (the general election is in late March) and Blais stayed in office until June, even though the students had made it clear in September they wanted a new government in place immediately.

In March 2002, fresh off the outrage of an invalidated election result and an executive with no mandate, not to mention the growing engineering and commerce blocs on his side, Schulz tried for a third time. His chances were so high, even his opponents thought he would win. But he didn't. Instead, he lost against an executive headed by one of Green's former vice-presidents. It was heartbreak for Schulz and for the silent moderate majority of students who wanted to rescue their student government from the arrogant, corrupt radical left. If it wasn't going to happen now, it wasn't ever going to happen.

Netanyahu changed everything

Pro-Palestinian protesters stand off against riot police on Sept. 9, 2002.

It wasn't until the Netanyahu riot of Sept. 9, 2002, that Concordia politics truly changed. Hillel, the student Jewish religious group, had taken a more political role in response to the very political SPHR, which had increasingly dominated CSU politics. It invited former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give a speech on campus, and the university, pressured by influential donors, wanted so much to show it wasn't afraid of the Palestinian activists that it turned down a request from its own security department to move the speech elsewhere. Despite the high security (complete with metal detectors), a riot broke out when pro-Palestinian activists stormed the lobby of the Henry F. Hall Building and started a standoff that only ended when a window broke and police discharged pepper spray inside the building.

The event made international headlines, which was a bit overkill since no one had died or even been seriously injured. But both sides had a barrel full of gasoline to fuel their partisan fires: the pro-Palestinian side was accused of using violence to stop a peaceful speech they didn't agree with. The pro-Israeli side was accused of sacrificing the security of students to bring a war criminal on campus in a deliberate provocation (I'll let you ponder for a moment the obvious flaw in this line of reasoning). The university took the extreme step of banning all events on campus related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a few weeks until everyone calmed down.

But they didn't calm down. Instead, the CSU council (led by a career student politician with no soul named Adam Slater) pounced on controversial flyers being handed out at a Hillel table which said "We've JIHAD enough" and provided information on joining the Israeli military, and by a vote of 8-1 ordered Hillel's funds frozen and its privileges revoked. Once again, the move made headlines as the leftist activists ordering the shutdown of the Jewish student group. Jews from around the world wrote letters to the CSU, the university and other media demanding that the decision be reversed. Having once again underestimated their opposition, the CSU president partially reversed the decision four days later. But Hillel wouldn't get full access to their funds for weeks.

The right takes over

There was no recall petition this time (with elections happening every year in March, and nearly a month of lead time required, the timing is rarely sufficient for such an exercise), but during the next election in March 2003, the vote wasn't even close: the "Evolution, Not Revolution" slate, whose main platform point was to represent students without going all crazy-activist, defeated the left-wing slate (called "Clean Slate" and headed by the former judicial board judge who wrote the dissenting opinion in favour of Schulz) by more than two to one. More than 4,000 students voted in the election, completely obliterating the previous record for student voter turnout.

Natalie Pomerleau, the head of the Evolution, Not Revolution slate, became the new face of CSU politics in 2003.

Though each party had all-new members unconnected to previous iterations, behind the scenes they were run by the same camps: Blais on the left, Schulz and his successors on the right. A look at who was putting up posters in support of each campaign was enough to see the dominance of the same political factions.

This time, the leftist coalition of about 1,500 Muslim students, Palestinian activists, anarchists, anti-capitalists and other leftists had been overwhelmed by a new coalition of Jewish students, engineering and commerce students, and members of the silent majority who were fed up of the CSU and wanted change.

In 2004, the incumbent party (now called "New Evolution") won again. The left, which through each election softened its image more, couldn't convince enough students to vote for them, and couldn't shake off the reputation their predecessors had created.

In 2005, 2006, and 2007, the hand-picked successors of the current executive won the election each time, relying on a rock-solid political machine and still-prevalent fears of what would happen if the left ever regained control.

When the corrupt right controlled Concordia

But as Concordia became a one-party system again, the inevitable corruption began to take hold. Some of the stunts were incredibly transparent, not to mention petty. With the chief electoral officer, judicial board and council chairperson all appointed by the CSU council, it wasn't long before they were filled with grossly unqualified partisan hacks who would check with the CSU executive before making just about any decision.

At the Concordia Student Union, corruption and financial scandal hit about once every five years, not coincidentally the amount of time it takes for all the students to graduate and be replaced by new ones who haven't learned from past mistakes. (Except that many of the people involved in current CSU politics, like Blais, Steven Rosenshein, Slater and others, were still fighting their petty student battles almost a decade after arriving at this university, unable to let go.)

