11/29/2016
In the first case, it is bad faith to suggest that there was a only one message when you clearly have coopted the image of the students in the Northern Teacher Education Program in La Ronge Saskatchewan, when they have been active for months trying to protect their school from being shut down. Fighting fees is not the same as the continuation of a rural Indigenous teaching program that you have been capable of making a connection with, and having free tuition doesn't automatically make it accessible to rural communities. In fact, it should be expected that if free tuition were to be made a reality in the current context of Canada, it would likely undermine rural education programs and benefit those that lived in urban centres more intensely.
More nefariously, this image of having a cohesive and unified message has been manufactured both here in this video but also in how this day of action was organized. In Saskatoon, many people participated that want to take a more radical position that included building towards a student strike on our campus, and across English Canada. When it became apparent to the CFS organizers in their planning meetings that there were people with these ideas there, immediately important decisions were reserved for their backroom meetings. In doing so, they compromised any sort of democratic involvement in the day of action, which most significantly undermines the development of a student movement that they claim to represent. Instead, to bolster their own bureaucratic lobbying efforts. This culminated in local organizing committee not deciding on the speaking list for the action, but instead our CFS affiliated Grad Students Association being tasked with it. Though once it was found out that the Indigenous representative was sympathetic to members of the Socialist Students' Movement - Revolutionary Student Movement speaking (Those with a Pro-strike position), because we have a long history of supporting Indigenous activism on our campus, I can only imagine that the decision was to ignore the GSA's decision. Finally the speaking list was decided among the paid CFS organizers themselves. The nail in the coffin is that the CFS was incapable of then getting an Indigenous speaker for the event because the Indigenous students at the UofS didn't feel like they had been properly engaged with and that they were being tokenized to support the CFS line.
Lastly, on the day of action, when the SSA-RSM came out with a large contingent of support for the day of action, CFS reps were explicitly guiding reporters and photographers away from our group because we had signs and banners supporting the tactic of a student strike. Despite this, many reporters did in fact talk to us, while others were totally happy to help craft the CFS's image of a cohesive message.
