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A British Columbia university student is pressing ahead with a lawsuit against his student union after it failed to award his anti-abortion campus group official club status before a deadline his lawyer set last week.

Oliver Capko, a first-year agriculture student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Langley, B.C., had applied for his group, Protectores Vitae, to become a funded campus club, but the Kwantlen Student Association’s executive denied that status because it is a pro-choice student government.

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Mr. Capko and the Protectores members were offered the unfunded ‘recognized group’ status, which the KSA gives to political and religious groups, but has declined.

“It is unfortunate that we have to sue our own student representatives in order to secure equal and fair treatment on campus,” Mr. Capko said in a statement. “We are not religious, nor are we political. Our activities would lead to consideration of bio-ethical issues at Kwantlen, which would surely enrich the extracurricular experience of students. That is why we applied for club status and not recognized group status.”

The group’s pro-bono lawyer, John Carpay of the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms gave the KSA until Friday to grant Protectores club status. Court documents will be finalized and filed next week.

National Post