Future in Peril for PIRG and Campus/Community Radio at the University of Ottawa

Two important campus organizations in Ottawa are in the final days of a student vote to determine their future. They each separately have a referendum question on the elections ballot on whether they can re-establish student funding and financial sustainability of their operations.

As part of one of the campaigns, I wrote an op-ed for the local newspaper. They haven’t decided to publish it, so while there is still time in the campaign, it’s worthwhile to share here (below).

Even if you aren’t at the University of Ottawa, it’s not irrelevant if you are concerned about the larger struggle and our collective connections. And the micro is the macro in a holographic universe. But also, maybe some readers will actually have some connections to reach UO students, and getting the word to them would be a big bonus.

Before you get to the op-ed, there are a few preliminary notes with which I’d like to introduce it.

The culture of campus/community radio was important to me even before I had any direct involvements with any stations. In Ottawa, in the early/mid ‘90s when I started listening, CHUO as well as the station at CarletonU, CKCU 93.1 FM, were broadcasting music – especially hip-hop – you couldn’t hear anywhere else. It is also more than just the music, it is the whole set of counter-cultures or alternative cultures that are provided homes on campus/community radios.

My first semi-direct involvement with CHUO was in 2001. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the G20/IMF/World Bank meetings were hastily rescheduled to November 16-18 in Ottawa. There was a huge chill on social movements and on protest in that time, and the Ottawa protests were the first such summit to happen after the attacks. The protests were very damped down in comparison to April of that year in Quebec City against the summit there for the FTAA (the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas), but there were still protests .

I was part of the Ontario Indymedia (IMC: Independent Media Centre) network, and CHUO provided a two hour block of their broadcasting on the Sunday morning, the 18th, for our protest coverage. I said I was ‘semi-direct’ involved because I wasn’t on the radio, but instead was doing our print coverage production, the ‘Blind Spot’ and ‘Raw News’ papers. We published them as short PDFs in 8.5×11 format. You can find the recording of that two-hour broadcast, plus the set of PDFs, included in this archive I’ve started of some CHUO-related content. It’s important that we do what we can to make our history accessible.

Secondly, along with the radio, CHUO, there is the PIRG: OPIRG-GRIPO or OPIRG-Ottawa.

PIRG stands for Public Interest Research Group. In Canada, I think they are all campus-based organizations, and in this province, they are all under one umbrella name, ‘Ontario Public Interest Resarch Group’, but they are all independent organizations.

Between 2007-2018 or so, I was involved as a non-student in a few initiatives connected with OPIRG-Ottawa. The longest-lasting was our ‘action group’ IPSMO, the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa.

Our central and founding cause was organizing in solidarity with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake (Mitchikanibikok Inik),  located about 3.5 hours north of Ottawa in so-called Quebec, and one of eleven Anishinabeg Algonquin First Nations that make up the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation. But we also did a lot of other work and collaborations over the decade or so we were active – our being situated in the country’s capital was a large factor in some of what we were involved in doing.

As I already mentioned, it is good if we can document our history and make it accessible for others. There isn’t a comprehensive resource I can link to for all of what IPSMO did – there is our website, which is still up on Wordpress, and our Youtube channel, and these are at least something of a historical record.

I bring that up because the following isn’t particularly representative overall of our work in any way, but it is something very noteworthy and it is documented well, thanks to one of our members, the late Matt Cicero aka Matt Morgan-Brown.

What it is, is that we had an undercover police officer infiltrate IPSMO for about a year in advance of the 2010 G20 summit/protests in Toronto. If you’re involved in activism, it’s probably not going to be surprising to hear that this kind of thing happens. But it is surprising when it happens to you.

The ‘you’ I refer to was a group of people of varying backgrounds and also, shall we say, varying levels of political radicalness. We were quite an open group, in terms of membership – which kind of explains how a police got involved, albeit under false pretences, but it also is to say that our membership was open to people who were new to activism. We’d do events on campus, including during frosh week, such as ‘Intro to Indigenous Solidarity’ workshops. Then on the other extreme, a few of our members got arrested in highway blockades, locked down with concrete barrels and then removed with severe “pain compliance” methods by the ‘SQs’ (the Sûreté du Quebec provincial police force).

So that is the context of the collective surprise of discovering one of our members was actually a cop. You can read more of a description here in Briarpatch magazine, and then as a more formal political analysis in Upping The Anti journal.

That ends this introduction to the two organizations whose future is at stake.

I also want to note that in the op-ed, I mention WPIRG and the campus radio at University of Waterloo, CKMS. That’s essentially where I started into activism, and what I want to note here is the later story of covert campus infiltration by conservatives.

In 2009 there was a Wikileaks release (described in context here) of a private workshop at UW where two conservative operatives came in and gave a session for student campus conservatives about how to do campaigns to defund PIRGs and other campus institutions. The two operatives were former UW students themselves, including one of whom who’d been a columnist at the student newspaper at the same time I was – and obviously thus the two of us had had some public animosity between us.

Fast forward a decade or so after that infamous workshop, and both WPIRG and CKMS had lost their student funding. WPIRG is now defunct, but I think CKMS has been re-born as a station that isn’t dependent on student funding.

