Expressing Concerns about CSU Referendum Questions

LettersMichael Eugenio — Published October 28, 2014

To CSU council members,

Conservative Concordia is one of the 80 recognized clubs under the Concordia Student Union. Our mission is to be a home for conservative students from Canada and abroad where they can discuss current affairs and promote a balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.

On Oct. 19, we became aware of two referendum questions up for discussion at the Oct. 22 CSU council meeting that will directly affect Conservative Concordia. The first one is concerning budget cuts and the second one is concerning the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

At the meeting, councillors decided to include a referendum question on the ballot that would ask undergraduates if they want the CSU to “officially oppose the budget cuts to the education sector specifically, and the public sector in general,” as well as work with “other organizations with comparable positions in order to seek alternate sources of public revenues as facilitated through the provincial and/or federal government.”

The portion “seek alternate sources of public revenues” means one thing only: increasing taxes. This would undermine Canadians’ standard of living and discourage many companies from investing here, which means less employment opportunities after we graduate.

Also, the question suggests that the federal government made cuts to the education sector, which could not be further from the truth. The Conservative government has invested $12 million in aboriginal business studies, $40 million for internships in high-demand fields, $123 million to modernize the Canada Student Loan program, $800 million in the Canada Social Transfer for post-secondary education and $1.8 billion to support research in Canadian universities. The government also introduced the Canada Student Loan forgiveness program for medical and nursing graduates who practice in rural and underserved communities.

Secondly, with regards to the BDS referendum question, which will also be included on the ballot, we denounce that the petitioners did not provide the full story, once again. We wonder why they always forget to mention that the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people is armed groups such as Hamas, who use funding from international aid to attack innocent Israeli civilians, including children.

We strongly believe in the right of Israel to exist and defend itself from these terrorist organizations, and find it shameful that the petitioners refuse to acknowledge that international humanitarian aid (our tax dollars) is going towards building terror tunnels and rockets instead of feeding the general population.

We stand behind our leader and Prime Minister who said in Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, that denying the right of Israel to exist is the new form of anti-Semitism. We denounce the fact that this type of rhetoric is still tolerated at Concordia University in 2014, in our modern multicultural environment. We also do not understand why the CSU feels the need to interject in international matters they have no influence over, as well as how this resolution will contribute to the betterment of the Concordia student body.

Finally, we would like to say that the current CSU executive does not speak in our name and we denounce their partisan attitude of governing only for those who elected them.

—Michael Eugenio,
President of Conservative Concordia