A Conservative Student Assault on the Canadian Federation of Students in the Mid-1980s

Abstract

Student newspapers, conference documents and delegate reports offer insight into how the executive of the University of Alberta Students’ Union, affiliated with the youth wing of the Progressive Conservative Party, tried to establish the Canadian University Students’ Executive Council (CUSEC) in the mid-1980s. CUSEC organizers envisioned creating a narrowly focused, low-cost, easy-to-join, national student organization exclusively for student union presidents from Canada’s largest universities to undermine the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS). CUSEC organizers were unable to effectively challenge the legitimacy of the CFS, a relatively well-established, social-democratic, national-level student organization that arose in the 1970s and 1980s after the collapse of the Canadian Union of Students in 1969. Leadership attrition, shifting organization tactics, and a general lack of interest outside the large universities in Western Canada (and McGill University in Quebec) led CUSEC to dissolve in 1988, but it was successfully revived under different organization names in the 1990s.