BUSU's GA Student Representative Team pictured from left to right: BUSU Board Vice-Chair Charlie Martin, Aalok Biswas, Sophia Carnovale, Aaditya Gupta, BUSU VPEA Mark Chrabalowski, Tarini Nair, BUSU Street Team Member Sabrina Rodriguez, BUSU Policy Writer Isabella McLaughlin. Not pictured BUSU VPUA Carleigh Charlton.
Hi, Badgers! My name is Isabella McLaughlin and I am a Policy Writer at the Brock University Students’ Union (BUSU). Within this role I get the opportunity to work closely with the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) both as an author for policy papers and as a representative at various OUSA led advocacy and policy events. This October OUSA hosted their 60th General Assembly (GA) at Brock University, which is also celebrating its 60th year! Brock University delegates, along with delegates from universities across Ontario, had the opportunity to review, provide feedback on, and participate in passing three OUSA policy papers into the official OUSA policy library.
As a delegate I got to experience my third OUSA GA and wanted to share what attending is like for Brock students who may be interested in applying to become a delegate for future GAs or getting involved with the organization more broadly.
What is OUSA & GA?
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is an organization comprised of nine university student organizations across Ontario that represent approximately 160,000 post secondary students across the province. Led by full-time office staff and by a Steering Committee (SC) with student representatives from each member school, OUSA advocates for undergraduate student populations at the provincial level with the specific organizational visions of accessible, affordable and high quality post-secondary education.
Two major facets of OUSA’s operations are their comprehensive policy library and their continual advocacy to provincial governance. The policy library provides the foundation of the organization’s advocacy through situating OUSA’s positions on various issues and topics and covering pressing concerns and recommendations relating to them. This policy is truly student led as it is authored by member school students, debated by member schools delegates, and covers wide ranging topics that reflect the diverse voices that make up OUSA member school’s student population. OUSA policy papers cover a wide array of topics including Housing, Transit & Community Development, Tuition, and Student Health and Wellness. OUSA holds two General Assembly conferences each academic year. At each of these four days conferences, three policy papers are reviewed, edited, debated, and voted on. These policy papers and the existing policy library are used to format what will be advocated on and lobbied for during OUSA’s Student Advocacy Conferences. During these conferences, SC members and representatives from member schools visit Queen’s Park to discuss pressing issues in post-secondary education with MPPs and provincial government officials. This allows the student voices that are elevated through the GA/policy process to be directly heard at the systemic and legislative level through OUSA’s direct advocacy.
Preparing For GA
For the fall 2024 GA, the three policy papers that were presented are Student Financial Aid, Blue Ribbon Panel Report, and Environmental Sustainability. The Student Financial Aid paper highlights the need for equitable funding practices and transparent loan/grant systems. The Blue Ribbon Panel Report analyzes the report of the same name, which was initiated to analyze financial sustainability in the post secondary sector. The policy paper itself explores the outcomes of the report and areas in which student concerns and interests need to be better focused in remedies forthcoming. The Environmental Sustainability paper explores how greener practices can and must be implemented on post-secondary campuses through both physical infrastructure and ideology and investment practices.
Leading up to the General Assembly, authors of the papers are hard at work constructing, editing, and implementing feedback to the principles, concerns and recommendations (PCR sets) that comprise the main sections of the papers. The student unions at each member school choose which students will attend as delegates. At Brock, BUSU gives students the opportunity to fill out a form indicating their interest in attending and discussing their familiarity with the topics at hand or OUSA and advocacy more generally. Once selected, the delegates begin participating in training sessions to ensure everyone is familiar with the paper topics and the goal and purpose of GA. During this time delegates also get to look at the working draft of the papers for the first time to review what is currently written and provide initial feedback. This feedback is reviewed by the authorship teams and implemented to create the first conference drafts of the papers going into day one of GA.
