Students hold sit-in at VIU following bag search

Zena said the sit-in is calling for VIU to take responsibility for the bag search. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm

Students protested outside the doors of Vancouver Island University’s president's office on Thursday over what they say is an incident of racial profiling. 

While participating in a sit-in protest outside the president’s office, sisters Zena and Sara Kishawi, said they are calling on Vancouver Island University (VIU) to launch an investigation around an incident where members of the VIU Muslim Women's Club had their bag searched on March 7.

Sara said that the group of four women including her and her sister were studying in the school’s library when Dan VanderSluis, Associate Vice-President of Human Resources for the school approached the bag that was recently dropped off at their table and searched it without their consent.

She said after the search, the group went up to VanderSluis and asked what he was doing.

“So we questioned the action, ‘why are you looking at our bag?’ he had said, ‘I'm just going to take a look inside your bag because of a concern,’” Sara said. “We questioned ‘why are you looking inside her bag? What's the concern?’ He said a staff member had said that there was a concern with a bag, and he just wants to check because there's a large crowd of people.”

Zena said the group had been studying in the library since the morning when a friend dropped off a bag carrying a button-making machine to them. This happened before a VIU Senate meeting started in a room on the same floor, where people were waiting to be let in.

Video was taken of the aftermath of the search with the women asking why the bag was searched, during which Vandersluis said they heard concerns about the bag from another staff member. The video that was posted a week ago has since been viewed over 100,000 times.

Sara said after the incident, the group had two meetings to discuss with VIU staff about what had happened.

“We walked into it expecting for them to be like, ‘here's what we can do.’ But it was more like, ‘here's what you can do. You can sign this, you can do this, and we can enter a resolution,’” Sara said. “I was like, ‘okay, well, that is not what we're here for, there was a mistake made, the institution made a mistake.’ I need that accountability, but they were treating it like a conflict”

Sara said after the first meeting she did not feel like their concerns were heard so they asked for a second meeting. She said a second meeting was refused and that it was not until the video was posted to social media that they received a letter from the university’s President and Vice-Chancellor Deborah Saucier.

In a second meeting following receiving the president's letter, Sara described it as four minutes of staff minimizing their concerns.

In the letter from the president, Saucier said she extended her sincere apologies on behalf of the university that the actions caused them to feel targeted and unsafe.

She said VIU takes the safety and security of all students and employees very seriously and provided an explanation of why the bag was searched.

The letter reads: 

“On March 7, a VIU employee observed a man described as a white male wearing a N95 mask leave a bag on a table and leave the area. An employee expressed concern about a suspicious unattended bag to a senior employee who walked over to observe the bag in question. Neither employee involved were aware that the bag had been dropped off for your group by a friend.”

In the letter, Saucier said VIU will be reviewing its safety and security procedures for unattended bags on campus and their goal as a school is to ensure a safe and welcoming environment for all students.

CHLY obtained an unsigned incident overview report an employee wrote on March 7.

In the report, the employee said they were approached by a staff member with a heightened tone of urgency and said they were concerned about an individual carrying a bag with “odd and possibly suspicious contents.” 

The staff member approached the employee again said the bag was left at a table and the male carrying the bag left the vicinity.

In the report, the employee said they approached the table where the bag was left and bent over to look inside the bag without touching it. The report states the employee did not ask the students seated nearby if the bag was theirs or not. After this, the group of students then started questioning the employee about why he searched the bag.

Zena said although VIU staff said the bag was unattended, the group had the bag with them at their table after it was dropped off.

“And then now they're saying, ‘Oh, the bag was unattended.’ Although we were literally sitting around the bag, like the bag was with us, we have proof it was with us,” Zena said.

She said that the group of women were all Muslim and they were the only people in the area to have their bag checked.

“So this is leading us to think maybe, like based racial profiling or discrimination, and value has no like, follow up with our policy against that they're basically doing nothing right now,” Zena said. “Except they're trying to tell us ‘Oh, well, I'll adjust our like our attended bag policy, or we'll adjust our bank policy.’ That is not what we want. This is a discrimination case, we're not getting an actual reasoning, and we want them to do something about it.”

In a second video obtained by CHLY following the search, VanderSluis can be heard apologizing to the group saying it was not the case of racial profiling.

“This is not racial profiling. What I was informed us that someone came through this area, dropped a bag and immediately left,” VanderSluis said.

In the video after being asked if he had permission to search the bag, VanderSluis said he should have asked first before looking in the bag.

“That's a very good point. I should have asked,” VanderSluis said.

At the end of the video, both parties agreed to have a meeting to go over why the bag search happened.

Zena said the sit-in is calling for VIU to take responsibility for the search.

“Personally, I want them to take responsibility and acknowledge it, and not try to hide it from other students and like, don't act like it was our fault,” Zena said “They're trying to spin it around and say, we weren't looking at the bag, we weren't doing this. We want them to take responsibility for what they have done, acknowledge it and do something about it.

Sara said they had been telling VIU for several months about their concerns that an incident such as the bag search could occur.

“For the past five months, we have been warning VIU that something like this is going to happen if they don't put measures in place,” Sara said. “We have been asking for preventative measures. And unfortunately, now we have moved on to accountability measures because they did not prevent this from happening.”

Sara said the group will continue with marches and protests in support of Palestine until their demands for the university to shut down the campus Starbucks, release a statement on behalf of the school calling for a ceasefire between Palestine and Israel, and create an anti-discrimination policy that protects students of colour are met.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.