Well here it is: the final portion of the MacGillivray-Clarke platform. The issues addressed are activities, the environment, lobbying of various organizations, and the crux of the pair’s campaign, accountability and availability.
Activities
The main ideas in this part of the platform revolve around the creation of an Activities Advisory Committee and an increase in events sponsored by The U. I’m divided when it comes to these initiatives. I fully support the creation of an Activities Advisory Committee. I think it’s a great idea and definitely a positive step when it comes to determining how to plan events for such a diverse student body. It would ensure the events that are planned appeal to the largest group of students possible. Having representation from every year would help to achieve this goal.
What worries me is the typically apathetic attitude towards Union events. Increasing the number of events is not going to bring in more students if they are not attending the events already being put on. It seems like the more you try to do, the less interested students seem to become. Two years ago, when Amanda Milne held the position of VP Activities and Events, SuperSubs were her thing; and there were many of them. These were expensive and poorly attended; and according to an archived issue of the Xaverian Weekly, published March 23, 2006, Milne ran a $33,000 deficit in the 2005/2006 year. Events are the most visible evidence of our union dues at work and to see my money spent on events with poor turn-out is disappointing. Perhaps utilizing the proposed committee to review current events for improvement or revamping those that are poorly attended would be a better idea than just simply adding more events.
Environment
I’m glad to see a commitment to maintaining the Environment Office and improving publicity of the department. This is really all the department needs. Lise Richard, the current Environment Officer, has been doing a phenomenal job of increasing the profile of environmental concerns on campus and forcing administration to acknowledge these legitimate concerns. Perhaps actively recruiting more student involvement in this initiative is a worthwhile option to consider.
Lobbying
I’m kind of confused as to why this is included in the platform. These roles are already included in the job description of President and Vice-President, and are a big part of the job at that. While important to know that MacGillivray and Clarke intend to honour this part of their job, and I fully support our membership in CASA and ANSSA in particular, it’s something I feel that goes without saying. If they didn’t fulfill this aspect, then they wouldn’t be doing their jobs. It just strikes me as out of place to include this as a platform issue because by including it, MacGillivray and Clarke are essentially saying that lobbying on behalf of students has been a problem in the past and past presidents and vice-presidents have not been fulfilling this role adequately. It would need more evidence of how they would do this part of their job better than others who have gone before for it to qualify as a legitimate campaign platform. You can’t just copy out your job descriptions and run an election campaign on it, calling them ideas.
Accountability and Availability
This last portion is the main focus of the MacGillivray-Clarke campaign, according to campaign posters, website slogans and the candidate’s themselves. It’s also the portion that I have the most concern with. MacGillivray is the Off-Campus Councilor. I live off-campus, which means Matt is my councilor. If I have concerns about living off-campus, theoretically, I would bring these concerns to Matt and he would present them to council. Matt has never once identified himself to me as the Off-Campus Councilor, and up until I started blogging, I didn’t know that Matt was my councilor. I find this incredibly problematic. A big portion of the MacGillivray-Clarke campaigns deals with keeping Union executives, sub-executives, councilors and other staff accountable for their work. If MacGillivray is unable to promote himself as a councilor, I’m not convinced he’ll be able to do it as Union President. Yes, students will know who he is because of the public nature of the job, but that doesn’t mean he’ll represent students the way the President should. His track record is not exactly favourable. While making council minutes readily available, posting regular executive updates, and publishing a staff directory are all noble efforts, it doesn’t change the fact that MacGillivray has not approached his off-campus constituents all year to find out what he can do to improve their living experiences while at X. You can’t just sit back with an open office door and let students come to you; a big part of being in public office is actively seeking out the problems that need addressing.
The second half of this initiative deals with availability. Currently, I don’t see this year’s union as being unavailable. They hold office hours, they answer emails, are easily approachable and are more than willing to help out students and answer questions. They understand that the purpose of their job is to work for students. I don’t see availability as an issue, and it’s especially not a big enough issue to base the bulk of your campaign on. I understand that MacGillivray and Clarke want to open the union up to more student involvement and participation, but their ideas don’t seem to go farther than letting students know who they are. I need some proactive ideas – engage that student who could care less about the union, inspire that student who thinks union fees are a waste of money and seek out that student who is too shy to come find you. These are ways in which I would like to see my union working for me.
Overall, this platform is lacking really innovative ideas and often just mirrors the campaigns of years past, calling for the same reforms. Either these reforms haven’t been fixed (which I don’t believe to be true as the Union has drastically improved over the last few years) or MacGillivray and Clarke aren’t as in tune with the Union as they would like voters to believe. I need to see some guts and some brawn; all I’m seeing is recycled ideas with limited enthusiasm and I’m not confident MacGillivray and Clarke have given this campaign the research that StFX students deserve.
- Danielle
*The views expressed in this post are entirely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of StFX's Students' Union.
- all platform descriptions can be found at http://macgillivrayandclarke.googlepages.com/platform
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2 comments:
I agree, the ideas are old and stale. Some are unfeasable. If you would like a two-steps back year vote for MacGillivray and Clarke.
