Student Unions Make Education Better

1. Student unions need to be autonomous, capable of self-governance, and have the necessary revenue to carry out the will of their students.

For over a century, student unions have enriched Canadian higher education. They provide essential services that help prevent students from having to drop out. They foster the development of high-quality extracurriculars that complement curricular instruction by allowing students to apply what they learn in ways not possible in class. They help reduce student exploitation through advocacy and activism.

Canadian student unions are among the wealthiest in the world, but now they are in trouble. External forces like provincial governments threaten to weaken their autonomy. From within, student unions face mounting scandals that have led multiple student unions to collapse within the past decade. Allegations of corruption, financial mismanagement, toxic working environments, the subversion of student journalism, and unelected non-student staff undermining student democracy raise questions about whether student unions are denigrating into authoritarianism. 

2. The path toward improving student unions is not through breaking them down, but building their institutional capacities and democratic quality.

Canada needs to save its student unions. Weakening them is only going to make the problems worse.

Instead, student union democracy needs to be strengthened. Its capacities for service provision, advocacy and activism, and extracurricular activities need to keep growing to meet the changing needs of students. Long-term progress is needed where student unions get better year over year.

3. We want to empower students and student leaders by giving them the data they need to think long-term and foster continuous improvement of their student unions' performance.

We are former student representatives who have served in roles from campus to global levels. We research how to make student unions the best they can be. We believe that improvements should be student-led. We offer a gift that can help students do this: information.

This index compiles data from student unions across the country, combined with our ideas, drawing from our lived experience and published academic research, to present a report on the progress student unions have made and the challenges they face, plus a vision for what they can be in the future. We believe this index, like other indexes that measure human rights, freedom, democracy, and wellbeing in countries, can be a resource for students who want to make their student union better. We present this index not as a definitive picture, far from it, but as a starting point based on publicly available data to help the ongoing conversations about student democracy. We share it with you to invite your feedback and insights to add to what we have started.

We want this index to show that Canadian student unions are an impactful benefit to education. We also want to show that they are getting better over time. Too many students in this country and the world have sacrificed too much for student unions to be abandoned now.