“Before that, we existed in this space where, because there aren’t any laws for groups like us, nobody really told us that we needed a permit. Last April was when we were told that we would be a liability if we don’t apply for this permit,” she said.

SSMU Vice President, Clubs and Services Anushay Khan said that temporarily closing the kitchen is necessary until the collective acquires a new permit.

“MK could be fined up to $2,000 per day,” Khan said, adding that “SSMU could cover the costs for the fine – but if we were fined, then reapplying for a permit would be even harder.”

“We were recently informed that we had to do [the certification] every single year,” said Khan, citing an inspector’s visit from February 2010, when it was established that ten per cent of the group would have to undergo hygiene and food and safety training.

“At that point, that was just one person, but MK’s membership has increased, which means that more people need to be trained, said Khan.

Khan explained that the permit expired January 21, and claims that she emailed MK about renewal in December, and followed up with a second reminder email upon the reopening of school in January.

“There was no progress on the issue because of exams and because it was the beginning of the semester, so it’s understandable, and then they had about two weeks between then and [January] 21 to get a new permit, but that didn’t happen,” she said.
Collective members, however, claim that they never received the first email.

“SSMU says that they sent us an email about it on the 12th of December,” said MK member Alex Briggs. “But we never received that one – we’ve gone through the backlogs and that’s not there. So we found out about it as soon as we got back to school. On that day there was one spot left for the February certification test, but we’re a collective…we had to talk about it, and then that one was gone. And now the next one is in March.”

Representatives from MK also objected to the lack of notice they received about having to close operations.

“The first time that [SSMU] came to the kitchen to notify us was yesterday [January 25],” said Zheng. “There was a lot of miscommunication, but also the logistics of organizing as a collective – getting everybody trained and finding a way to pay for it – would have taken a really long time. So we really needed that two-month buffer, but we just didn’t know in time.”

Khan has said that MK would need to cover any training costs.

In the meantime, the collective is looking for ways to keep operating. One potential solution is to make the Midnight Kitchen a club operating in the same way as the SSMU Mini Courses.

“People will have to sign a waiver and their signature will make them a part of the Midnight Kitchen Club,” Briggs explained. “So that way we won’t be serving food to anyone external, we’ll be making it for ourselves. We’ll need to check on the legality of that, but the Mini Courses don’t have a permit, and they cook food in the kitchen for themselves. If that doesn’t work, our second loophole is that we’re going to try to get everyone involved in some part of the process – cooking  cleaning, setting up, or something.”

However, Khan pointed out that since most of the Midnight Kitchen’s income is from student fees, that may not be an option.

“We don’t give clubs fees – fees are for student services,” she said. “So there is a bit of a logistical problem with that, but…I met with MK twice today, we are going to see what we can to, and I will try my best to get it going as soon as possible.”

Organic Campus, a student service that operates a weekly local organic food stand, was also closed indefinitely on Wednesday. Organic Campus acquired all the necessary certification, with ten per cent of their membership undergoing hygiene and food and safety training, but the paperwork was not processed in time for them to get certified. While they will likely get re-certified before MK, they will also be closed for the foreseeable future.

— With files from Rana Encol

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“HireRight performed a background report for a prospective employer of mine…and on the report were certain basic facts about me that matched those of a serious convict,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“I’ve never been in jail, I’ve never been arrested, but on that basis, my job offer was rescinded before I was supposed to start working. After weeks of contacting HireRight, the information was finally corrected and I got the job. I was lucky not to be desperate at that time, and everything worked out, but if it were someone who really needed the job…a few weeks could be whether or not they could feed their family.”

In this case, HireRight’s matching via name and birth date meant that a job applicant was matched with wrong information. Several recent lawsuits challenging HireRight’s policies have arisen from within the American trucking industry.

Trucking companies use a HireRight report called Drive-a-Check (DAC) to make hiring decisions. The companies themselves submit reports to DAC on employees and former employees that later resurface in background checks on the employees. The company is required by law to provide a copy of the background check to the job applicant.

In one lawsuit, it is alleged that the company regularly failed to provide the report to the applicant until after a decision had been made based on the report’s contents. There have also been allegations that trucking companies submit false reports to the DACs in order to control and blackball the careers of certain drivers.

Allen Smith, of trucker’s association The Truth About Trucking, first became aware of the issue when false information was submitted to his own DAC and added to the report without question or investigation.

“I was on a trucking company lease program, and I wasn’t getting the miles, so I was getting starved out. So I returned the truck, but before I did, I made $3,600 worth of repairs to the truck. And they ended up putting on my DAC that I turned the truck in in bad need of repairs. That’s when the light went off that this thing was really a problem,” said Smith.

Another trucker, Bahir Smith, filed a suit in 2010 claiming that HireRight is in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires that the company take reasonable measures to ensure that its information is accurate and notify the applicant as they are being investigated.

