Is the CSU transparent?

Lack of organization, communication issues and long meetings frustrate the student body

NewsGeneviève Sylvestre & Maria Cholakova — Published April 1, 2025 10 minutes

“Since we're a fee levy [group], we're independent, we try to do everything ourselves,” Winton said. “And, given that the CSU has been very reluctant to support us in basically any way aside from two executives, [...] I just don't even bother trying to deal with them at all.”

Winton has worked all year to create a gender-affirming care (GAC) loan program to help students access care without the pressure of waiting for reimbursement from insurance. 

Originally, she went to the CSU to present her motion and ask for a maximum of $100,000 to be allocated to the loan project at the first regular council meeting (RCM) of the fall semester. 

At the RCM, on top of sharing financial concerns, a councillor named another reason to oppose the motion. 

“It’s just contradicting many people’s beliefs and religious values,” the councillor said at the RCM. “I just have to speak in their voice, and I have to say that these students also represent a significant portion of the student population.”

However, according to the CSU Positions Book, the union’s official position since 2021 is that it “stands in solidarity with trans, nonbinary and gender-non-conforming folks.” 

“[The] CSU never publicly acknowledged this incident. They still haven't published the minutes, as far as I'm aware, they never apologized to us either,” Winton said, adding that only one executive member apologized to her in private afterward. 

Council voted to send her motion to the finance committee, which has a budget of $20,000. Her project was then struck down due to a lack of funds.

After failing to receive support from the CSU, Winton launched the program at a reduced capacity of $20,000 through Queer Concordia. 

To try and get more funding for Queer Concordia and her GAC loan program, Winton sent her application to receive a fee levy increase during the 2025 CSU general elections. 

The CSU Policy on Fee Levy Applications states that existing fee levy groups looking to run for an increase need to provide “an audit or review engagement prepared by an external accountant for the previous fiscal year.” 

As Queer Concordia is the smallest fee levy group on campus—receiving $0.02 per undergraduate student, per credit—Winton said that an official audit could cost around half of the group’s operating budget.  

Queer Concordia sent in their application on Jan. 22, and additional documents on Jan. 23. They received no updates about their application after it was sent and acknowledged. 

On March 4, after reading The Link and The Concordian’s collective editorial, Winton realized Queer Concordia’s fee levy was not even added to the deliberation documents for council to look through. 

“So I reached out,” Winton said. “And apparently, our application was never even presented to the committee.”

According to Leen Al Hijjawi, one of the chairs of the fee levy committee, the Queer Concordia fee levy application was sent after the deadline without an audit. 

However, emails acquired by The Link showed that the application was sent before the last Monday of January—the deadline outlined in the policy. 

The fee levy committee and its lack of organization 

Queer Concordia isn’t the only group that has been having issues with the fee levy committee. 

During the winter semester, fee levy applicants had to send their application to the chairs of the fee levy committee by Jan. 27. 

As is procedure, after receiving the applications, the council needed to meet to deliberate on the packages presented to them. 

However, according to committee chair Moad Alhjooj, despite numerous attempts to convene during the nomination phase of the general elections, councillors were unresponsive. 

As such, the committee did not meet at all. 

By Feb. 25, the CSU held an urgent special council meeting (SCM) to ensure that the upcoming CSU elections would be held properly and according to the rules. The agenda included the approval of fee levy applications and referendum questions. 

The approval of the applications took place four days after the Feb. 21 deadline of the CSU election nomination phase. During the SCM, the CSU chairperson placed the fee levy committee in a breakout room and granted them 40 minutes to deliberate on the applications. 

Only one of the five applications was accepted. Afterwards, groups were not informed about the committee’s decisions for a few days. 

When asked why groups were not kept in the loop about their applications, Alhjooj said it was hard to communicate when there was no new news to share. 

“Sometimes it's very difficult to deal with applicants when we ourselves don't have the answers,” Alhjooj said. “When we can't meet with our fee levy committee, we don't have any more [information] from them. We don't know where this is gonna lead or go.” 

A week later, the only group whose fee levy was accepted, ElectroCon, had its application revoked due to a lack of oversight from the committee meeting during the SCM.

The revocation came as a shock to the group. According to Husam Tannira, ElectroCon’s president, the CSU told the group to follow the application criteria on the CSU’s website instead of the fee levy application policy. 

This created an inconsistency in their application, as the website only called for 750 student signatures to create a new fee levy compared to the 3,000 needed, as outlined in the fee levy application policy. 

After the mishap, ElectroCon got in contact with the CSU. 

“They told us [the revocation was] just because there was some misunderstandings between the fee levy committee and the other fee levies. Which, to be honest, we were like, ‘OK, fair enough,’” Tannira said. “We don't want to be approved on [the] price of other people getting refused for no reason.” 

ElectroCon has yet to meet with the committee and ask them what happened with the application. 

During the last CSU RCM, held on March 12, the council voted to hold a special fee levy referendum as soon as possible due to mistakes made by the fee levy committee during the approval process. 

“Once this is passed, hopefully we'll call for another fee levy committee meeting where we can discuss all the applications, hopefully not with the time constraint, go over everything in detail and then hold the separate elections just for fee levies,” Alhjooj said during the RCM.

