Some Brock students are tired of the current state of their students’ union, a dissatisfaction that has culminated in the student-led RESTORE BUSU Movement.
Last month, on Jan. 13, a post was circulated on the r/brocku subreddit titled: “BUSU EXPOSED!! Staff caught abusing their power.” The post was also shared on Instagram.
The post, shared by the grassroots RESTORE — Reinstating Elections, Strengthening Transparency, and Opening Representation for Everyone — BUSU Movement (formerly the BUSU RESTORE Movement), levied serious accusations against the Brock University Students’ Union (BUSU).
Among these accusations were claims that BUSU General Manager Robert Hilson and other full-time, senior BUSU staff had “rigged executive hiring processes, covered up scandals, manipulated board members and sabotaged democratic decision-making” to “centralize power” while pocketing student fees.
In an interview with The Brock Press, RESTORE BUSU described their constitution:
“We are a group of Brock undergrad students working for progressive, democratic reform to BUSU. Many of us are current or former BUSU members, club leaders or ordinary students who want to help out. What unites us is we are all privy to the inner workings of BUSU and have discovered that BUSU is effectively broken.”
In their initial post, RESTORE BUSU pointed to the “$1.4 million or 61 per cent” of BUSU’s $2.3 million budget — consisting primarily of student fees — funding staff members, with 38 per cent of that money going “explicitly” to “BUSU’s unelected senior staff.” They claimed that Hilson has “unquestionably increased his salary as General Manager of BUSU” from the $107,904 plus benefits yearly salary he made as Brock’s Director of Athletics.
Hilson’s specific salary is not public knowledge, and information on BUSU’s full-time roster is not on their website, so the validity of this statement cannot be verified. RESTORE BUSU confirmed this in the interview, and said the “lack of transparency regarding these essential budgetary matters is of major concern.”
The other main criticism RESTORE BUSU aired in their post was the union “subverting democracy,” a topic the movement elaborated on in another post on Reddit and Instagram on Jan. 27.
In 2022, BUSU ran a referendum proposing major alterations to their governance, including changing BUSU executive positions from being elected to being hired and changing the Brock University Students’ Administrative Council (BUSAC) to the Brock University Students’ Union Advisory Council (BUSU-AC or A-Team).
This referendum passed, altering BUSU’s governance system to this new executive model, a model that RESTORE BUSU deems “illegitimate” and which services “elite corporatism,” as they claim in their post. The movement alleges that Hilson used the 2022 BUSU sexual assault scandal to “orchestrate” this model, even though the allegations were found by a third party to have been fabricated.
RESTORE BUSU also criticized the BUSU-AC, telling The Brock Press that while BUSAC was “the student legislature run by elected Brock students who introduced, debated and passed motions for decades,” the new A-Team, “despite being more open to students, has no real power and effectively acts as a focus group for executives to bounce ideas off.”
Whether or not Hilson was the driving force behind this change in 2022 is not clear, as many conversations regarding the subject occurred in-camera, but what remains public are board meeting videos from May 24, 2022, and June 28, 2022. In the first of these videos, the Board of Directors rescinded the Board Action Plan decision to “hire/appoint Executives as of 2023-2024,” with most of the student representatives speaking against the decision. In the second, the story was much the same: despite Hilson advocating against the motion, the Board further voted to rescind a handful of other governance restructuration decisions from the Board Action Plan. Beyond that, there are no further public conversations or documents regarding the decision to approve the October 2022 referendum topics, only mention of the executive election restructuring in the meeting on Aug. 31, 2022.
Furthermore, BoD decisions regarding the Board Action Plan, if they were recorded, are not available on BUSU’s YouTube channel, nor are any meeting minutes available on BUSU’s website.
RESTORE BUSU accused the union of deleting the October 2022 referendum results from the public in its post, which includes a screenshot from a previous BUSU Instagram post showing that while 75.2 per cent of student voters said “yes,” the voter base only represented 15.7 percent of Brock students. As per BUSU’s Policy 400 Elections and Referenda, there are no listed quorum requirements for referendums.
“Referendums used to be regular student engagement activities pushed by BUSU to help bring more voices to divisive issues and received significantly higher turnout rates as a result,” said RESTORE BUSU. “BUSU, as it is, is top-heavy. Decisions are made from the top down rather than the bottom up, with nearly all motions put forward by the unelected senior staff, and referendums have been reduced to only about one per year.”
