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Day Sixteen — My only friend, the end

Corey Stanford/Gazette

Oh, hey — it’s the last day of University Students’ Council Elections 2011. Whattayaknow?

I don’t know if this culminating day came quickly or slowly, to be honest. It doesn’t feels like it’s been more than half a month. Yet I also feel like this whole USC elections process has been akin to suffocating in quicksand.

So really, who knows. The good news is that it’s over and at 9:00 p.m. this evening we’ll know who the next USC president is and be able to return to our regular lives of never talking to each other.

Let’s just look forward to that.

Obviously, you should probably vote if you haven’t done so already. But more importantly than anything — get informed, damnit. Just remember yesterday’s quote of the day.

Anyway, here’s some stuff.

To everyone who’s been along for the ride — It’s been a slice.

Thanks for reading.

This is as bad as that professional hockey team in Ottawa

We’ve kind of beaten the Senator-At-Large thing to death now with yesterday’s blog and today’s story on it in the hard-copy, tree-killing version of our product.

But it’s easily the biggest issue of this voting period so far. All of the candidates ran under the assumption students would have seven votes. As someone eloquently put it to me on Monday, the senatorial candidates “didn’t just have the rug pulled out from under them — they were pushed off the cliff.”

I don’t really like the idea of running as a slate, which a number of the candidates did. I mean, you should be running for yourself, not using your Facebook clout to help out your friends. It’s entirely unfair to someone from outside the USC who wants to run for Senator-At-Large and can’t benefit from the existing relationships between candidates. But they’re just playing the game. Don’t hate the player, and so on.

So we’ll see how this affects things. If anything it will be interesting to see how the votes shake out between Michael Ciniello, Adam Fearnall and Alysha Li who ran a “joint campaign.” Is the one who gets the most votes the best candidate? Or maybe just the one who pulled the most weight during their joint campaign? Or the one with the best Facebook page?

Here’s a hint: it’s likely the third option.

I spoke to current senator-at-large Pat Searle at length about this yesterday. He was clearly upset not only that this decision came down so ridiculously late but also that senators were getting the short end of the stick once again.

Currently, senatorial and Board of Governors candidates are not reimbursed by the USC for their campaigns like other candidates are. That means that anyone running to be a part of one of the two highest governing bodies of the university are doing it completely out of their own pocket, while faculty councilors who may not even show up to USC meetings are reimbursed for their expenses.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me now and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me two years ago when I interviewed former USC VP-University Affairs Jacqueline Cole for this article. Back then she thought the policy should change:

“I think that [the USC] hasn’t figured out what we want our relationship to be with students who are involved with the Senate and BOG,” Cole said.

“The USC plays a key role in advocating for students to get involved in university governance and if we want to take ourselves seriously I think that we need to support students who want to get involved.”

Two years later, nothing has changed and Searle is echoing Cole’s statements on his Fuss on the Bus blog and to me yesterday when he had this to say about it:

“I think something needs to change because if this is how senators are being treated I don’t think people will keep on running. It’s certainly already eliminating students who can’t afford to run. The USC will give you a loan but you have to pay back the loan at some point. There isn’t an option where you can just run a free campaign. Unless you’re really popular and you have a Facebook group that everyone wants to be a part of, you’re out of luck.”

It would be a major win if the USC could lobby someone to change this and a major fail if they simply continue talking to the media about it and never acting on it.

Listen, you can complain to me all day about it, but I can only publicize your thoughts. I can’t actually make anything happen. But you can, elected USC representatives. At least try.

Another interesting tidbit from my conversation with Searle yesterday — he said now that students only get a vote a piece for Senator-At-Large he wouldn’t be surprised if the last place finisher in the race had less than 10 votes. We’ll have to wait until tonight to see if he’s right, but a result like that has got to sting.

Some biting criticism

So since we’re getting all worked up here, let’s talk about the Spoke and the Wave shall we?

I’m a big fan of the quality food sold at both establishment, and while I may gripe at the prices, I’ll always be going back because it’s honestly the best food available in the UCC where I work for about 14 hours every day.

But here’s a question — when did USC president become synonymous with restaurant proprietor?

It seems that every election season the candidates bring forward their fantastic ideas about how to fix The Spoke and The Wave. Meals for $3, Spoke to go, moving Rick McGhie nights back upstairs, turning The Spoke into a lounge then back into a bar then back into a lounge and then morphing the two into a bounge. The list goes on so long that it hurts my soul.

At the media forum on Friday, USC VP-Finance Ely Rygier was wise enough to raise the fact that this year the Spoke and the Wave are $10,000 in the black after suffering through an absolutely awful period financially the last two years.

I never wish to be in the shoes of the presidential candidates when they’re sitting up on that stage being grilled by USCers and media alike. It’s cruel and unusual punishment. But this was the one instance where I wish I was, so that I could answer Ely’s question of why the Spoke and Wave had such a massive turnaround.

Luckily I have a blog. So I can answer it here in four words — leave your managers alone.

There is a distinct difference between this year’s USC student executive and previous year’s executives and how they deal with the Spoke/Wave. And none of the candidates identified it. They leave Jeff Armour alone.

Jeff Armour, for those of you who don’t know, is the food and beverage manager for the USC, meaning he runs the show at The Spoke and Wave. If you ever see him sometime, you should shake his hand and say thanks for providing students with such excellent service.

Armour will hate that I’m naming him here because he’s that noble of a guy but it’s just too difficult to watch amateur politicians tell him how to do his job. I mean, where do you get the nerve?

His 15 years of experience in the restaurant industry tells me that Armour might know a thing or two about making a restaurant or bar successful.

Never mind that the Spoke and Wave also have Mark Leonard as head chef, the same Mark Leonard that Salari incorrectly referred to as “Jeff Armour’s boss” at Friday’s debate. A fact Andrew Forgione did not know enough about to refute him on.

Listen, we don’t expect the candidates to know everything. That would be unreasonable. But in turn, the candidates should not try to address everything as if they know everything. That’s equally as unreasonable.

It’s perfectly fine to answer a question by saying “You know what? This isn’t in my wheelhouse. I have no experience what-so-ever in that field. That’s why the USC has full-time managers with mountains of experience on these subjects. So that I don’t have to pretend I know everything.”

The best answer to Ely’s question was “Jeff Armour.” And none of the candidates said it.

Odds and Ends

• David Basu Roy has footage of a spoken word he performed at The Spoke last week. No word of a lie, I saw Basu Roy doing karaoke at The Spoke Tuesday night. Say what you will about the guy, he is a man of the people.
• Meanwhile the Andrew Forgione team checks in with a rip off of that Google search commercial that I vaguely remember from a Super Bowl a couple years back. It’s nothing earth shattering but it is well done and polished —thanks to YouTube — like most of Forgione’s campaign. It certainly can’t hurt his chances.
• The Gazette has some of the best damn photographers on this campus and we’ll be featuring some of their exemplary campaign photography later today. Keep your eyes peeled for that one
• Again, thanks to everyone who read, loved, hated, tolerated and commented on Blog the Vote. It wouldn’t have been worth it without you.

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