Open Letter to Kyle Steele
Kyle,
I never got to meet with you about this, although maybe we could sometime next week (your door says you’re in Ottawa this week), but I think your decision to buyout the contract with Chartwells represents a huge opportunity to invest in and build the student community, and I just wanted to make sure your decisions moving forward work to further that goal rather than take away from it. Moving away from Chartwells also introduces an opportunity to promote socially and environmentally responsible business that Chartwells, despite its efforts, was never able to acheive because of the corporation’s national scope.
Amy told me about the possibility that Tim Horton’s may be moving in to the abandoned Perkin’s space, and while Tim Horton’s embodies socially and environmentally friendly practices as far as national coffee chains go, there’s still an irony around buying out a contract with a national corporation that ships in frozen ingredients and replacing it with a national corporation that also ships in mostly frozen ingredients. I’m not saying that any student run incarnation of the three food outlets in the SUB need to be a eutopia of locally grown all-organic products sold by employees making a living wage because most students can’t afford that, including me. What a student run business or co-op can do is sell food that is affordable because profit is being kept in the student community, instead of selling cheap food by minimizing input costs. Cheap food is cheap by externalizing the cost of production on workers and the environment, no matter what corporation is selling it.
The other concern I have over a Tim Horton’s coming into the SUB is the lack of student programming they would be compelled to host, or the amount of student programming students would be compelled to attend inside a Tim Horton’s. I’m sure this is something that could be negociated around, but something strikes me as odd as something like a Coffeehouse being held in a Tim Horton’s, and there must be a reason that I’ve never seen any Tim’s host live music. I see Perkin’s as a venue that can attract significant walk-in traffic to student-run events, and the SUB desperately needs that sense of community. In the end I hope whatever ends up in the Perkin’s space fosters this sense of community, not the sense that capitalism is invading our community buildilng.
And in the end I feel that the only responsible choice is for the Student’s Union to reinvest our money in students, not corporations, and in community, not capitalism.
But that’s just me.
-dewey
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