Tories try to wreck student unions

Report taken from Ryerson Free Press

Leaked materials were posted on WikiLeaks.org over the weekend have added to the growing body of evidence that the Conservative Party has a strategy for interfering in campus student unions.

In 2002, a secret Millennium Leadership Fund of the youth wing of the Progressive Conservative Party was exposed by the Western Gazette in an article called “Tories plot to infiltrate student government.”The article referred to an email leaked in March of 2002 in which then OPCCA President Adam Daifallah boasted to fellow party members about Millennium Leadership Fund recipients who were successfully elected that year at Queen’s University, the University of Waterloo and the University of Windsor. According to the Gazette, the Millennium Fund was largely paid for by senior Progressive Conservative members and supporters.

Now it appears that strategy has evolved into a campaign to falsely obtain student union funding and destabilize student clubs with a social justice mandate.

What's the big secret?

The website wikileaks hosts the audio tapes (1) (2) of recent strategy and tactic meetings of campus conservatives.

The leak was made on March 13, 2009.

Update: link two is now broken but link 1 still works. Some of the files are copied below.

In addition, copies of agendas, photos, speakers lists and other documentation are available. Also of note is the turn of events at the CBC. Wikileaks' source mentions and speculates the following:

After running a few times on CBC Radio One's early morning news cycle on March 20, 2009, the story was abruptly pulled. Thus, this tape has been released to Wikileaks, given the concern that this story was pulled or censored from within the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The CBC story mentions the use of front groups or clubs. Such clubs mentioned are: Star Trek Club, Star Wars Appreciation, Games and Leisure, and the Friedrich Nietzsche club at Carleton University in Ottawa. Such names hardly sound political, Tory, or aimed at attacking the Canadian Federation of Students. What's the big secret?