Advocacy Updates: What we have been working on since November!

February 10^th, 2023

Hello all! Andrew here, your GSA’s resident Advocacy Advisor, filling in for your regular host, AC. Apologies from the Advocacy Team for the delay since our last update. It’s been an intense couple of months. We have a lot to update you all on as a result, so let’s get to it.

Overall, the GSA’s advocacy strategy can be divided into four different levels: 

1. The Institutional level (the University of Calgary);
2. The Municipal level (the City of Calgary and local organizations that aren’t a part of the university);
3. The Provincial level (the Government of Alberta and provincially based organizations);
4. And the Federal level (the Government of Canada and Canada-wide organizations). 

We have updates from all four levels. To avoid writing out a dissertation-length blog post, we’ll focus on the most important details for each update; however, if you have any questions about, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. You can email the GSA President, Saaka, or VP External (VPX), AC, or stop by our office (Earth Sciences 1030) for a chat. We’re open for in-person meetings Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from 10 am to 3 pm. 

And now, for the details:

Institutional Advocacy Updates

The university is a large institution, so there are quite a few campus-specific issues that the GSA tries to provide a student perspective on: mental health resources, residence services, and other student services, to name a few. Different members of the GSA are involved in these various areas, according to their portfolio descriptions and committee affiliations (shoutouts the senior leadership team!), but the main issue that our executives have been responding to for the past few months has been the Tuition and Fees Consultation Committee (TFCC) process. By now, we trust you’ve heard that the University’s Board of Governors (BoG) has voted to approve the fee increases presented to our Graduate Representative Council (GRC) in October and November. We were disappointed by this decision (see our recent post for more details), and are hence using this development to shift the focus of our advocacy. While the vote has passed through the BoG, the fight for affordable tuition in Alberta is far from over as far as we’re concerned. 

To take the next steps in the fight for affordable tuition, the GSA’s Advocacy Engagement Working Group has launched its LOUD series, which aims to build solidarity in advocacy through facilitating needs-based community discussions among grad students. Our first event took place last Thursday with dozens of students engaged in conversation for strategic ways to build solidarity among students. The organizing team took many notes from this event for how to follow-up and grow the movement across campus, and we will be implementing these in our series over the rest of the term. To learn more about this group and stay informed for future organizing sessions, workshops, and events, please join our mailing list.

In addition to tuition, your VPX, AC, and the Chair of the GSA Food-Housing Working Group have been actively involved in strategic workplan conversations within the Nourish to Flourish group. There is lots to say here, and more to add regarding the GSA’s Food-Housing Working Group internally. That’s one part of our food strategy (keep your ears open for more details). 

Municipal Advocacy Updates:

Fall is generally (pre-)budget season in the external advocacy world, and this is where our municipal efforts were concentrated. 

The City of Calgary began soliciting public feedback on their 2023-2026 Service Plans and Budgets proposals back in November, which we mentioned in a previous blog post. The feedback period allowed individuals and organizations to make submissions to the City, or speak at City Council, and provide suggestions, criticisms, and comments directly to the municipal government. The GSA submitted two documents to the City as part of this process, with concerns and suggestions that were pulled from your responses to the Advocacy Priorities Survey. If you would like to read our submissions, please reach out to either myself or AC and we can send you a copy, but as a quick summary:

On November 25, the final budget was released to the public, and it included an additional $19 million for mental health and addiction strategies plus an additional $40 million to convert office spaces into residential and post-secondary spaces. We’re hoping that the budget submission put post-secondary issues on City Council’s radar, but regardless, we’re thrilled to see more funding being put towards housing in the city—especially for post-secondary spaces, and we hope these can come online soon for students to access.

Provincial Advocacy Updates

As far as post-secondary funding goes, the biggest advocacy opportunity exists at the provincial level. In a typical year, most of the GSA’s external advocacy is at the provincial level. This is because post-secondary education is provincial jurisdiction: the policies, funding levels, commercialization efforts, and so on come from the Ministry of Advanced Education, headed by the Minister of Advanced Education himself, Demetrios Nicolaides. 