Day 1 - Thursday
Day 1 one of OUSA’s General Assembly is always exciting as it is an opportunity to meet with fellow student leaders from schools across Ontario and start to discuss the papers with the authors themselves. The day started with an introduction presentation from OUSA Home Office where important information about the policy papers and the plan for the weekend was presented. All of the delegates also had the opportunity to participate in an ice breaker activity that allowed us to start to get to know our fellow delegates.
The main activity on the schedule was the break out sessions. Three separate rooms were established for each paper and delegates separated into three groups, spent an hour in each room going through the paper, and giving feedback. The first day of breakout sessions are always a great opportunity to have any questions about a specific topic or PCR set answered, hear new perspectives through other delegate’s feedback or views, and suggest any pressing feedback one may have now analyzing the paper in more depth. Going through the breakout session myself, I heard a lot of great questions from other delegates that allowed me to learn more about the Blue Ribbon Panel Report, and heard of some great ideas through discussions on other campus’ environmental initiatives.
After the breakout sessions concluded the authors were hard at work rewriting to implement the feedback they were given during the day while the delegates were able to attend the scheduled social for the evening, which was a 60s themed karaoke night at Isaac’s.
Day 2 - Friday
The second day of GA started with presentations from representatives at three member schools sharing various projects on their campuses that relate to the topic of the papers being reviewed. Delegates had the opportunity to hear about unique financial aid opportunities at Laurentian University, a sustainable lab coat reuse project at McMaster, and the forward thinking sustainability projects happening at Brock University. It was enlightening to hear about so much great work happening at other campuses and as student leaders it inspired delegates to think about similar projects that could be put in place at their own schools.
We headed into the second and last round of breakout rooms to review the new drafts of the policy papers with changes from the previous day’s feedback. This gave delegates a chance to delve a bit deeper into some of the more technical aspects of policy facets such as how OSAP funding is handed out differently across institutions or how viable it is for all member campuses to have greenhouses space. Much like the first day the discussion and feedback was recorded for the authors to implement that evening. The social for night two was the OUSA semi-formal dinner where delegates had the opportunity to celebrate both OUSA and Brock’s 60th year.
Day 3 - Saturday
After two very busy days in break out sessions, Saturday gave delegates a little break. The only main activity on the agenda was reviewing the newest version of the papers, with Friday's feedback implemented within them, to craft and submit the amendments that would be presented on Sunday’s final plenary. Unlike the somewhat informal nature of the revisions from the breakout sessions, these amendments would be formal motions that would have to be voted on by the entire delegate group, and if successful, would be unchangeable after being voted in. It serves as a mechanism to make any final or last suggestions that either resulted from newer changes to the paper or from a prior suggestion not be reflected in the current draft. Brock’s delegates gathered in the BUSU office to review each paper and collaboratively craft our amendments. SC members and Homeoffice met later in the day to review each amendment submitted to prepare the official plenary agenda and motion list for the following day.
Day 4 - Sunday
The last day of GA is arguably the most important as it is solely for the Plenary and OUSA Annual General Meeting. Plenary is the formal meeting through which each policy paper that has been worked on that weekend will be voted on to be passed into the official OUSA policy library. There are three main motions to pass the papers but there are also motions for each of the submitted amendments to finalize the final versions of the papers. When each motion is presented there is an opportunity for it to be spoken on by delegates which prompted great discussion throughout the day about various pertinent student advocacy topics. Each of the three papers officially passed with the final votes and all of the author teams did an amazing job! These papers will be published throughout the next calendar year so keep an eye out on the OUSA website and social media for when they are officially released to see first hand the advocacy and policy work that was completed during GA weekend!
The next OUSA GA will be held in the spring term and as always there will be an opportunity for Brock undergraduate students to apply to be delegates!
Keep an eye out for application openings on BUSU Instagram and LinkedIn, and feel free to reach out to BUSU’s Vice-President, External Affairs at vpea@brockbusu.ca about any questions relating to OUSA and OUSA related opportunities!