A new dynasty

This week, after a year of gross financial mismanagement, lawsuits and accusations that generated more headlines and was enough to temper the executives' pats on the back, change is coming back to the CSU. Actually, the slate named "Change", which was supposed to succeed the current executive, lost by more than 500 votes to a party called "Vision", backed by Blais and former CSU president Mohamed Shuriye, who had been part of the Evolution dynasty but broke off from it to join the Rebel Alliance. Vision also won more than 2/3 of council seats, solidifying their control over the union for the next year.

It wasn't a complete reversal (Blais and Shuriye are moderates, not leftist radicals), but it wrestled control from arrogant established power brokers who had clearly become too corrupt for students to accept anymore. And while there are still contestations to resolve, it looks s though the election couldn't be stolen, despite some questionable decisions like disqualifying people based on what they say.

It's hard to say whether this is a momentary hiccup or a true regime change. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict doesn't dominate CSU politics the way it once did. Neither do traditional left-vs.-right issues. Instead it's dominated by people who have been involved for 10 years now and have obsessed themselves with settling old grudges and scoring petty political victories that have no meaning and no use. The younger students are too afraid to confront their puppetmasters who perpetuate unofficial political parties based primarily on a personal conflict between two people almost a decade before.

Whichever party controls the Concordia Student Union though, you can bet that in a few years the scandals will return, and the cycle will continue. The only constant is that the politics never end, even if the political issues are so trivial that nobody but the politicians care about them.

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• Change
• Fresh
• Attention
• Vision
• New Union

I guess "Freedom" and "Awesome" and "Puppies" dropped out.

In case it's not clear yet just how small the stakes are, the Concordian has a story about a former CSU executive being caught on camera ripping campaign posters from the walls.

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In it, Curran points the finger at student apathy, saying people who go to university just don't care enough about what goes on in their student government:

The truth is, your average student is usually too busy with classes, work, movies, gym and love life to pay attention to student government. So the decision-making and, more importantly, that ginormous bankroll, falls to that small clique of keeners for whom politics is passion and bedside reading is Robert's Rules of Order.

This argument sounded familiar to me, so I went looking in the archives. Allison Lampert said the same thing eight years ago, when students started to turn on their radical left-wing student government:

It's a university with a history of political activism, and a group of older, working-class students who feel their social causes are as important as what they learn in the classroom.

It's also a university that attracts mature working students, who prioritize their jobs and part-time classes over voting for student council.

"The same things that make a small number of students really active also make a large number of students less involved," observed Concordia University student Zev Tiefenbach, 23.

...Some observers argue the CSU executive was elected because of voter apathy at Concordia - about 7 per cent of students cast ballots in the last election, compared with 20 per cent at McGill University.

Their explanation: Concordia has a larger number of part-time students - 45 per cent of the student population - who are often less inclined to get involved in school politics.

Apathy is certainly a problem, no matter what the political leanings of the student government. And apathy breeds corruption. But the CSU actually gets a lot of students involved. Its elections have gotten as much as 10% turnout, which is very high for student elections in large universities. The fact that these scandals are being uncovered should be considered a good sign in that regard. I'm sure there are plenty of questionable expenses from smaller student groups, like clubs and faculty-specific student associations. But few people care about those.

It's not just Concordia, either. Dawson's student union learned a hard lesson last fall when an executive went crazy with a union-financed credit card.

Should the university step in, and take the financial reins? Even if they wanted to they couldn't. The CSU is an accredited student union that's separate from the university, and Concordia can no more step in and take control than an employer can take control of a workers' union.

The decision must be the CSU's to make, and while they've already promised even tighter financial controls, that's not the answer. After all, financial controls are what got them into this mess in the first place, after almost $200,000 went missing from its coffers in 1999 and 2000.

And it's been shown time and time again that turnover every four or five years causes an inescapable loss of institutional memory, and the slow deterioration of any good intentions that may have been placed there by predecessors. Outside staff hired to make up for that loss (like the bookkeeper accused of mismanaging those hundreds of thousands at the CSU) end up gaining more and more power through their growing knowledge, and learn how to manipulate things behind the scenes.

Instead, the CSU and other student associations charged with managing any money simply shouldn't be doing so. They should setup an independent organization to handle their finances, sign their cheques and do financial reports (with another accounting firm doing the auditing, of course). Political decisions would rest with the elected student government, but balancing the chequebook would be left to professionals instead of 20-year-old students with no experience handling a million-dollar-plus budget.

