A Decade of Corruption

What is the solution to over a decade of malicious sabotage to a democratic organization?

The short answer is it will take many students coming together to demand better and likely some formal insitution, perhaps the university administration or some level of government, supporting the efforts to shut down the cult, or at least deter it from trying anything with the students' union again.

"Shut It Down" Doesn't Work

In terms of how this issue can be solved, you'll never find me saying the TMSU should be shut down for a few reasons:

  1. Shutting down a students' union is a lengthy process and is unlikely to bring any actual savings for students. In all likelihood costs would go up because the university would absorb some of the TMSU's more valuable services (Health and Dental plan, food bank, etc.) and would just raise tuition accordingly.
  2. This removes students' official voice, and while it hasn't been a voice anyone can trust for a while, there are decades of examples where the students' union fought for students and made measurable improvements to campus. From the founding event of the students' union which was a protest that forced the library to have more books and raise the limit on how many things you could check out to more recent wins like water bottle stations in every building or closing Gould St to cars.
  3. The cult's goal has always been to make the students' union seem useless or a waste of
  4. Something will replace it, either an existing student organization or a new one will form after a few years. This replacement could be even worse, potentially setup by the cult leaders from the beginning to have little to no guardrails against their corruption.

In short, shutting down the TMSU might save students $20 a year but could very well end up instead costing extra and it guarantees no voice on important issues. Just like the solution to a bad politician isn't "let's abolish the government", the solution to the students' union is for well meaning students to take it back from the cult that stole it from them.

Simple Solutions

Like many real world issues, this is too great for anyone to solve on their own. But if enough students take easy and simple steps to bring attention to this issue there are lots of possibilities for how the cult can be overpowered.

I've briefly included some general ideas below to give inspiration, but you can also check out a blog post I wrote years ago after I was fired for refusing to cover up sexual violence within the students' union where I talked about some ideas I had for improvements: https://blog.davidjardine.ca/decade-of-corruption/

Hyper-Local Journalism

Get your friends who care about what is going on together and form a small group where you keep tabs on the students' union and share what you learn with your other classmates. You could share information on your social media, during conversations in the hall or in group chats, and can even volunteer to write for the school newspaper (or even make your own substack/medium website) and share those articles with people you know.

Bring it to Lectures

The TMSU scandals are so wide-reaching there are tons of ways talking about it can be relevant to class. A computer science class could use the TMSU as a case-study to explore how an online voting system could be built to avoid the kind of election interference TMSU regularly sees. A business class could use any of the major event scandals to see how poor planning and management led to the issues in the first place. A communications class could study the structure of TMSU for a better way to organize it in order to avoid the poor communication and lack of awareness among students. And certainly any class about ethics or politics would have an endless of topics to choose from. Even if these conversations don't touch on specifics of the scandals it increases awareness and makes it more likely people will pay attention on their own time.

Keep Talking About It

Whether you're posting about things you've witnessed on the subreddit, talking with friends, or sharing news stories about the scandals in class group chats, even just as a casual "can you believe what's happening!?" - all of this increases awareness and makes it harder for the cult to get away with their goals.

There are surely dozens of simple, easy ways to spread awareness that don't involve you getting on a soapbox on Gould Street or leading a protest. The most efficient way would be if you are already part of a student group, whether it belongs to the TMSU groups or not, make sure the group regularly pays attention to what is going on because the outcome of this, whatever it is, will affect all groups and all students.

One of the most obvious ways to try and make a difference is to run for the students' union yourself. Have a clear message, do as many class talks as you can, and just talk to students in the halls during campaigning. It isn't easy, but it also is far from impossible.

If you don't have the ability or energy to run yourself, at least do your research and cast your vote for people who deserve it. And encourage anyone you know to do the same. 90% of the cults playbook is manipulating people who are totally unaware during elections and just collecting votes by pressuring people in the moment. The more people have a general awareness about the students' union the less possible that is for the cult.