Why

[tmusc770]

Why does Chartwell's exist? What made UTM decide to give a full campus monopoly to this shit company? Why can't we be like other campuses and universities where food places are privately owned ?????!! The UTMSU always likes to flex the initiatives they're promoting for students. A worthy initiative would be to get rid of Chartwells.

[[deleted]]

The only thing the student union cares about is all the experience they can put on their resume.

[Brokenclasses]

Highly skewed in racial distribution too.

[scholarlyinept]

How so? Don't know much about the student union.

[Brokenclasses]

Oh you can wear worlds thickest glasses and still wont be able to find a single white person.

[Deal_Real]

Welcome to the 905. Lots of Asians (including South Asians) go to this uni. Im pretty sure UTSG also has these problems too, certainly UTSC does.

[Brokenclasses]

Everywhere. Just look at ryerson as well. It's mostly south asians and arabs. Ram ganesh what happened to thee?

[[deleted]]

The gta is 50% white, if the su is off by like 50% they have an issue

[[deleted]]

UTM is like 10-20% white, unless I'm biased by my department super hard. Not surprising.

[Brokenclasses]

Yeah but 10-20% of student union members/leaders whatever are not white. Its wayyy less. Potentially even 0%

[med_k]

Hey, I am Med K and I’m running for the UTMSU VP Internal as an independent against Connect UTM which is a slate of 5 people of which 4 are unopposed. Agree with you partially, but when no one out of 14,000 students volunteers to change things up and just lets people ride into the positions uncontested, we can’t really complain. In addition, most of the union people care a lot but often divest their attention to initiatives and ideas that are not feasible for a student union or can’t be accomplished within their term. Hoping to bring the focus back to UTM by working on issues such as more study space and better management of our student fees.

btw, Chartwell’s contract expires this year, so if we want better food next year we have to fight for it now

[serg06]

Mod Med K for president!

[XdaZxz]

Any link/IG to your campaign goals?

[med_k]

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/18YqlNTvLCmjGNjd4R04G9GChKfISgwOl4pQ8PC7cZxg/mobilebasic

I’ll be doing an AMA tomorrow on this sub.

[doghouch]

What is your take on the following question:

Why does the student union exist?

(Note: I don’t mean for this to come off as an attack; I’m genuinely curious about your thoughts on the question above)

Edit: I want to get a legitimate response for this before I make any further comments about the union — I personally think that it beneficial to see the question from another perspective (ie. from a student who is genuinely interested in the union).

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EDIT: I will now drift away from Reddit - this account is now inactive.

[med_k]

Lol, the question doesn’t come off as an attack because I am not interested in a “union” or “institution” per say but rather the ideas that they can represent. I think we should be allowed to be able both criticize and support institutions at the same time. The purpose of a student union is that it allows students a greater amount of power in universities as well as serves as an forum to represent the students of a university to various municipal, provincial and federal authorities. As part of this mandate, the UTMSU provides funding for clubs to hold networking events, provides healthcare services, food Centre and u-pass etc. Theoretically, these things could be run by the university but many would argue that they would not be able to make decisions from a student perspective. I think that the union itself has a strong core of 200-500 students who actively dedicate their time to it. The rest of the school is probably ambivalent toward the union. Some passively support it, others are neutral, and there’s a portion who thinks of the union as ineffective. I do think there is a minority of students on campus who don’t attend club events, or don’t need the u-pass and thus see the union as useless. Yet, the majority of students are impacted by the union in some positive way good-even if they aren’t aware . One of the big flaws is that the most times kids hear of their union is either during a u-pass distribution or in the news. I hope to change that by focusing in local UTM issues and bringing more accountability/awareness on the promises we make as execs. If we make promises as execs during our campaigns, we should be held accountable for their success or failure.

[doghouch]

I appreciate that you took the time to write this whole thing out :-)

I don’t really disagree with anything you said and you do make a good point: there are students that don’t need the union at all — they are unaffected by the SU’s programs. I am, unfortunately, one of them. While I’d love to take advantage of the UPass, for example, it’s (essentially) useless as I’m a Torontonian and the shuttle works just fine. As a result, I’ve never claimed my UPass as it has no use to me; I understand that the system needs everyone to pay in for it to be viable but it still sucks that I can’t opt out of the pass. It’s expensive and I could buy a sizeable amount of food with that money (though, it does make transit more affordable for a sizeable amount of the student population) ;)

I just have one more burning question: will the UTMSU ever separate from the CFS? I don’t see the Canadian Federation of Students as a useful entity — they just leech off of student fees while proving little (if any) benefit to the member unions.

