Let’s Talk About the University of Regina Students’ Union Before It’s Too Late
But there's only so much Saskatchewan Stupid you can fit into one Substack, right?
We should have done this at least a year ago.
The issue is complex and I don’t think I’m ready to go in as hot with this hot take as originally planned. For now I’m going to keep this facts-forward and try to wade you through the complexities that make this particular dumpster fire a bit difficult to diagnose.
Hannah Tait was the URSU president from spring 2021 to 2022.
In May 2022, University of Regina student Navjot Kaur won the URSU presidency. Pedram Monfared became VP Operations & Finance; Harsh Patel became VP Student Affairs.
With that, the presidency went to runner-up Tejas Patel.
By 2022-23’s year-end, URSU operational deficit had ballooned to $1.46 million, the URSU’s million dollar line of credit was halfway maxed, and assets drained.
Both were barred from URSU.
In March 2024, Mahad Ahmad won the presidency, joined on the exec by Jwalant Patel, Zuhruf Zarooq, and Honey Patel. Behind the scenes Aoun Muhammad was promoted to General Manager.
URSU’s 2023-2024 audit showed the organization was operationally insolvent, bleeding with an accumulated unrestricted deficit of $1.37 million and no turnaround in sight. Its assets are toast.
By April, the University of Regina’s administration - finally acknowledging years of dysfunction - publicly ended its student fee-collection agreement with URSU, effective August 31, 2025 (effectively for the 2025-26 school year).
And with that, University of Regina students have no union, no representation - a first in Canadian university history.
Remember, whenever Saskatchewan is first, it’s never a good thing.
Worse yet, as these idiots were milking the URSU’s cash position to nothing, they were also running “compliance campaigns” targeting service centres.
Specifically, the Women’s Centre and UR Pride.
Ahmed and Muhammad were positively insistent it was about holding women and the LGBQT community on campus to legal and financial benchmarks.
Come February and March of this year UR Pride and the Women’s Centre both sued URSU, claiming over $300,000 in withheld levies, breach of contract, and outright bad faith.
As a non-profit, holding an annual general meeting is a requirement by law, part of the Centre’s duty to serve women and the campus community.
The moment Indigenous Knowledge Keeper Kenny Awasis began a traditional blessing at that meeting the heckling started: men interrupting him, demanding the meeting be sped up for “fasting”, others talking over women struggling to keep order, all but daring security to intervene.
Other men openly disputed the chair’s basic right to run the meeting.
When security tried to restore order, it only confirmed the level of menace in the room - a threat so palpable, so plainly gendered, that the Women’s Centre had little choice but to shut the whole thing down. No elections. No business.
No safe space.
Weeks later, when the Women’s Centre met again, it was only under the clamp of tight security, the atmosphere a mix of siege and shame: a legal, required meeting in Saskatchewan needed security guards at the door to keep women safe on their own university campus.
Where was the outcry?
Where were Regina’s lefty “progressives,” its university administrators, its student leaders - the so-called guardians of culture and discourse?
Hiding.
The U of R’s response was a whimper about “internal investigations.”
The province’s media didn’t want to be accused of scapegoating new Canadians.
The U of R student body and administration sat on their hands.
No outrage. No shame. Just fear, silence, and complicity.
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In August, shit got even more real when URSU was evicted from all its offices and commercial property. Its keys and assets handed over per the constitution, barred from practicing even the basics of representation or advocacy.
At the same time, the Regina Police Service confirmed an investigation into alleged financial misappropriation and possible fraud at the URSU.
Looking through the minutes of URSU meetings over the last few years it’s not hard, at all, to figure out what’s happened here, but I’ll leave that to the actual cops to tell you.
September saw a final, desperate bid: URSU called a Special General Meeting to dissolve the union.
In fact not just to shutter the union, but to slip in a sweetheart clause, releasing the outgoing execs from any liability or responsibility for the disaster they’d overseen.
Student outrage forced the meeting to adjourn with no vote.
Here’s as far as I’m willing to go today on the hard realities: international male students, especially those from societies where women’s freedom is systemically suppressed, rose to dominate the URSU as it spiralled.
Male solidarity and cultural misogyny, combined with cowardly unwillingness to address the anti-woman culture head-on, turned a Saskatchewan university that should be a safe haven for every student - regardless of origin or sex - into a weapon.
Nobody should mistake these facts for blanket condemnation of newcomers; the vast majority of international students are just that - students, here to learn.
But URSU’s collapse proves what happens when bad actors and broken governance combine.
Disempower professional management.
Create a brotherhood of insiders.
Ignore or silence dissenting voices.
Use procedure as a bludgeon to clear out anyone who opposes you.
Wait, that’s the Sask Party playbook!
This is what I’m talking about when I refer to complexities.
How can I reference cultural factors, when this kind of behaviour has rendered our own homegrown government even more corrupt and incompetent than the URSU?
Every asshole who desperately wants you to believe this isn’t the Sask Party’s frenzied population-growth plan in action should look around and ask: is this really what you wanted from our universities, our province, our country?
