Torey Ellis, Staff Contributor
A proposal to overhaul the Student Union Building and switch-up its food providers has kept everyone, even student union councillors, in the dark.
“It’s hard to have an opinion when we haven’t even seen a written document,” says Max Ma, an arts and social sciences representative on council, in an email.
The proposal, which has been kept from councillors while the executive and administration finalized “minor but important details,” will be put on the table at the Nov. 24 council meeting, says one of the student representatives to the Senate, Maggie Lovett.
The final offer will be voted on only one week later at the Dec. 1 meeting.
“I’m not impressed,” says Glenn Blake, the LGBTQ representative on council. “We talked about the basics, what we’d like to see, but it wasn’t concrete, you know? It would have been really nice to have some key points that we could at least mull over.”
He also says that a week between seeing the proposal and voting on it is not enough time.
“We’re students too,” he says. “Not only do we have council stuff, but we also have schoolwork, and this is done at such a time when all students are worried about final exams.”
“I don’t think that leaves students enough time to either rally against it or to come up with a counter-proposal,” he says.
Blake says he won’t be going into the Nov. 24 meeting with an opinion ready, because “it’s really not in anyone’s best interest to say like, ‘I’m really against this,’ when I don’t know what’s being offered,” he says.
The idea for the university to fund a SUB renovation, in exchange for gaining control of the food contract was first presented on Oct. 13, but “there wasn’t a great attendance rate from people actually on council,” says Lovett. The presentation took place at 6:00 and most councillors show up to the meetings at 6:30.
DSU President Chris Saulnier has been consulting with councillors all fall, says Lovett, but without seeing a proposal she’s missing a lot of information.
For her to support it, “it would have to allow complete control of (a kiosk) for a student-run food co-op without any potential for that being revoked or changed in the future,” she says.
“The wording on that would have to be really clear, that would be really important to me.”
Blake disagrees on the concept of a student-run kiosk.
“It pigeonholes us to say: this is your space, this is where you belong. If we’re going to revamp everything, then let’s start with the entire structure of where people are allowed to eat.”
He wants to make sure that the new contract makes room for student societies who want to cater their own events.
“Why the hell should the Spanish Society have to go through Sodexho when we have a Mexican restaurant that can cater the event for a fraction of the cost?” he asks.
“So it would be nice to have those addressed, and for those to be non-issues,” he says.
Lovett agrees that specialized societies should be allowed to bring in specialized foods.
She cites the student-run kiosk and an indoors waiting area for buses as perks of letting the university take over the SUB.
Ben Wedge, another council member who is also a student representative to the Senate, is suspicious of the deal.
“Any notion that the University requires full control of the SUB’s food services in order to expand the building is ludicrous,” he wrote on his personal blog.
He says he is in favour of expanding the SUB and re-doing the food area, but does not like the university’s offer.
“The plan for the University to swap crap for crap is insulting to students and will continue to keep choice out of our grasp. We want tasty, healthy, cheap food,” he says.
“Why don’t we build it like a mall food court, comprising a number of independently-leasable kiosks complete with a kitchen. We could rent these out on multi-year (three or five) terms, and allow a variety of businesses to set up shop.”
Wedge makes the argument that charging rent to those businesses would make the DSU the same amount of money that they’re getting now. The current food contract with Sodexho makes the union less than $200,000 a year.
Yet Sexton Campus Director Neil Bailey thinks that the possibility of going all student-run is low.
“It’s not likely in the next year or two or even three that we’re going to be able to completely replace food services with something that’s student-run,” he says. “I’d really like to see the DSU … grow those initiatives so that we have some potential in the future of having a bigger contingent of student-run food services.”
He says the trickiest part of the issue is the public image of the DSU as either representing the students or working with administration.
“The executive realizes that they have to work with the administration, which becomes this conflict where then the DSU and the executive is seen as being insiders that are sort of collaborating with the enemy,” he says.
“We’ve been handed this whole system where it’s sort of a dichotomy, like ‘administration against the DSU.’”
“I think all the people involved are good people, but I don’t know if they hold the same ideal of a really high level of student-run services on campus,” he says. “And so without knowing that it’s tough to have to judge.”
He says that the only way to make a contract between the university and the DSU work is if there is “something that we can hold both the DSU and the university administration to,” and that will improve over time rather than become a short-term solution.
Bailey also speaks to the problem of students feeling left out of the DSU’s decision-making process. “You know student engagement at Dal is just not a very potent activity,” he says.
“It’s almost inevitable that students will feel left out, because of the fact that we don’t have that either a communications forum, or we’re not talking about things that are important enough to engage students as a whole.”
He says that because of this phenomenon, the DSU does not end up being representative.
“The primary function isn’t representation, it’s perpetuating these systems that we have in place: providing various services.” He adds that those students who are active and present on campus are “the most valuable resource the university has.”
“I see a lot more hope through conduits like that, and of supporting of student activism like Campus Action on Food, than I do through negotiations between the DSU and the university.”
With files from Samantha Durnford and Bethany Horne.
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