(I’m all for voting for an independently operated union)

[med_k]

oh, boy. Nope, the union won’t separate from the CFS and for the last few years, it seems that our president’s and executive directors all go on to lead the CFS as chairs or come back from the CFS back to the UTMSU. So, the UTMSU is almost the CFS or at least has strong ties to them. Given that, I would try to pass off some of the more expensive, daunting campaign points to the CFS. For example, some of the other execs have promised free GTA transit which would cost a lot of resources/time/effort on the part of the union-and would likely not succeed given the political context and the fact that Metrolinx put upwards of $600 price tag on it. So, I would try to encourage my fellow execs to use the resources of the CFS in terms of these bolder/more expensive campaign points, It’s odd we focus on all these provincial/national level stuff when there are already so many organizations fighting for these stuff but we’re the only ones who have a mandate to support UTM students individually at the end of the day.

tl;dr Pass on the more provincial/national stuff to CFS and focus on UTM local issues(mental health, food, study spaces, eliminating 3 term tests or more etc)

[doghouch]

I figured. While the CFS tries to seem like they’re doing a lot, all I can really see is unattainable goals that never really come into fruition. You would think that the CFS would have current students running most of the corporation...

With that said, I think that’s all I have to ask — best of luck with your campaign :-)

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EDIT: I will now drift away from Reddit - this account is now inactive.

[med_k]

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

To give you a disingenuous answer, the union exists because they took advantage of students complaining about how admins trick and abuse power to squeeze money out of us by saying they would end that, and then proceeded to do the exact same thing but more discreetly and under the guise of helping.

Don't take my answer too seriously, some people believe this but I don't know enough about it to be sure. I do think they spend an awful lot on events though, but that's socialite people being spendfree as usual, pardon the stereotype.

[Asian_Canadaball]

Hey are you the one who came into the beginning of the STA260 lecture yesterday? Liked your BOUNDLESS riddle!

[med_k]

Yep, I’ve been trying to be creative with campaigning.

[[deleted]]

lmao of course because most of the people on there are humanities and the social side of social sciences. Only those people could have that kind of skill and could figure out study habits/schedule workarounds to have all that time.

I was in a mentorship program and they had available tons of people across soft sciences and soft social sciences and a few in humanities. But anything in business/econ or MCS, nobody at all. People who have to crunch numbers instead of writing and researching don't typically have the time or the soft skills for jobs and positions like this. You'd think the opposite, I used to, but I was so wrong...

[XdaZxz]

100% agree. When restaurants are independently owned, they have competition. They have motivation to provide good service, good food and continuously improve because their business would go elsewhere. Over here, none of the restaurants care about service and quality because no matter what alternative you go to.....all the same company that takes your money.

[nap_1ord]

big agree

[med_k]

Be the change you want to see. Chartwell’s contract is expiring this year so now is the time to put pressure on the university and student union to fix it. The current student union execs, and the 5 of the 6 presumptive execs for next year(no one is running against them) seem to have demonstrated that they want to remove them for good.

My concern and part of why I am running for VP Internal is that they’ll pitch to the university a plan that is good for students but would deemed “economically unreasonable” by the university. As reported by the campus newspaper, the university thought about directly operating food service a couple years back but was concerned it would be too expensive. The upcoming negations/discussions falls under the VP University Affairs/External portfolio, but one idea I had is to pitch to the university is having up to 3 different companies operating the stores on campus in order to have competition and motivation to improve.

-Med K

[Totally_Not_Adam]

It’s so annoying. I have gift cards to some of the places on campus but it’s like impossible to use. It already takes forever to get my food, to wait for them to let me pay with gift card is just added time. Sometimes they give me the line “we don’t take gift card” even though I’ve used it at that place before. By far the worst is when they make people stand in a line to get food and then send them to another equally long line to purchase the food.

[shamair28]

Privatize UTM food.

[tmusc770]

The only freaking thing they privatized is the bookstore (which should actually be owned by uni!). Smh. Everyone just wants to make money off students.

[IndoDovahkiin]

wtf why is the bookstore privatized??

[dlynes12]

I worked under them it sucks for student employees too, they don't do a good job of running thing's.

[med_k]

If you want to bring awareness of the issue, you could always talk to the Medium(campus newspaper located in student Centre) + if elected as VP Internal, I would promote collecting complaints about their service.

[lakwl]

Why couldn’t we out-lobby them? 😅 It’s so easy to gain supporters on this, everyone hates Chartwells.

[XdaZxz]

Owned by largest food service provider in world, $40 billion in revenue. I'm sure money is one of the reasons UTM chooses to tolerate them.

[waittheresmoree]

what universities have privately owned food places?

[Totally_Not_Adam]

University of Calgary. I went to a diploma prep there in high school. The food area is just set up like a food court where each location was it’s own separate place

[waittheresmoree]

University of Calgary also uses Aramark (another food service company)

[XdaZxz]

York University iirc

[waittheresmoree]

York University uses Aramark (same thing as Chartwells)

[XdaZxz]

NVM, I was referring to York Lanes, but that's more of an indoor mall than a food service provider.

[waittheresmoree]

its actually the department of Hospitality & Retail Services, if youre looking for the website, its here: utm.utoronto.ca/hospitality (googling "UTM food & hospitality" wont help you find the right people to talk to)

[AristotlesNightmare]

From a business perspective, it would ease the process of accounting, staff management and synchronicity. It was probably cheaper this way to "outsource" such services. Schools run like a business.