Instead this conversation is nowhere - not in Saskatchewan newsrooms, the Legislature, nor so-called halls of Saskatchewan academia.
Because, let’s admit it, this is hard and we’re lazy as hell.
Hard, because it means confronting truths no one in Saskatchewan has the guts or self-respect to say out loud.
Lazy, because no one wants to put the effort into doing anything productive if there’s a risk of being labelled something derogatory, even if it’s false.
Well guess what?
You’re always going to face the risk of being labelled something you’re not. It’s how the world works now.
I don’t give a shit what you call me, because just like everything else I’ve been called, I’m not that and I know it.
This kind of retaliatory intimidation is already happening at the University of Regina, including through its own student newspaper.
First of all, a standing ovation for Carolyn Thauberger.
The guy whining about hurt feelings while publicly naming and shaming a Saskatchewan woman as he wrings his hands about misogyny and racism is URSU General Manager Aoun Muhammad.
The excerpt from the Carillon above struck me as incredibly patronizing… almost propaganda-like.
In January 2025, the board of directors of University of Regina’s newspaper was Tayef Ahmed (Board Chair), Akib Hossain (Director at Large) and Zuhruf Zarooq (Director at Large).
<Hi, it’s me. It’s the day after I published this. I decided to delete the “chattel” line. It was too broad, made me wince reading it back today. You get the point without it.
The point here is not to reinforce stereotypes. We must, however, confront the whole truth about the context of this issue, no matter how uncomfortable, in hopes we can find a better way forward. Okay bye, T.>
This is the truth. Unvarnished, ugly, necessary.
The University of Regina’s campus union has apparently surrendered to a mob - a literal mob - of young men, almost entirely non-Canadian, dragging the most regressive, hateful non-Canadian values right through the front doors of our universities.
The result? Years of open intimidation of women, of LGBTQ2S students, of anyone foolish or brave enough to believe that equality is still a Canadian human right.
(Well, as long as Scott Moe doesn’t strip it from you, but that’s a different kind of a stupid and we’ve already established we only have capacity for so much in one post. )
Let’s quit the bullshit about “cultural misunderstandings.”
This debacle is a hallmark of the Saskatchewan Party’s desperate, frenzied immigration boom - foreign men emboldened by the promise that in Saskatchewan nobody, absolutely nobody, would challenge imported misogyny.
You want to call that racist?
Go on, son.
While you’re at it, explain to me what values you think you are defending when you let women in Saskatchewan lose the right to assemble.
When you let men coming from countries with well-documented contempt for other sexuality, female independence and education literally drive women out of their own legally-mandated meetings.
In Canada.
And what of the University of Regina’s board of governors, administrators and every other adult in the room who looked the other way?
They watched this all unfold with performative hand-wringing about “compliance,” making “accountability”.
The only thing that has made this okay is us.
Saskatchewan is terrified of its own shadow: terrified to call out bigotry when it wears the mask of multiculturalism, terrified to confront the misogynists who see women as disposable, terrified of appearing anything but welcoming, even while the grimmest values in the world are being projected onto our campuses.
We’re also a bunch of passive idiots who raise our kids to believe someone else is going to do it for them.
You almost can’t blame those who came in and figured out taking over a multi-million dollar organization in Canada would be easy enough to do blindfolded.
Who do you think runs Saskatchewan?
Lol.
Here’s the bottom line: if you don’t believe in equality for women, if you believe university meetings are yours to disrupt, or that women’s voices are yours to silence, or women in Canada are here to “know their place”, get the fuck out of Canada’s student unions, of our offices, and any position of leadership.
I’m going to leave you with a true story that happened a couple weeks ago.
I’m in a mall parking lot and observe teenaged boys jaywalking - running across the street, mid-street. When an oncoming vehicle brakes hard to avoid hitting them, one of the boys slams his hand down on the car’s hood. The driver, a new Canadian, starts screaming at them and one of the boys shouts a slur back at him.
With that, the driver pulls into the parking lot and with his vehicle, pens the teen boys in with his bumper. Now everybody’s straight up hysterical.
Boys are screaming.
Grown ass man is screaming.
But women are emotional.
I walk over, tell them all to cool it.
I’m a mom of two sons: I’ve got the voice.
“BOYS.”
Get in your car, shut the door and SHUT UP.”
They do.
Now I address the male driver, who is literally vibrating he is so angry.
The boys had insulted him with an ethnic slur, which I assured him was a horrendous act and shouldn’t have happened.
But he also probably shouldn’t have pulled into the parking lot to try to run them over with his car, so let’s just wait for the police.
At that this clown, just sweating and shaking, looks at me with unbridled hatred and says all menacingly and dramatic, “Someday we will handle things in Canada the way we do in my country.”
I laughed.
Out loud.
In his face.
I couldn’t help it.
“You will do no such thing,” I said.
“Because the way you do things in your country is fucked - that’s why you’re here.”
True story.
Have a great week, Saskatchewan.
I appreciate this post may leave some of you uncomfortable.
I don’t care.
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