By Justin Ling, Opinions Contributor
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s faux-populism: that horrible nagging voice that follows you around on every issue and insists on telling you, “I’m the voice of the people!”
Enter the Dal Liberty Society and their foolish campaign against, well, everything. The topic du jour: the Loaded Ladle.
Let’s recap. The Ladle wants to give away essentially free (with a $2 levy) food. Point one, Ladle.
On top of that, they want their food to be delicious, student-made and sustainable. Their goal is to tackle corporate production of food in favour of Nova Scotian farmers, benefiting your health, the environment and workers. Some of the food would even be grown at Dal.
The group has thus far worked its ass off, independently, trying to scrape together the money to serve you poor students, with no compensation for themselves. Game, set, match.
Finally, the group would be breaking the corporate monopoly on campus, creating the “competition” that the Dalhousie Liberty Society claims to love so much.
But the DLS says that working together to invest in a challenge to our current food at Dalhousie is “unethical”. Michael Kennedy actually suggests that he opposes the “politics” of ethical food. Would they rather chow down on testosterone-injected fascist cows fed with the cinders of burned-down orphanages?
I for one, welcome 45-minute line-ups for good food. If it’s that damn popular, I think it should be encouraged. If you can’t wait, than you can go get food somewhere else.
Over the course of the year, I have no doubt that every student who wants to eat the Ladle’s food will get many a chance. I would rather pay $2 and get fed several dozen times over the year than pay $10 for a poorly-prepared slice of greasy pizza instead.
As a working student that occasionally hits the under-$20-in-my-bank-account-so-I-can’t-visit-an-ATM level, I hurriedly welcome with awkwardly outstretched arms anyone who says “So you’ve got no money? Here’s some food.”
If you’re already shelling out money, hand-over-fist to be here, why should you be subjected to the obsessively ideological demands of the Dal Liberty Society as to how much you should pay for your food? So they want us to pay for every service we use individually, instead of collectively. By that logic, we should be gouged by every food vendor, bookstore, public bench, restroom and prof (“that awkward post-class chit-chat will be $50, please.”)
Chartwells does a lot of the food serving at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. Apparently this type of massive, multinational company that, according to Michael Kennedy, is more ethical than the Loaded Ladle, because they don’t ask students to support it collectively.
When Chartwells was asked to use more local ingredients, being located on a farming campus and all, the company grudgingly “agreed” and started listing Pepsi as a local product. Yeah, that Pepsi.
The DLS want the people to be free to decide, but only if that means if the rich kids get their way, the corporations get to make bigger profits and, ultimately, Michael Kennedy is calling the shots.
When I grasp that pen of freedom in my sweaty little hands, I’ll be enthusiastically signing over my $2 because I think that if students want to take this university’s food production into their own hands, let ’em.
If they want to benefit local farms, they should. And if they want to put that much work into a service for the students of Dalhousie, with essentially no return for themselves, I think they should be encouraged.
I’ll also be donating $20 to cover the cost of the first ten opt-outs that Mr. Kennedy lures with his bullshit flute.
Oh, and, as a final point—have you ever wondered where the DLS picked up its tactics? How, until this year, you never heard of them, but now they appear to be everywhere like a nagging fly of right-wing economics?
Well, kids, keep in mind that in 2009, “audio recordings, photographs and documents that were leaked from a recent Conservative Party student workshop in Waterloo exposed a partisan attempt to take over student unions and undermine Ontario Public Interest Research Groups (OPIRGs) on campuses across Ontario,” according to an investigative piece written by the Ryerson Free Press.
One tip for young Conservatives included starting shell groups which were “issue-based” to promote the same partisan ideology, with a different face. Many members of the new Dalhousie Liberty Society are former members of the Dalhousie-King’s Conservatives. Coincidence?
Please, vote for the levy. That way, everyone can enjoy the Ladle’s delicious food and so maybe—just maybe—the DLS will shut up and stop fondling Ronald Reagan’s reanimated corpse in our student union building.
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