How dare you use student fees for protesting?

A Conservative club at the University of Ottawa says that the student union was wrong to use student fees to charter a bus of about 50 students to protest the G20 in Toronto. “I highly doubt that every single student who has to pay those fees would be happy to know their money was being spent to send a few individuals to protest for the weekend,” Campus Conservative president Peter Flynn told the Ottawa Citizen.

The Student Federation of the University of Ottawa’s (SFUO) Foot Patrol Centre pooled resources with the Student Appeals Centre and other campus groups to pay the $1,000 bus rental fee. Flynn took particular issue with the fact that services like foot patrol and student appeals have no mandate to protest. “If there was a ‘protest centre’ on campus then it would make sense to use its budget for this sort of thing, but these service centres have nothing to do with protesting,” he said.

SFUO president, Tyler Steeves defended the expenditure. “We try to capture the passions of our students and help students to pursue them, whether that means setting up intramural sports leagues or renting a bus so they can protest something they care about,” he told the Citizen.

For coverage from campus paper the Fulcrum, please click here.

For all of our coverage of the G20, please see here.