My worry isn't so much about the CSU, which has a few eyes on it at all times, but more about the smaller organizations getting student money that aren't the subject of constant attempts at coups d'état. Their financial mismanagement - or just imprudent choices of where to spend money - might go on for years before anyone notices them.

If student government want to be truly proactive about solving this problem, they first have to admit they have a problem, and that they need help to solve it.

UPDATE: A McGill student association executive resigned over personal use of a $2,000 hotel gift certificate that was deemed inappropriate.

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At least with the Concordia Student Union, the stakes involve some serious money.

A week after the scandal of the year broke out, the student papers (especially The Concordian) are all over the news, even though there's nothing actually new happening, mainly because the target of the $25,000 bribe accusation hasn't spoken publicly about it. It's even making the McGill papers.

Meanwhile, in other scandals keeping the CSU so busy they can't deal with regular business:

• Email account broken into! Secret evil plotting emails leaked!
• Patrice Blais sued! For libel! For $125,000!
• Patrice Blais sues! May force special election a whole month before general election, wasting thousands of dollars!
• Disappearing bookkeeper defaults on legal case! On the hook for $360,000!

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The bribe attempt was allegedly made in May 2008. It is becoming public now only because the CSU has decided to switch insurance brokers, and ASEQ believes it is because they did not allow themselves to be blackmailed.

The CSU health plan is the student association's largest single expense, and $25,000 represents only a fraction of its yearly budget.

But still, to ask for a direct, illegal campaign contribution and threaten to cut off a multi-million-dollar deal if it's not received is pretty insane.

To be clear, the Concordia Student Union denies the claim (though Rosenshein hasn't spoken publicly yet UPDATE (March 3): Rosenshein emerges do deny it as well), and says its decision to switch insurance brokers without even opening it up to bids was unrelated to any alleged bribe.

The letter from ASEQ executive director Lev Bukhman to Concordia University asking it to take charge of the student health plan is here (PDF).

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The Evil Borg Cube (a.k.a. Hall Building)

I used to look back at my alma mater Concordia University, and ponder how student politics there had changed. In my years (2000-2004), there were scandals, recalls, backroom deals, lawsuits, riots, arrests and just general overall craziness. But since then it had been mostly quiet. A one-party system had been instituted at the Concordia Student Union, finances seemed under control and everyone stayed out of the headlines.

But thankfully, university student politics have a habit of repeating themselves every few years, as high turnover results in institutional Alzheimer's and the same mistakes get made by a whole new group:

• Person in charge of finances is left unchecked, money goes missing, and then she does as well? Check.
• President proclaims innocence? Check.
• Financial mismanagement so complicated even auditors can't figure it all out? Check.
• Recall petition to remove executive? Check.
• Executive tries to find loophole to subvert democratic will of petition? Check.
• Club money goes to questionable expenses? Check.
• Comparisons to corrupt African regimes and measures put in place to make sure this "doesn't happen again"? Check.
• Patrice Blais? Check.

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When the executive discovered what happened (at first they thought it was more like $30,000), it was reported to the council of representatives in a super-secret meeting. The press release came out a week later. It took four years before she was finally convicted, though the union still hasn't recovered all the money.

This month, history appears to be repeating itself, and the CSU has apparently discovered another "financial irregularity" about "misappropriation of funds" which was presented to a super-secret meeting. No dollar amount is given, but one would assume we're not talking about a few extra beers in the expense account. No one is named, of course, but it would have to be someone with access to the money, either an executive or an accountant.

For someone to do this at the CSU takes balls (and "creative accounting" skills) the likes of which I have never seen. The union put rigorous financial controls in place after the first fraud, including new financial policies and the hiring of a financial controller. It will be interesting to see how these safeguards were foiled this time.

Meanwhile, a bit further west down de Maisonneuve Blvd., the Dawson Student Union has a financial scandal of its own. It seems one of its executives racked up $29,000 in expenses on her executive credit card (well, I assume it's a her - if a guy is spending that much on clothes and jewellry, there's bigger problems afoot).

Whose bright idea was it to give apparently limitless credit cards to 18-year-old CEGEP students? I mean seriously, did nobody consider the rather obvious possibility that this might happen?

What the CSU and DSU have in common, despite the fact that stealing from them is like taking candy from a baby (a baby with a trailer full of candy), is that both were accredited as official representatives of their students, meaning the schools' administrations have certain legal obligations involving student fees, and can't interfere in their affairs.

