Now here’s a story that plenty of student activities professionals in the UK will be familiar with.
This academic year Garnett Genuis, the Conservative MP for Sherwood Park/Fort Saskatchewan in Alberta, has been rocking up to campuses across Canada to ask students whether they are better or worse off than their parents’ generation, and has been generally discussing youth unemployment and economic issues facing young Canadians.
Actually, the Conservatives being interested in a) engaging with young people and b) the issues they’re facing is very much not something that anyone in the UK will be familiar with – but I digress.
He’d been due to pitch up and run his stall at York University in Toronto on January 9th – but the day before he shared some news:
I have disappointing news to share about further attacks on free speech.
My event at York University (scheduled for this Friday) is now cancelled due to a decision of the student union not to allow it.
I’m pretty surprised. We’ve done the same event concept at universities in 4…
— Garnett Genuis (@GarnettGenuis) January 8, 2026
The post was seen by 782k people, the story was picked up by national news, and any number of big names jumped on the story as an illustration of the ills of students and their SUs.
Fellow Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner posted on X to call for York University to be defunded, and popular right-wing activist Ezra Levant said in a post that the MP should take the SU to court.
The problem? It has nothing to do with the SU, and everything to do with university free speech procedures.
In an interview with TorontoToday, Symone Lennon, the vice-president of advocacy for the York Federation of Students (ie the SU) said it had no knowledge of the proposed event and “nothing to do with” its decision not to proceed.
The decision had actually been made by the separate York University Student Centre (YUSC), a student and university governed non-profit set up in the 90s when a referendum agreed a compulsory fee to fund the new building.
Its executive director said the event was “not approved to proceed due to the application of our booking policies and event request procedures” and “was not politically motivated.” He also said the organisers did not provide enough detail for YUSC to assess the event properly and determine the “appropriate channel and venue”, and that the organisers were free to reapply.
But dig a bit deeper and this more than a “the Conservative student society didn’t full the form in properly”.
It’s one of the tales I’ve been getting across on Day 3 of my little tour around a bunch of Canadian SUs – later this week I’ll be joining our own Debbie McVitty on the bill of HESA’s Re:University event, but first I’m braving the snow to get across the issues for students and their unions.
And here in Ontario, the culture wars are alive and well.
Reservists on duty
Back in 2019, York University had been the site of a major flashpoint when a campus event featuring former Israeli soldiers associated with “Reservists on Duty” was met by large counter-protests – culminating in shouting, physical pushing, and scuffles in and around the campus’s Vari Hall.
The incident quickly escalated beyond the event itself into a national controversy about antisemitism, protest, and campus safety – all fuelled by contested claims about what was said and done on the night.
Institutional handling was widely criticised as fragmented, with unclear lines of authority between security, student affairs, and senior management, and with no shared operational framework for managing high-risk events and protests.
To douse some of the flames, an independent external review was commissioned by the university, led by a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada – and his mandate was not to assess the merits of Israel–Palestine positions or to attribute blame for political speech, but to examine York’s policies, procedures, and operational decision-making.
It found that the university lacked clear lines of authority, coherent escalation pathways, and a shared incident-management framework for high-risk events. It recommended systematic advance risk assessment, clearer distinctions between protest and disruption, staged intervention protocols, improved training for relevant staff, and more consistent communications.
And it naturally recommended clearer guidance on permissible protest, the consistent application of “place and manner” limits, staged response protocols for disruption, and a raft of recommendations aimed at managing risk.
In other words, the often suffocating bureaucracy of risk assessing the life out of student activities in the name of safety and freedom – exactly the sort of measure that the Conservatives had been calling for – was the real culprit preventing Genuis from running his little stall. It’s like rain on his wedding day.
That structure is fascinating by the way. We see plenty of different definitions of what’s to be run by the SU and what’s to be run by the university in the UK – in this model, as well as the SU itself, a whole wedge of student facing work has as its board a mixture of SU reps, directly elected student directors and university staff.
It allows the SU’s own programme of work to be more focussed on “political” issues, and means that much more of the service provision impacting students can be democratically influenced by them than we’d see in the UK. But there are downsides too.
We fixed that
I think we all know what kind of crazy Marxist nonsense student unions get up to. So, we fixed that.”
Doug Ford is a Canadian politician and businessman who has served as the 26th premier of Ontario, and as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario since 2018, and that quote is from a Progressive Conservative fundraising email in February 2019.
He was talking about his “Student Choice” Initiative – a policy his provincial government had just introduced that would let students opt out of paying fees for anything deemed “non-essential.”
The provinces have considerable power over HE in Canada – and this policy had deemed SUs, campus newspapers, food banks, LGBTQ+ support centres and cultural associations “non-essential”.
If you’re familiar with the debate over the Education Act 1994, there’s an eerie similarity. Health and counselling, athletics and campus safety were allowed to stay mandatory. But the idea was stop “forcing” students to pay for everything else.
It’s worth remembering that automatic membership – the thing that underpins pretty much everything SUs do in the UK – is never as secure as it feels. Someone, somewhere, is always ready to call it crazy Marxist nonsense.
What happened next was almost devastating. The policy took effect for the 2019-2020 academic year, and at some institutions using opt-in rather than opt-out systems, student organisations lost the majority of their funding almost overnight.
The student newspaper at Ryerson University (now Toronto Met) saw over 55 per cent of students opt out of its fee. Some unions reported budget cuts approaching 95 per cent. Campus food banks couldn’t plan for the semester ahead.
But the York Federation of Students and the Canadian Federation of Students took the Ontario government to court. In November 2019, the Divisional Court unanimously ruled the policy unlawful – the government had no statutory authority to interfere in the internal affairs of student associations, and universities had been granted autonomy over their governance for more than a century. Ford appealed, but in August 2021, the Court of Appeal dismissed it. The government backed down.