RESTORE BUSU’s post also included a screenshot presumably from former BUSU President Faten Darbaj’s social media, who “resigned five days after the referendum.”
In the screenshot, Darbaj cites an “extremely toxic and corrupt” environment that was “very taxing on [her] mental health and negatively affecting [her] daily life” and left her feeling “disrespected and betrayed.” Despite this, she ends the post by saying that “the non-elected full-time adult staff are wonderful, and are the backbone keeping the organization [BUSU] afloat,” making exactly who contributed to the toxic environment unclear.
RESTORE BUSU alleges to have stories from former BUSU members about senior staff members “hand-picking” applications without student involvement. In their initial post, they quoted a “BUSU student member” who said:
“It’s all about loyalty. They [the staff] pick whoever they know will do whatever they want without question. And if you do anything to question them, even if it’s your job, you are dead to them.”
Regarding their lack of named and attributed sources, RESTORE BUSU told The Brock Press that:
“Right now, our anonymity is only to preserve the growth of our movement so as not to scare students away from sharing their accounts or joining our movement. Going forward, we will be including firsthand accounts of students who have agreed to share their identities and put their names to accounts of abuses of power they have witnessed.”
As of writing, there have been no such firsthand accounts, but RESTORE BUSU says they are still in the beginning phases of their ultimate goal to secure “democratic representation that is transparent, responsible and accountable.”
Much of their platform relies on the, at the time of writing, ongoing BoD election, with initial plans to endorse candidates who support their values, campaign with them, “elect a majority into BUSU’s board and get to work.”
While they have not publicly endorsed any BoD candidates, RESTORE BUSU claimed that 13 running candidates are part of their “steering committee”:
“A solid majority of all candidates running in the election are affiliated with RESTORE BUSU. We all have a shared vision of democracy, transparency, and accountability for BUSU, and we won’t be pushed around by BUSU’s senior staff. We are all committed to a students’ union truly run by the students.”
Similarly, no candidates have outright claimed affiliation with RESTORE BUSU as of writing, but many of their campaigns are built around the same fundamental values that the movement is claiming to be built around as well: transparency, accountability, advocacy and democracy.
“Right now, our democracy as students of Brock is the worst it has been in 60 years,” said RESTORE BUSU:
“If you look at the students’ unions of other Ontarian universities, you can see they are able to not just work but thrive under a diverse, responsible, student-run union that embraces democracy rather than hides behind it. BUSU was not too long ago very much like this and that is what we hope to restore.”
The movement recently released an open letter to the BUSU BoD’s current chair, Brielle Kaminsky.
Writing on behalf of “the students of Brock University,” the letter reiterates many of the points made thus far, stating that BUSU’s “long train of scandals and dismissals of due electoral process invokes a system to reduce students under autocracy,” and its “humiliations and limitations upon the representation and self-determination of the student population” has forced them to “demand the reinstatement of executive elections and full democratic participation in their Students’ Union.”
The letter concludes with an appeal to Kaminsky:
“In humble confidence of a just outcome, we earnestly request you, Madam Chair, to uphold these fundamental principles by restoring executive elections and ensuring that all decisions respect the will of the student majority. If, however, these appeals to your sense of duty and fairness fall on deaf ears, all students of Brock University are compelled — by moral obligation — to take lawful and resolute action to reclaim the rights of the student body, uniting in purpose to secure for ourselves and for future Brock students the democratic representation so essential to our common good.”
BUSU has not made any public comments regarding any of the accusations directed at them by the movement.
Recently, students flooded the comments section on one of BUSU’s elections Instagram posts, calling for the union to reinstate executive elections. RESTORE BUSU was among them and has also recently criticized the union in a different post about their lack of public response to the election controversy.
Several BUSU members, including Robert Hilson, Brielle Kaminsky, President Anusha Pahuja and VPUA Carleigh Charlton (who was an active participant in the comments section of the initial Reddit post) were reached out to by The Brock Press regarding the RESTORE BUSU Movement’s initial post. Of those members, Hilson and Kaminsky had no comment — but both expressed that they and BUSU were “aware of the Reddit post” — and neither Pahuja nor Charlton have responded as of writing.
In addition to these BUSU members, several of the other contacts on RESTORE BUSU’s initial post were reached out to, including Brock VP Brad Clarke and the Student Justice Centre. Neither have responded as of writing.
Whether or not BUSU will respond to these allegations is yet to be seen.