As University of Guelph students are in final preparations to end their school year, the mayor of Guelph is wondering who will take responsibility for graffiti found across the city to promote a students strike that happened late last month.
Last month, graffiti began appearing on private and public property in different parts of the city to promote of the March 20 student strike at U of G. Most of the graffiti is in red paint, some with a hammer and sickle imagery and the phrase ‘workers unite’.
Jack Fisher, president of Central Student Association (CSA) at U of G, said the student union had organized an action on that date, but he claims the graffiti is from another group on campus.
On March 20, the CSA was actively asking for signatures on a petition against funding cuts by the Ontario government, said Fisher.
“There’s another group on campus who also organized a strike and they were promoting a walk-out — that’s the Revolutionary Student Movement,” he said. “It was unfortunate and not planned that the two protests had similar messaging and happened at the same time on the same day.”
Both groups are seeing elimination of tuition fees among their demands, but Fisher said Revolutionary Student Movement’s demands are more extreme.
Fisher said the messaging in the graffiti appears to have come from that group, which he describes as being extreme left.
“We didn’t spray paint anything, but we also don’t know specifically that it was them — other than the spray painted messages across town align with their messaging,” said Fisher.
Mayor Cam Guthrie said he would like to see someone take responsibility for the graffiti.
“Resorting to vandalism, especially on public property to try to get your point across actually doesn’t get your point across — all you are doing is upsetting the public as a whole because they ultimately will be paying for its removal,” said Guthrie. “I would love to see someone take responsibility for it, because then we would know who to send the bill to.”
A private business owner who asked not to be identified said he will be painting over the graffiti on his place of business at his own expense.
Fisher said the CSA has issued a reprimand to the Revolutionary Student Movement and the group will be able to defend themselves at an upcoming tribunal.
“They are one of our clubs that we recently accredited, but we did not expect vandalism out of them right out of the gate,” said Fisher.
