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| "Yes" side poster outside the SUB today. |
While the Referendum Oversight Committee has blocked the "No" side in UVic's referendum on membership in the Canadian Federation of Students
The point the "Yes" side is trying to make is that if you are not a member of the CFS you pay $20 for the ISIC (the full retail price.) If you are a member of the CFS you get the ISIC for the $16.04 per year which you pay in CFS fees.
This is NOT a "free" ISIC card, any more than the soup served by the UVic Student Society during the "student debt soup kitchen" is free. It is paid for with your student fees. True, you get the ISIC cheaper if you're a CFS member (although many students don't bother to get one, since it's only of real use for international travel–you can get student discounts domestically with your UVic Student ID.) But a portion of your CFS fees are still going to operate CFS Services' provision of the ISIC. There is also a $5 fee for getting your photo taken.
The organization known as "CFS" is actually two separate incorporated entities, CFS National and CFS Services. Unfortunately the CFS only financial statements available to regular students are "consolidated" ones which make it hard to assess the financial position of CFS Services. Around 90% of the CFS' revenue is from student fees. A recent Canadian University Press article suggests CFS National is currently subsidizing CFS Services to the tune of over $2 million.
The bottom line? Subsidized is not the same thing as free. An ISIC at less than the retail price may be a benefit of CFS membership, and $16 is less than $20, but it sure isn't zero.
On a related note, the ROC didn't like the coverage I gave them earlier today and committee member James Coccola demanded I remove my post. The ROC claims this type of leaked information will compromise the fairness of the referendum. Frankly, the ROC itself is already doing more toward that end than I ever could.
As an exchange student who has been doing some traveling lately, I can attest to the uselessness of ISIC. I have never used mine.
ReplyDeletePost if you are a UVic student and have used an ISIC.
When I fly home to Calgary, it gets me a discount on WestJet (5% I think?).
ReplyDeleteI save 5$ on each VIA rail trip on each of the multiple trips I make to my hometown each year. That pays for itself after about 3 trips, so it's worth it to me. Plus, not all of the fees to the CFS go just for the ISIC card, so the money is being dispersed other places and you can't claim the card costs 16$.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you don't have to pay 5$ to get a photo taken for the card. You can bring in a photo--such as a leftover from applying for a passport--and that will suffice.
I used my card when traveling in Europe. Got myself some discounts on plays in London and such.
ReplyDeleteI went across Europe last summer and most places had no idea what the ISIC was, but they gave a regular student discount which I could have just used my student card for. Some places that had a student discount thought it was fake becuase of the cheap lamination.
ReplyDeletei have used mine so many times and has saved me tons...check out the site http://www.isic.org/ to see all the places including Europe you can get discounts. That said, the CFS membership fee is for the organization as a whole and you get lots of different types of services in return. That the UVSS hasn't been very good at promoting them all is not the Federations fault. Their conduit for communication is the local after all. The ISIC is just one of the things you get. I don't really understand why the UVSS doesn't try better to even promote this. They should go to different buildings and set up tables. At Ryerson they do it all the time.
ReplyDeleteSuppose we were to accept this word game about "free"... what would the "cost" of the ISICs be? The cost of the ISIC/Studentsaver discount program was around $350,000 this last year, out of total student fee revenue of under $4 million. That's less than 10% of the $4 students pay each semester to CFS-National... so total cost per student is less than $0.40/semester.
ReplyDeleteHmm. So far as I understand it, every time the CFS "gives a student a free card", CFS-National buys it from CFS-Services, who is the only ISIC provider in Canada. If CFS-S is really tanking (as the vanishingly small amount of information available suggests), then this giveaway is not just overselling a marginally useful card, it's funneling money to the failing service branch to keep Phil Link's socialism well-stocked with champagne.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, when is CFS-S going to be wound up and amalgamated with CFS-N? There was a direction at a general meeting years and years ago, but the National Exec never reports on the progress of that.