2022 was far from a typical year, however. Former Premier Jason Kenney stepped down from office; as such, the governing United Conservative Party elected a new leader (and, by virtue of them having a majority in the Alberta Legislature, a new Premier), Danielle Smith. Because of the leadership election, the Alberta Legislature was only open for a short amount of time: November 28th to December 23rd. And because Premier Smith’s new government had to transition into their roles, there wasn’t much opportunity to meet with MLAs during that period. Even our provincial affiliate, the Alberta Graduate Provincial Advocacy Council (ab-GPAC), had to delay its advocacy week until the new year.

But that doesn’t mean all has been quiet on the Provincial front. The government has introduced and passed a total of seven bills in those few weeks before the holiday break. Your GSA advocacy team has been keeping track of these new bills in case any of them impact the post-secondary sector. Of the seven, there are two in particular that we’d like to call your attention to. The first, the Inflation Relief Statues Amendment Act, 2022 (or “Bill 2”), is intended to provide assistance to qualified Albertans who are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living. The second Bill is the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act, commonly refered to as the “Sovereignty Act”, or “Bill 1” (and its amendment). The situation around the Sovereignty Act is complex, but we’re keeping an eye on it and will update you on any relevant developments. 

Federal Advocacy Updates

While we wait for some of the dust to settle following the recent provincial cabinet shuffle, your GSA has been involved in a great deal of work advocating at the federal level. And it’s here where we need to shout out our federal affiliates—the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA)—for being such wonderful allies and collaborators.

AC, your VP-External, has been doing an amazing job with CASA: he’s the Chair of the Graduate Advisory Committee and a member of the Federal Policy Committee, which is responsible for writing and reviewing the policies (all 50+ of them!) in CASA’s Policy Manual. Each policy in the manual reflects an advocacy priority—complete with research and recommendations to stakeholders—that CASA membership has voted on and which CASA presents to politicians, industry leaders, researchers, and anyone else interested in student issues. So if you see him around, make sure you give him a hearty pat on the back, because he’s been doing incredible work. 

Through the Federal Policy Committee, we’ve been working closely with Trevor Potts, CASA’s Research and Policy Analyst, Tera Cardinal (Mount Royal University), the Committee’s Chair, and Rose Grant (University of New Brunswick), the Committee’s Vice-Chair on the creation of two new policies—one on housing, and one on food insecurity—and we’ll be collaborating on a research paper addressing these issues. It’s been a pleasure working on these projects, and we’re excited to see the impact these policies and the research paper will have for students across the country. 

All this policy work with CASA was done in preparation for Advocacy Week, which was held in Ottawa from November 21st to 25th. CASA picked nine policies from its Policy Manual to present to politicians and stakeholders (like the Tri-Council Agencies). Some of the policies recommended that the federal government increase the number of financial supports for post-secondary students, while others asked for regulatory changes that would make completing your degree, or accessing post-secondary education, easier. You can see these policies here: one of the policies, the creation of a Canada Student Grant specifically for graduate students, was a policy that AC and I had been working on with Trevor and the Graduate Advisory Committee for a few months prior to Advocacy Week. 

We were repeatedly told that CASA’s advocacy week is well-known for punching far above its weight, and our experience certainly confirms that. Some of CASA’s policies received recognition in the House of Commons, from members of different political parties, and we also had the opportunity to meet with important groups like Support Our Science. Follow-up meetings and letter campaigns are on-going, but CASA’s work has already born fruit: the federal government announced not long before Advocacy Week that interest on federal student loans would be abolished, which had been an ongoing advocacy priority for CASA.

That’s about it for updates for now. Again, if you have any questions, please reach out to AC (vpext.gsa@ucalgary.ca), or Saaka (pres.gsa@ucalgary.ca): they’d be happy to talk with you.  

In solidarity,

-Andrew