I'm not suggesting differently here, but this is clearly a systemic problem. CEGEP and university students can't be trusted with huge bank accounts. Rigorous financial controls need to be put in place, and those controls need to be verified on a regular basis by an independent third party.

Perhaps the government should step in here. The same law that says universities must hand over student fees to accredited student unions should also require certain financial control measures be put in place, and there should be regular inspections by the government to ensure that they are respected. Miss your audit by a day and you get a visit from a government agent. Even if you don't, you still get a visit. Otherwise things like this will just keep happening.

And all of this is completely separate from the misappropriation of funds by student clubs and smaller associations. It was rampant in my time and I doubt it's gotten much better.

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As the years pass and my connection to my alma mater fades (despite the Alumni Association's pleas that I donate money and give back), I realize that I don't know the people studying there anymore. I'm not familiar with the day-to-day issues. And more importantly, I don't care.

But it's fun to watch as this year's vote becomes more of a farce than ever. There's only one set of candidates running for the executive this year, the Left having been so demoralized by seven losses in a row that they've retreated to a legislative-only party. Even the apparent joke party was disqualified when it turned out that its members were signed up to run without their permission or even their knowledge.

The last time an election for CSU executive was uncontested was ... I don't know if it's ever been done.

Despite the protests from the media about a one-party system being de facto undemocratic, the election goes on, with prizes handed out to a few random voters. Even with that, it's hard to see this election breaking any turnout records.

Oh Concordia...

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"I believe it's time to set petty politics aside and come together to build a stronger Concordia community."

-- Angelica Novoa, Concordia Student Union president, during the election campaign

If you've been anxiously awaiting more news about Concordia student politics (and we all know you have), the student media have returned from the holidays and they give you the latest:

• An appeal was filed about the blatantly leading referendum questions in last November's CSU by-election. It was summarily rejected by the brand new judicial board for apparently technical reasons. Now the CSU can get all the money it scammed out of students.
• Minutes of a suspiciously-called student council meeting last April that suspiciously disappeared without a trace have now mysteriously reappeared. The meeting was nothing important, just the legislative branch of a political organization arbitrarily overruling the judiciary over a common-sense judgment that two politicians were ineligible to run in the category they filed for because they were not part of that category of student. Convinced that everything has been resolved now, the council has voted to restrict itself from ever discussing the issue again.
• The Concordian features a mid-term report card of the CSU administration, focusing on the things they've accomplished.
• But their assessment of the CSU's commitment to accountability is scathing at best.
• A loser in the November by-election (and, for that matter, March's general election) publishes an open diary in The Link in which I guess she tries to be funny, but comes out sounding like the kind of get-a-life bitterness that has consumed Concordia politics for far too long.
• The Graduate Student Association had to call in mediators because the executive and council refused to speak to each other. The meeting was held in secret so we don't know what they said.
• Concordia's Board of Governors (that's the corporate CEO grownups who should know better) apparently found it necessary to rename its "Interim President" position. Well, actually it "abolished" the "Interim President" position and created the position of "President for an Interim Period." The person filling that position, whatever it's named (wasn't it "acting president"?) is Michael Di Grappa.
• Meanwhile, administrators still refuse to acknowledge the existence of the "risk assessment committee" that was setup after the Netanyahu protest in 2002. The Acting Interim President for an Interim Period has refused to testify at an access-to-information hearing about it.
• The search for a new provost and VP academic (the No. 2 administrative position at Concordia which is also being held on an interim basis) has drummed up a whopping two candidates: Katherine Bergman, who has been dean of science at the University of Regina since 2001; and David Graham, who was appointed dean of arts and science at Concordia in 2005.

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The CSU is still trying to figure out if two of its current councillors were properly elected in March. The council nullified a decision of its own judicial branch under suspicious circumstances and has now used stalling techniques to avoid the issue of whether two independent students (those that don't belong to one of the school's four faculties) were in fact independent at the time of their election.

Nevertheless, it's trying to conduct a clean election.

I can't speak for the candidates (six candidates for three seats, with clear party affiliations), but the referendum questions leave much to be desired.

Three of the four involve fee increases (student-imposed student fees have skyrocketed this decade), and they're all written by the people who want the fees approved instead of an impartial third party. As such, they include irrelevant statements about what the fees will pay for.