Accountability and Availability:
I’ll address this first as it’s the area where we seem to be getting the most criticism.
First of, I’m sorry if I haven’t approached you personally as a councilor the way you wish me to. What you need to understand is that the Off-Campus constituency is a rather large one, large enough in fact that it takes three councilors to represent it (Sandy MacIntosh and Erica Foster are the others, I hope you have at least been able to deal with your concerns through one of them). The suggestion that I have not approached any of my constituents to hear their concerns is unfounded. I’ve lived Off-Campus all my years here and have heard Off-Campus concerns all those years and certainly didn’t stop when I became a councilor. The vast majority of the people I know live Off-Campus and I have no trouble making them aware that I am a councilor (In all fairness as well, I wasn’t aware you lived off-campus when I met you, if you actually have any concerns my email is x2005elh@stfx.ca)
The fact that you didn’t know I was your off-campus councilor and that you probably didn’t know there was more then one off-campus councilor (I’m guessing that you didn’t since you used the phrase “Matt has never once identified himself to me as the Off-Campus Councilor”) is an unfortunate problem with the union. The majority of students don’t know who their elected representatives are. To heap such a burden on the councilors alone is unfair, they need help being promoted from the union as a whole. This is exactly the sort of thing we are trying to change by having a staff directory with position, picture, contact info, what they might be able to help you with. As well as having the “meet your union” events we are proposing.
For the availability half of this, you are unfortunately looking at this from the perspective of someone who is at least somewhat involved with the union. You see them as being there in their office when they are supposed to be and willing to help you as them being available…which it is…to a certain group of students.
I’ll share a couple of stories with you….
This year I was going to the SUB to study with a friend of mine, and 4th study lounge was pretty crowded so I suggested we go over to where the offices are and study there. Her response was, “am I allowed over there? Its just for union people isn’t is?”. It blew my mind, the idea that she somehow thought that over there was off limits, or only for certain people in the union. I’ve run into this numerous times and I realize it may be hard to understand for people that are closely associated with the union, but the average student doesn’t find their union all that inviting.
Another story…
We did visits to residences through council this year, just to go around and hear students concerns and see what they thought of the union. You know what we got a lot of? Closed doors and people completely uninterested in talking with us. Now this wasn’t everyone, we did get some useful info from this, but a good chunk of the response was “leave me alone”.
Both these experiences taught me two things, many students are unaware that the union is there for them (they think it’s an exclusive thing, off limits to the average student) and that many students are unaware that their union (President/vp, executive, councilors, etc) has the ability to try and address your concerns.
This is what we are committed to changing, by creating the union directory and having a “meet your union event” early on in the year, so people feel welcome to 4th floor SUB and don’t see it as “off limits”. These are just our suggestions to start with as well, we’re committed to this idea as a whole, if people have other suggestion on how to do this even better I hope they will bring them to us and we hope we can work with the executive and council to find even better ways of promoting this idea.
*Just as a side note I am loving the irony here that me getting heat for trying to bring attention to council has probably brought more attention to council then its gotten in a long time, hahaha.
Activities:
We’re glad to hear positive response to our activities advisory committee, it’s definitely a step in the right direction to making sure student union events are appealing to all students.
As far as the suggestion that we are pushing for more events, this is actually untrue. Our focus is on working to continue improving on the existing events (maybe adding a few new twists to them), by looking at what has been successful and what needs work from previous years. The confusion may have arisen from the fact that we wish to have more wet/dry events, by which we mean, making our existing events more open to students who don’t wish to or are not legal to drink.
As far as your union dues are related to events, there is a bit of a misconception here. The events that take place through the union are self sustaining from sponsors and the profits from the events themselves, your dues don’t actually pay for them. One idea that has arisen from our talks with the current VP Finance is to actually make the budget for activities and events separate from the rest of the student union budget so that they would have their sponsor money and run more independently from there (Which is definitely an idea worth considering, it would clear up some of the budgetary confusion and misconceptions in this area).
The Environment:
Lise is awesome! Ya, that’s all we can say, and actively recruiting more student involvement in the department is definitely a great idea, it could be one of the volunteer options through the X factor volunteering program we are proposing in fact.
Lobbying:
Yes, these are included in the job description of the president and vice-president but as we saw in the debate on Tuesday night, not everyone feels that this area is as important as it truly is. We included it simply to stress the fact that we do think our participation in ANSSA and CASA are essential and that we are committed to continue working with these groups to bring STFX students’ concerns to the federal and provincial governments.
To your criticism that, “Overall, this platform is lacking really innovative ideas and often just mirrors the campaigns of years past, calling for the same reforms”. It appears that you have completely forgotten about the first two parts of the platform, you said yourself about the second part, “I was impressed to see a couple of really wise, unique ideas in this portion of the MacGillivray-Clarke platform; ideas that, if played right, will benefit The U immensely”. As far as calling for the same old reforms, we don’t see an issue with that at all if the reforms haven’t been put in place yet.
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