CASA national survey funded by McGill SA legal settlement

Pau Balite/The Dalhousie Gazette

COLD RECEPTION Delegates at CASA’s AGM discuss the national survey.

HALIFAX (CUP) — Close to $30,000 being put towards a survey of Canadian students by the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations is coming from a settlement with a McGill University student association.
CASA national director Arati Sharma explained the survey’s details at the alliance’s annual general meeting in Halifax last week.

“We sincerely do apologize [for any miscommunications about the survey] because we do feel that this was in our jurisdiction to decide,” Sharma said at Dalhousie University on November 20.

The survey has been raising questions among some CASA members who were unclear of its details, including those who made the decision to conduct the survey and where the money came from.

The Canadian Student Survey is a project co-initiated by CASA and the Canadian Education Project, a Toronto-based research group. It’s the first time Canadian student unions and lobby groups have designed such a broad survey for data gathering purposes. The idea behind the survey is to prop up advocacy and lobby efforts. In previous years, these groups relied on data from outside research groups.

At the time of the AGM plenary — the meeting when a representative from each student union votes on the specific policy decisions up for debate — 20,000 students had completed the survey.

Due to confidentiality reasons, Sharma couldn’t disclose details of the settlement with the Students’ Society of McGill University, but said the issue regarded missed member payments. Through an out-of-court settlement, CASA was awarded $37,500 in total — $28,575 in membership fee back-payments after the $8,925 in legal fees was factored in.

McGill undergraduate students voted to exit CASA in 2005.

Sharma and CASA’s governance officers decided to put the settlement money towards the Canadian Student Survey, which is taking place online this month. Student unions that have membership with CASA and their provincial lobby groups can receive funding from both organizations to participate. Non-CASA members are also allowed to participate, at a fee of $1,000 per institution.

There are currently 19 schools participating in the survey. The total cost will be $60,000, including a fixed cost of $40,000, and a variable cost of $1,000 per institution.

“I didn’t know there was a settlement before I came here,” said Jack Brown, president of the University of Fraser Valley Student Union Society, to the group of representatives.

“We’ve been having communications issues for the past little while now,” he added during a break from the meeting. His university isn’t participating in the project because British Columbia doesn’t have a provincial lobby organization affiliated with CASA and the University of Fraser Valley doesn’t have room in its budget to pay the fee.

Ella Henry, vice president of education at St. Thomas University’s Students’ Union, said the project has raised questions concerning CASA’s governance structure.

“I think we heard, here, in the plenary, that a lot of schools have questions about whether the national director and governance officers were within their mandate to make that allocation of money,” she said.

St. Thomas didn’t participate in the survey because its research ethics board raised concerns about its lack of scholarly research. Before the university’s student union could put its participation to a vote, though, the project had already been approved, Henry said.

After several student union representatives voiced their concerns over the lack of communication, Sharma said CASA would work on improving the head office’s communication with members.

“Our leadership working group is developing a communications strategy for the organization,” she said. “I think we have a great external communications strategy for responding to the media and government, but I think we need something a little more robust so our leadership group is actually communicating with our members better.”

The provincial lobby organizations partnering with CASA in the survey are the Alliance of Nova Scotia Students Association, the Ontario Undergraduate Students Alliance, and the Council of Alberta University Students.