The Concordian student newspaper, which is desperately trying to increase its fee to bring it on par with its competitor The Link (some background on their bickering here), has this question on the ballot:

Do you agree to raise the fee level of The Concordian, a free weekly, independent newspaper covering news, sports, arts, music, features and opinions for Concordia by $0.09 per credit, from $0.10 to $0.19 per credit, to cover the rising costs of printing the newspaper, repairing old and failing equipment and increasing the creative quality and scope of the paper? This fee will be charged to all Undergraduate students beginning with the 2008 Winter term (2008/4 courses) and will be subject to the university's tuition and refund policy.

The problem is that the question implies that the fee increase will only cover rising costs of printing and equipment replacement. Though that's part of it, the editors are also interested in offering contributors a small honorarium and saving some money for a rainy day.

If a competent election officer was running the show, the question would look like this:

Do you agree to raise the fee level of The Concordian by $0.09 per credit, from $0.10 to $0.19 per credit? This fee will be charged to all Undergraduate students beginning with the 2008 Winter term (2008/4 courses) and will be subject to the university's tuition and refund policy.

The other two fee questions have the same problem. Unnecessary campaigning is emphasized below:

Do you agree to raise the Concordia Student Union Fee Levy by $0.25 per credit, from $1.50 to $1.75 per credit in order to fund important services and initiatives such as the creation of an emergency food bank for students in need, a free daily lunch offered to Loyola students and Concordia Student Union 101's. This fee will be charged to all Undergraduate students beginning with the 2008 Winter term (2008/4 courses) and will be subject to the university's tuition and refund policy.

Do you agree to adjust the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) membership fee levy (which includes the membership fees of the Canadian Federation of Students, the Canadian Federation of Students- Services and the Canadian Federation of Students-Québec) to $0.41 per credit per student, thereby continuing to support the increased demand for campaigns and services of CFS, some of which include lobbying for student debt reduction, better student financial aid, more funding for post-secondary education, cell phone discounts through StudentPhones, student discounts at hundreds of retailers in and around Montreal and free ISIC cards? The fee adjustment would represent a $0.01 decrease for Arts & Science, Fine Arts, and Independent students, and a $0.41 increase for Engineering and Computer Science and John Molson School of Business students, thereby equalizing the fee levy paid by ALL undergraduate students. The fee adjustment would be implemented in the Winter (2008/4) term and collected in accordance with the University's tuition billing and refund policy.

The last question is even worse. In order to correct a decades-old discrepancy between fees paid by various faculties, it proposes to "equalize" the fees by slightly decreasing the fee for the largest group (Arts and Science, Fine Arts and independent students represent more than 65% of the population) and creating the fee out of nothing for the rest. The large group will vote to decrease their fees, and even if engineering and commerce students vote against their huge fee increase en masse, it won't matter because other students make that decision for them.

It's a horribly unfair system.

So why are these dirty referendum tricks tolerated? Because they have been used for years.

Just about every fee-related referendum question for the past five years has included unnecessary and leading information. The Art Matters festival, People's Potato free lunch service, CJLO Radio, Frigo Vert, Sustainable Concordia and the Concordia chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group have all used this technique to get fee questions passed.

The divide-and-conquer equalization technique, meanwhile, was first used by the Concordia Student Union itself back in 2001, and has been adapted for use at The Link (full disclosure: while I was an editor there, though I still feel bad about it). Other groups like QPIRG have used a similar technique but with a slight increase instead of a decrease for the majority.

I suppose I could just let it go and dismiss it as the work of uneducated students, but some of these people are going to be involved in real politics someday (Mario Dumont was a Concordia graduate). They're going to have to learn at some point that this kind of manipulation of the electoral process isn't kosher. It might as well be now.

UPDATE (Dec. 1): This post is referenced in Macleans.ca's Nov. 30 daily campus update. Though it's "Concordia Student Union", not "Concordia Student's Union".

Also The Concordian's Tobi Elliott informs me that The Concordian's referendum question passed. So did all the other ones. What a surprise.

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Not that the grownups at Loyola and Sir George aren't doing petty political grandstanding of their own, of course.

I don't know about you, but this makes me want to hide my degree more than a protest or the prospect of some dirty hippies running the joint.

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A little history here. Many moons ago, Concordia University Television was founded as Canada's first university-based television station. It doesn't have a television broadcasting license, nor is it on cable anywhere. Instead, it has monitors on a closed-circuit system throughout the university, mainly in the downtown Hall Building.

Somewhere in the 1990s, the Concordia Student Union (which was still concerned with that "democracy" thing and hadn't yet been taken over by the moderate/radical or Israeli/Palestinian political divides, each bent on using political corruption to eliminate the other and stay in power at any cost) had the bright idea that, because nobody cared about what they did, they should get the word out more. So they mandated (read: required) CUTV to film their meetings and "broadcast" them to students. But because of technical limitations at CUTV, this never happened. And with the inevitable turnover on both sides, this rule was eventually forgotten.

