Amanda SparksDisclosure: Andrea DeKeseredy and Ping Lam Ip are former presidents of the Sociology Graduate Students’ Association. DeKeseredy and Ip have also previously been involved with Halt the Hike.
The University of Alberta’s Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) is the only official organization representing graduate students in our university. However, it seems students do not have trust and passion in it.
We have about 8,500 graduate students, most of whom are at the same time GSA members. Over the past five years, none of the GSA General Elections had a voter turnout that came close to one fourth of all members. In the 2025 election, the incoming president received 591 votes, only about seven per cent of the members. Additionally, the GSA’s website is riddled with vacant positions. Most concerningly is the vacancies in the faculty steward positions, who are the first point of contact for graduate students with labour-related issues.
It is not hard to understand why. For the past few years, the GSA has shown more interest in things that do little to help students than in matters of high-stakes. In 2022, the GSA and the U of A Students’ Union (UASU) spent $145,000 on a dodgeball game in a failed attempt to break the Guinness World Record. Just in 2024 alone, the current GSA president spent more than $15,000 to attend three conferences in Ontario. These trips resulted in discussions about advocacies but not actual accomplishments.
But when it comes to issues that require immediate actions, like tuition hikes and labour grievances, the GSA has continuously displayed apathy and/or uselessness. In September 2022, graduate students from multiple departments were experiencing significant delays in receiving their graduate assistantship contracts for the fall term. Many had to begin work before even signing an appointment letter. But the GSA refused to collaborate with departmental graduate students’ associations to make a timely response to this crisis. Yet in that same month, the GSA took the time to put on the dodgeball game.
In 2023, when the university was about to raise our tuition for the fourth consecutive year, students were calling on the GSA to gauge interest in a strike. The GSA was initially reluctant to mobilize any resistance. Only after a grassroot student group, Halt the Hike, began organizing a protest did the GSA participate later on.
Ironically, the GSA is also our labour union. It’s the only legal entity that has the authority and obligation to represent all academically employed graduate students in collective bargaining and protecting our labour rights. The GSA’s ongoing passiveness in standing up for students is fundamentally at odds with its designated legal role. But this problem has a deeper root than individual executive members being indifferent to our workers’ rights and sufferings. It has a structural origin in Alberta’s laws.
The Alberta Labour Code and the Post-Secondary Learning Act (PSLA) are responsible for outlining how the GSA operates. It stipulates that the GSA has the “exclusive authority” to act as our trade union and negotiate a collective agreement with the university. But at the same time, the PSLA considers the GSA as a part of the U of A.
The U of A also provides the GSA with funding for a wide range of vital services and support for graduate students. For example, each year the GSA receives more than $960,000 from the university to administer grants and awards to its members. This includes academic travel grants, child care grants, emergency bursaries, and Graduate Student Recognition Awards. This means our union is representing the interests of student workers while being under financial influences of the university, our employer. This makes it almost impossible for the GSA to reject any harmful policies the latter puts forward.
In an attempt to rectify these conflicting roles, in 2022 the GSA Council restructured the portfolio of GSA executive members. It replaced the original position of vice-president (labour) with associate vice-president (labour) (AVPL). With this change, it confined the role’s responsibilities solely to labour-related issues. Not all GSA members elect the AVPL, but some 3,500 to 3,700 academically employed graduate students do. The GSA Operating Budget, which comes from our membership fees and funding from the university, among other sources, funds the five other executive positions. The AVPL, however, is paid by the GSA Labour Union Fund made of our union dues.
Nevertheless, the GSA Budget and Finance Committee, chaired by the GSA president, has the authority to propose how money is spent in both the Operating Budget and the Labour Union Fund. The AVPL is merely a non-voting member of this committee. This means that the GSA, which is de facto part of our employer, has control of our union dues but our labour representative has no say. This inconsistency has significantly weakened the capability of our union leader to represent us. This can best be seen in the 2025–2026 budget. In the budget, the GSA proposed a 16.75 per cent cut of the AVPL’s stipend. This is despite the Labour Union Fund having a projected surplus of almost $49,000. Not to mention, the AVPL is in charge of collective bargaining, arguably the single most important task of the GSA.
Under the current arrangement, our union leader, who is part of and financially dependent on the GSA, is incapable of representing our best interests and addressing our utmost economic predicaments. This is no fault of those in the AVPL role themselves, but because the GSA itself is a subsidiary of our employer. The only solution is a change to the provincial laws, making the GSA and our union separate entities. The union would be able to fight for our labour rights in good faith and with full capacity only insofar as it is a structurally and financially independent organization.