But the Wikileaks had exposed this type of meeting wasn’t limited to Waterloo, but instead was an organized effort by more senior conservatives to mobilize students to use a range of unethical but effective tactics to get rid of non-conservative institutions on campus.

When I wrote about the campaign to defund the PIRG at Carleton University in 2013, I emphasized how PIRGs are an instance of what are described as “infrastructures of dissent” or “infrastructures of resistance.” I think these are important concepts to understand: things that foster and sustain a community, culture, and continuity of activism and solidarity over the long term. That is what the conservatives want to remove, and that is what we want to defend and build.

The last part of my long-winded intro to this op-ed, is about where I submitted this op-ed to: the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.

What I’ll note about it, is that in summer 2024 I sent in a letter to the editor, which did get published*.

It was about the CANSEC, Canada’s largest weapons manufacturer conference that takes place annually in Ottawa, and the protests against CANSEC that year – that year being 2024, in the midst of the Gaza genocide.

I said they published my letter, but they did a bit of butchering of it and ended up needing to publish a correction two days later.

What they did to it, tells its own story of the way the corporate media works sometimes.

A sentence that I had written was, “The International Court of Justice issued orders to Israel to prevent the commission of genocide in Gaza, but Israel continues to violate these orders, and the International Criminal Court has been asked by its chief prosecutor to issue warrants against leaders of both Hamas and Israel.”

They removed the part about Israel violating the orders, so it went to print saying, “ The International Court of Justice issued orders to Israel to prevent the commission of genocide in Gaza, and the court has been asked by its chief prosecutor to issue warrants against leaders of both Hamas and Israel.”

The correction they needed to make, of course, was because they had unwittingly conflated the two courts into one as part of their process of removing what they didn’t want to have published. They don’t issue corrections or apologies simply for taking out part of what you write.

I was hoping they’d publish this current piece about the situation at uOttawa. I wrote it with the general readership in mind, in a way that hopefully could be understood well.

In our campaign, a major difficulty has been the issue of how to reach students effectively, because many of them have no idea the elections are even happening, nor do they know there is a campus radio station. One way we’ve figured out, is that if we reach people who know students and can relay the message, that can be quite helpful in it’s own right. It’s not everything, but it’s a part.

Here is the op-ed…

Future of PIRG and Campus/Community Radio in Peril at uOttawa

Sometimes, with all the bad news we’re constantly hearing about, we need to hear about good things. When those good things are at risk, that’s when we really need to hear about them.

This week at the University of Ottawa, the futures of two institutions are at stake: the radio station, CHUO 89.1 FM, and the ‘Ontario Public Interest Research Group,’ also known as OPIRG-Ottawa or by the French acronym GRIPO.

As part of the annual student general elections, there are separate referendum questions on re-establishing a student levy for each, to ensure they are funded enough to continue operations. They both lost their student levy two years ago, and just this past December the CHUO board of directors decided the station would need to shut down due to financial unsustainability. OPIRG-GRIPO isn’t at that point yet but could be soon.

So the question of course is, why should students support them?

But there’s also the question, why is this of concern to people who aren’t students?

I think I’m in a good position to speak to that second question. For over a decade I was involved in different initiatives with OPIRG-Ottawa, on a volunteer basis. And I’ve been listening to CHUO for over three decades; in more recent years I was also on-air as guest on a few shows, and contributed in other ways to some others.

But I can also speak personally about the value these organizations offer to students.

When I was a student, I took Mathematics at U.Waterloo in a joint program with Education at Queen’s U. It was only in my fifth year that I learned of WPIRG, UW’s equivalent of OPIRG. They are a centre of activism on campus.

I’d been on the track and field team, and then with the student newspaper, but it was through involvement with WPIRG – including their show on the UW campus/community radio CKMS – that I started to learn about and connect with initiatives and people off-campus, in the community. Up until then, I was very much living a student-centred life.

This is what I want to stress. Both the PIRG and the campus/community radio are ‘infrastructures’ with only a few paid staff, that support the many volunteers who come in and make the organizations what they are. These volunteers consist both of students and of members of the greater community.

Both OPIRG and CHUO connect the campus with the community and vice versa.

They offer such a diverse range of benefits that it’s not feasible to really describe them all here.

But they offer a home for a variety of voices and of values that aren’t supported in the same way anywhere else.

These are things that are so important in our current society.

Mental health in youth is said to be in crisis – mental health in many people is in crisis – and some of the key elements are loneliness and isolation, the impersonal and problematic nature of our communications technologies, the devastation of our environment, and the social and economic injustices people face.

These two organizations are antidotes. They provide connection, they provide community, they provide opportunities to be involved, and they provide a way to take action on issues.

One student asked me why CHUO should be supported financially by students, even if it’s only $3 per term, when other radio stations are self-sufficient. So I got into the differences between for-profit radio versus a non-profit organization that provides a benefit to the community but doesn’t make money doing it. It is kind of like when the government provides services that aren’t profitable, but we still collectively fund them because we understand their importance.

It’s up to the U. Ottawa students to make their choice this week on the future of both OPIRG and CHUO, but the risk is that students might not fully understand the choice they’re making – a choice they’re making for all of us.

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