You’d think that would be the end of it – but it wasn’t. In May 2025, the government introduced Bill 33 – the Supporting Children and Students Act – which gives the province sweeping new powers to regulate ancillary fees at colleges and universities. This time the threat is embedded in legislation rather than ministerial directive, which neatly addresses the legal deficiency that sank the original policy.
Fees are only part of it. Bill 33 also requires universities to use “merit-based” admissions criteria regulated by the province – without defining what merit means. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has warned this could roll back contextual admissions and harm students from marginalised communities.
Institutions must also develop “research security plans” subject to ministerial oversight, which critics say opens the door to political interference in academic work. One University of Toronto professor described it as:
…probably the most horrendous intervention into university autonomy in the history of the province.
The political context is hard to ignore. Bill 33 arrived after two years of escalating tension between SUs and both university administrations and the provincial government – particularly around Palestine solidarity activism. Student encampments were cleared by police in 2024 after Ford urged universities to crack down. And now this.
CFS Ontario (the province version of one of the national unions) has been blunt about what’s really going on – the bill frames ancillary fees as an affordability problem when the actual crisis is chronic provincial underfunding. Ontario has among the lowest per-student funding for post-secondary education in Canada – domestic tuition fees have been frozen since 2019 after a 10 per cent cut, leaving institutions financially stretched. Blaming student levies for affordability is, in their view, a distraction.
Cyrielle Ngeleka, chairperson of CFS Ontario, spoke at a rally outside York’s Vari Hall in October:
It isn’t the first time that we’re seeing attacks of this magnitude. There was the Student Choice Initiative back in 2019 and 2021, and it was deemed unlawful both times. Bill 33, again, is just part of that same playbook.
The bill received royal assent in November 2025. The specific regulations haven’t landed yet, but SUs across Ontario are watching closely – and preparing for another fight. The chant outside Vari Hall, led by YFS President Somar Abuaziza, was pointed:
Education is a right, not just for the rich and white.
Not a line item
What gets lost if the fees become optional? That was the thread running through the rally speeches. Shantanu Mehra, VP Internal for the York University Graduate Students’ Association, put it like this:
We are not a row or column in the balance sheet of the provincial government where they can just move us around so that at the end of the financial year, their profits are in place. The university is not a space for that, and we are not that.
The Indigenous Students’ Association at York spoke to what disappears without autonomous funding. Earlier in 2025 the university had attempted to suspend enrolment for its Indigenous Studies programme. ISAY President Rainingbird Daniels was direct:
If our students aren’t here, then there is literally no programming or events for Indigenous students who are on campus.
Calumet College Council President Anaum Iqbal (there’s a quasi-collegiate system at the university) made it concrete – her college had just run a reading week trip to Montréal, funded by levies:
Is York going to call all the hotels in downtown Montréal to get the cheapest prices available? York’s not going to do that. The students do that with the money that we get from our levies.
And Susanna, from the Ontario Public Interest Research Group at York, put words to the principle underneath all of it:
This is for us and by us, and that is what they are trying to take away from us.
Gleaming
What strikes you walking around York’s Keele Campus is how physically real the infrastructure of student autonomy is here. The Second Student Centre – opened in 2018 – is genuinely gleaming. LEED Gold certified, 126,000 square feet, there’s four storeys of convention space, dance studios, multi-faith prayer rooms, club offices, gender-neutral washrooms, and study areas. There’s green roofs with native plant species, and entirely LED lighting.
The architect was a protégé of Zaha Hadid, and it shows – there’s Alaskan yellow cedar fins on the façade, cantilevered upper floors, and glass everywhere.
It exists because in 2013, around 10,000 students voted in a referendum – the highest turnout in Canadian post-secondary history, apparently – and roughly 90 per cent approved a levy to fund construction. The building is owned and operated by the York University Student Centre Corporation, which as I noted above, is legally separate from the university, but governed by a board with a student majority. It also came in under budget and on schedule.
The First Student Centre – older and scrappier – is where the Community Service Groups live. Walking the floors, you get a feel for the scale of the infrastructure – Room 424 is the Access Centre for students with disabilities, Room 436 is the York United Black Students’ Alliance, Room 449A is TBLGAY, Room 449D is United South Asians at York.
There’s flags on the doors, posters on the walls, and students doing things for each other. These aren’t notional liberation reps or working groups that meet once a term – they’re funded, volunteered, physical spaces where communities organise. Down the hallway there’s a campus radio station broadcasting from a basement studio, the student newspaper offices, and the SU’s own main office. The levy pays for it – automatic membership makes it possible.
YorkFest to free tax clinics
And it’s not just the equality infrastructure. YFS runs what it claims is the largest orientation week on any Canadian campus – YorkFest – with headline concerts that have featured Tinashe, Ayra Starr, JID, and Major Lazer over the years, along with club fairs, drag bingo, and wellness programming.
CultureFest is described as the largest celebration of cultural diversity at any Canadian university, featuring performances, food, and a soccer world cup between club teams that’s grown so big it now requires an off-campus venue with shuttle buses.
There’s a Food Support Centre in the Second Student Centre basement providing groceries to students who can’t afford them, stocked to accommodate cultural and dietary requirements. A Wellness Centre offers mental health support, harm reduction resources, and sexual violence prevention services. There’s free legal support, an academic support centre, a grocery shuttle service for students without cars, and women-only gym and swim hours that YFS lobbied the university to introduce.
If that’s “marxist”, sign me up.
More tomorrow, when I’ll be heading Queen’s University in Kingston to go leather jacket spotting.