Fast-forward to this spring. CUTV station manager Jason Gondziola wins a seat on the CSU Council of Representatives, somehow believing that being a student politician and running a student media outlet does not present an inherent conflict of interest. He immediately starts lobbying for permission for CUTV to start filming meetings. Over the past few years, the station has been using student money to buy lots of new equipment and is distributing some videos via its website.

But CSU councillors, specifically John Molson School of Business councillor Catherine Côté, who apparently have no idea what politics mean, are concerned about their privacy. In some cases in the past, it's been Muslim women on Council who didn't want their faces exposed. Ditto some paranoid anarchists. I'm not sure who it is now, but I'm certain it's either an idiot or someone who is trying to hide from constituents.

Student politicians are almost by definition stupid. It's not their fault. They're learning how to become real politicians. This means that, for example, their political dirty tricks are a lot more transparent (illegally paying campaign workers, bribing, appointing partisan hacks to electoral and judicial positions, etc.).

But it boggles the mind that a student politician, who has run in an election and appeared on hundreds of posters and thousands of ballots, would cite privacy concerns as a reason to prevent journalists from recording the public proceedings of the most important student-run body at Concordia, responsible for a budget of over a million dollars. The fact that Councillor Côté did so after the fact, using the excuse that the issue should be revisited because she couldn't be bothered to show up to the previous meeting and should be given a chance to express her views, is the height of arrogance.

The Link agrees, calling her an "enemy of transparency".

She, and the entire CSU Council, should be ashamed.

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Yet this province seems to be the largest battleground for student protests in North America. They protest tuition fees, which are too high because they're above zero (some protests involve CEGEP students, whose tuition fees actually are zero). They protest government cuts to loans and bursaries. They protest the colonial capitalist imperialistic racist empire bent on ... evil of some sort.

And, of course, they protest each other.

Five student associations from Concordia, McGill and Dawson are suing each other over control of the Quebec chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students. Concordia's graduate association is planning to pull out of the organization over this dispute which has seen two competing executives appointed. (UPDATE Sept. 13: The Concordian -- yeah, I know -- has a detailed story on what's going on)

"Regional" (read: not Montreal or Quebec City) groups at UQTR, UQO and UQAR are threatening to leave the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) over their concerns the group is too Montreal-centric, and create their own lobby group to represent just their interests.

Currently there are three post-secondary lobby groups in Quebec. In addition to FEUQ (considerd the grown-up group because they sit down and negotiate with the government) and CFS-Q (considered almost renegade by its parent national organization and with little weight in Quebec because it only represents the two anglophone universities and an anglophone CEGEP), there's ASSÉ, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, which is a newer, more militant group that accepts nothing short of free education for all.

To give an example, the Concordia Student Union has been a member of all three organizations over the past few years, paying student money to three redundant organizations. They recently dropped ASSÉ (which was the cheapest of the three but also the most ineffective), and now pay money only to two.

And yet despite this, Jean Charest was returned to power with the clear intention of raising tuition, and fees are going up. FEUQ is threatening strikes, but they've already lost the battle. The public voted for tuition increases, and a few hundred students choosing to waste their money by not going to class isn't going to get anyone to change their mind.

All three groups need to take a moment to figure out why they're losing (even many students don't support their positions -- though I don't see too many of them lining up to donate money to the universities), and change their strategy before they become even more irrelevant than they already are. Once that happens, student unions will start pulling their funding and the Quebec student activist movement will implode.

UPDATE (Sept. 25): A judge decides to keep the offices off-limits to both groups until the issue can be reviewed further. The SSMU is happy, while the CSU is not.

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So students will save a few bucks each year, which they will no doubt be giving to their student union so they can continue needlessly suing other student unions over petty student politics.

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The first is a Justify Your Existence piece on Concordia Student Union president-elect Angelica Novoa, who has been under attack by her political opponents for being incompetent. Anyone want to take a wager on which side of this political magnet will be outraged with it first?

The other is the third in my series on Quebec bloggers-turned-authors: Mère Indigne, who unfortunately put her blog on hiatus mere days after I interviewed her. On the plus side, this means starting next week I can go back to featuring English blogs, some of which have been in my bank ready-to-write for four months now.

I should be ok for the next few weeks, but if anyone has suggestions for interesting local blogs that are updated regularly, let me know.

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