Misinformation, inaccuracies and evasion plague CFS representatives’ responses to an open letter, from 10 locals, in Charlatan article. The letter criticised the organization on a number of points and called attention to motions that will be submitted “with the intention of making the Federation more transparent, effective, accountable” and ­­”focused on our student membership”.

The article quoted Bilan Arte, CFS National Chairperson, as stating the letter “makes an assumption that our governing documents . . . are not available online. It also says that our minutes weren’t available online, and that is untrue. Our constitution and our bylaws, our operational policy and our issue-based policy have been online for years now.”

Arte’s quote addresses the aspects of the letter that take aim at:

The difficulty in accessing the federation’s information including “bylaws, policies, and especially financial information such as audited financial statements” The federation’s lack of “proper minutes” and access to minutes online across the national and provincial organizations

Federation Information

In examining these claims, we found that audited financial statements or budgets for CFS national are not only unavailable online but audited financial statements haven’t been presented to members in general meetings since summer of 2014. This puts the organization in violation of it’s own bylaws (Bylaw VII.4.c), as well as it’s operational policy on “Federation Documents”.

For the Ontario provincial branch, CFS-ON, financial statements are posted online. Specifically: audited financial statements from 2013, 2014 and a budget for the 2016 fiscal year. No financial data on 2015 is yet posted online.

Upon further research we found that the webpage where the financial documents for CFS-ON are posted, (http://cfsontario.ca/about/budget) was first indexed by Google on August 31, 2016. Due to the speed at which Google would have first indexed this webpage, it was created near this date (off by roughly a week at most). As well, these documents’ URLs seem to show their upload dates. The 2014 audited financial statement can be found at (http://cfsontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2016/08/Canadian-Federation-of-Students-Ontario-FS-A14-PUB.pdf); the portion “/2016/08/” indicates an upload date of August 2016. A recent Google cache of the page shows the 2016 budget uploaded but none of the audited financial statements. This implies that as of Sept 18th, the day before the release of the letter, the page was still under construction. Our evidence indicates these CFS-ON documents were recently released; at the earliest 3 weeks before the release of the letter.

Furthermore Arte failed to respond to the main focus of the signatories concern regarding “the federation’s information”, as she failed to mention or address financial information in her response.

Arte had stated “Our constitution and our bylaws, our operational policy and our issue-based policy have been online for years now”. The letter’s writers complained of the difficulty in accessing this information. The CFS’ constating documents were first posted in 2012, following years of debate and fighting from members critical of the CFS. Their complaint does hold some water, as earlier this year; CFS national’s website was down for over two weeks and their constating documents were unavailable during that time.

Minutes

The second major concern of the letter that was addressed at some length in the CFS’ response was a lack of “proper minutes at meetings” and unavailability of the minutes currently taken online. In response Arte had stated “It also says that our minutes weren’t available online, and that is untrue”.

We found that the national organization’s constating documents page was being updated on September 20th, 2016; evidenced by a Google cache of the page, the day following the release of the letter. Prior to September 20th, meeting minutes weren’t up on CFS national’s website. Looking for the minutes’ upload date is inconclusive due to the national website using a different convention than CFS-ON. Even documents uploaded in 2016 can be found with “/2015/07/” in their URL.

Similarly for the provincial organization: the minutes page was not cached by Google on Sept 23rd despite the site recently being crawled around Sept 18th (as seen in screenshot of CFS-ON budget page cache above). The minutes URLs indicate they were uploaded in September 2016.

Our evidence shows that the minutes were uploaded in response to the release of the letter on September 19th. Arte’s response is therefore inaccurate, misinforming and doesn’t reflect the valid concern of the signatories at the time of the letter’s release. The signatories concern that the minutes are not “proper” goes unaddressed. None of the general meeting minutes from either organization show discussion on any motions.

Unaddressed concerns

Other concerns highlighted in the letter were:

“Dominance of staff voices over those of students” “Lack of space for dissent and constructive criticism” “The overly burdensome process through which locals are able to leave the Federation” “The closed, exclusive nature of general meetings, which can prevent members from speaking in favour of their own motions at the committee stage”

None of these concerns were either touched upon or adequately addressed by the CFS’ response. The representatives however stated they “take seriously the issues raised and commit to working . . . to ensure concerns are addressed”.

Both CFS national and CFS-ON were asked for comment albeit with 23 hours of notice. At the time of publication they have yet to respond. We will update if comments are received.

Credit for the original article to Madison Ranta.