According to Winton, Al Hijjawi informed her that another meeting would be planned to discuss fee levies after the general elections. 

After the fee levy committee meeting, Hijjawi reached out to ask for Queer Concordia’s audit despite Winton explaining it was impossible in their previous correspondence. 

“It feels like everyone's constantly being given the runaround,” Winton said. “And it feels like these bylaws are kind of redundant, at a point where it's kind of impossible for little groups to get an increase or to even get instated.”

At the time of publication, the dates for the referendum have yet to be announced.

The Link reached out to the councillors on the fee levy committee but did not hear back by the time of publication. 

CSU’s issues with communication 

According to the CSU general coordinator Kareem Rahaman, it’s hard to define if the year was simply successful or not. He believes it is more complex than that.

“Maybe we strayed from the mandate a bit,” Rahaman said. “But it's not that we strayed because we just didn't want to do the mandate.”

Despite not following the general coordinator mandate word for word, Rahaman said that the CSU always made sure executives were present at major events at the university. 

“When things were happening on campus, when police were on campus, we put ourselves in those positions to talk to [police], to try to stop those things from happening,” Rahaman said. “Except [for] a handful of incidents, we tried our best to make sure that these things happening on campus were safe.”

Despite the presence of CSU executives at major events on campus, students like Winton have criticized the union for being unreachable and not answering emails on time or at all. 

“So that's a problem that I wasn't even aware of, for the most part. I wasn't even aware that that was a thing happening,” Rahaman said. 

Rahaman added that if a student wants to reach him or another executive, they can go to the CSU’s office and talk to the receptionist, who will try to get in touch with them. 

“Going to The Link, hearing about [communication issues] for the first time in an interview is not the best way to hear about it, I would say,” Rahaman said. “I mean, the Instagram page is active. There's a lot of ways to get in touch with [us].”

CSU's lack of transparency or student lack of understanding? 

Apart from executives’ reachability, students have also been vocal about the union’s lack of transparency. 

During the CSU general elections on March 11 to March 13, slates and councillors ran on promises of transparency for students. 

Rahaman believes that transparency is always brought up during the elections in order to paint the CSU in a bad light. 

“When I first ran, I ran on transparency too. But you know, my definition of transparency [is] something you can see through,” he said. “But in order to see through that thing, you have to look at that thing. You can't look the other way and then say, ‘Oh, well, that glass is not transparent,’ but you're looking at the wall.” 

He added that mechanisms for transparency are already in place, as the RCMs are open to all students who would want to participate or present a motion. 

Rahaman did say that, although meetings are public, the CSU’s website has not yet been updated with the most recent information. For example, the most recent minutes from a CSU RCM on the union’s website date back to May 2024. 

Additionally, the latest available budget and audited financial statements on the website date back to 2021-22. Finance coordinator Souad El Ferjani said she believes that, like herself, previous executive members were probably not made aware of the need to update the website. 

“The policy does not specify what things you need to update or not,” El Ferjani said. “And the trainings that we get are not detailed. They do not explain to you the scope of your work.”

El Ferjani added that she will be sending her budget and presentations to the web developer at the end of her mandate.

Where is the Judicial Board? 

Since its last decision was made in 2022, the CSU’s highest governing body, the Judicial Board (JB), has been non-functioning. 

The CSU JB acts as the judiciary branch of the union. It serves to render impartial judgments on complaints and cases by using and interpreting the CSU By-Laws and Standing Regulations.

Despite attempts from the executive team to reinstate the JB at the Jan. 22 RCM, councillors only voted for one out of four candidates who applied for the position. For the board to be active, a minimum of three members are required. 

As councillors entered a closed session to vote on JB candidates, it was not clear why three out of the four candidates were rejected. 

According to Rahaman, the problems with the restoration of the JB began long before the RCM.

He explained that it took the union three separate JB call-outs to get four students to apply for the position. 

As for the vote, Rahaman is still in the dark on why the council rejected the candidates. 

“We don't even know the reasoning as to why these people weren't selected,” Rahaman said. “And their job is to keep council in check; it's to keep these problems from happening. It's insane to me.” 

Filibustering, long meetings and disagreements

Long council meetings have been a recurring problem for the union this year. 

The CSU council is made up of 30 students from different Concordia faculties. Their responsibilities include passing mandates, voting on motions and approving the budget. 

During the academic year, meetings have often run over four hours, with a number of the meetings being adjourned without completing the agenda. 

This has led to delays in the approval of crucial documents like the budget. El Ferjani said that, despite the budget being added to different RCM agendas since September, meetings were always adjourned before it was approved. 

“I just called [an SCM] just to get the budget approved, because at that point, it was unreasonable,” El Ferjani said.

Arguments and long speaking turns are partially to blame for the long runtimes. Most notably, on Jan. 10, council member Drew Sylver presented a motion that called for the resignation of five councillors and seven out of eight members of the executive team. 

The motion led to an hour-long debate of executives and councillors accusing Sylver of failing to provide proof of wrongdoing for the listed individuals.

“It would be really easy for me [to say that the] union should implement this training and this training [...] for the following year,” Rahaman said. “But realistically, that is not going to solve anything, because they're just going to argue better.” 

With files from Hannah Vogan

This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 12, published April 1, 2025.