The blogosphere was very active last night as the Canadian Federation of Students waits to find out who will post internal CFS information that reveals their multi-tens of thousands of dollars referendum campaign plans.
The internal document, never intended to be seen by non-loyalist members of the CFS was mistakenly emailed to the CFS-BC executive list serv by a CFS-BC staffer. (Yet another major mistake by the CFS-BC office)
The documents appears to show the CFS actively planning to recruit CFS loyalists to play a role in the referendums. (Note: I changed this paragraph because, in an earlier version of this post, I said that it looked like the CFS was “planning to recruit CFS loyalists to count ballots in the referendums.” The CFS document talked about staffing in a number of areas in connection with the referendums, such as poll clerks. But though poll clerks play an important role in referenda, they don’t count the votes).More interestingly, the document ranks various supposed Federation loyalists with various letter grades. (I have been contacted overnight by a few people saying that some of the names are not Federation “drones” and are not happy being on the list)
All in all, a very interesting document.
I spent the night trying, much like many student newspapers, to reach various leaders of the Federation without success.
The initial comments coming from people that are, at an official level, not spokespeople for the Federation is the same across the country – the main line is that CFS-BC is a completely separate entity, the documents are CFS-BC, and the National had never seen them. (Funny how coast to coast everyone says the same line without any National influence)