In February 2006, Smith was arrested and pleaded guilty to defiant trespass and public drunkenness. In 2009, he applied for a trucking job; when he received the report that had been provided to his prospective employer, it was nine pages long and listed the single February 2006 incident three separate times, making his criminal record history seem much more serious than it actually was. Because the report was not forwarded to him at the same time that it was given to his potential employers, by the time he received the report it had already been used to make a hiring decision.

For the next job he applied for, later in 2009, the report was 11 pages long and listed the incident four times. After a third 2009 job application, he received a report listing his convictions four times, and he initiated a class-action lawsuit.

Allen Smith has created an online petition demanding that “the U.S. Government enact legislation that will protect truck drivers” from falsified DAC reports.

Currently his petition has almost 2,000 signatures, many from drivers who claim that the companies they worked for submitted false information to their reports, which HireRight failed to confirm before adding the damaging remarks to a driver’s report.

“When the DAC services were first formed, it was a good thing. It was to provide the trucking companies with information about employees…but what it has become is a retaliation tool against drivers,” said Smith.

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In Di Grappa’s last few days at Concordia, he received a mise en demeure – a notice of a potential legal challenge – from Concordia student Laura Beach and the organization she co-founded, TAPThirst. Beach, also Sustainable Ambassadors Coordinator for Sustainable McGill, accused Di Grappa of breach of trust over the lack of student consultation on the renewal of Concordia’s beverage contract with PepsiCo. Beach claims that the administration promised, and failed, to consult with students prior to signing the contract.

Di Grappa, however, took issue with the idea that the administration had a responsibility to consult with Beach and TAPThirst.

“I can tell you that we always used to consult with the students, we would meet with the CSU [Concordia Student Union],” said Di Grappa in an interview with The Daily.

“To me, one of the issues here is, who is the authorized representative here for the students on this issue? It was not clear to us that Miss Beach was that. And I don’t think it was clear to the CSU that Miss Beach was that,” Di Grappa continued.

Beach claims that Johanne De Cubellis, Associate Director of Hospitality Concordia, promised Beach and her fellow Sustainable Concordia member Faisal Shennib that they would be involved in the negotiations between the administration and a representative from PepsiCo prior to any decisions on a beverage contract. Beach also delivered a mise en demeure to De Cubellis.

Concordia environmentalists have also raised objections to the PepsiCo contract itself, which, in the eyes of groups such as TAPThirst, represents a move away from the years-long fight for a bottled water-free campus. Di Grappa, however, said that he does not see a contract with PepsiCo and a bottled water-free campus as mutually exclusive.

“The issue of a beverage contract…is so much larger than just the issue of bottled water,” he said. “Because it involves whatever commission fee the university receives, and it involves the service on campus, it involves marketing opportunities, sponsorship opportunities, it involves summer jobs for students, it involves scholarships, it involves all the other beverages other than bottled water…. So in my mind, it was never a discussion of, say, until we resolve this issue on bottled water we can’t go forward on Pepsi. … But out of respect for the discussions that were going on, we said… ‘If the university ever decides that it wants to address the issue of bottled water in a particular way, it still has the option to do so.’ So frankly, I don’t understand what all the criticism is about.”

According to Chris Mota, director of media relations at Concordia, there has been no legal action subsequent to the *mise en demeure*.

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Emily Essert, PhD 5 in English, who informed Munroe-Blum of the issue, expressed her offense at the offer of study space for rent. “What I have found in my time here as a graduate student – which is vastly different from what I had expected arriving – is that we are a department of have and have-nots,” she said. She explained that for graduate students, “one of the more recent options has been paid study space, offered in Ferrier. Which, frankly, just isn’t appropriate.”

Munroe-Blum was unaware that an offer of study space for rent was made to Arts graduate students in a November 8 email from Juliet Johnson, the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for the Faculty of Arts. Graduate students are given the opportunity to apply for the spaces, which will cost $200 for January to August 2011.

Johnson, however, said that the offer is an attempt to give Arts graduate students the study space which, as Essert pointed out, isn’t always readily available.

“The controversy is actually a little bit surprising to me, because I made this decision specifically out of equity concerns,” said Johnson. “There are only twelve spaces, and there are over 800 graduate students in the Faculty of Arts. … There’s no space in Arts that is actually accessible to any needy graduate student. So I wanted to make sure that these spaces would be allocated on the basis of equity. So what I want in these spaces [are] people who are really going to use them every day – graduate students who really need the space.”

The fee, said Johnson, is an attempt to ensure that the study space won’t be wasted, as well as to raise money for Arts graduate student travel awards. Johnson is also hoping that, for the majority of the rentals, the student will not pay the fee.

“There’s an option for the students to do it, because I wanted that option to be there, but the idea really is that the department or supervisor [pays the fee]. And that’s simply because if the space is free, then it’s not necessarily going to go to the people who really care about it. … This tiny fee is, I think, going to be enough to keep people from taking spaces who really only want to use it a couple hours a week.”

Essert, however, insists that a study space paid for by the department is little better than a space paid for by a student. “I still think that’s inappropriate,” she said, “because our department doesn’t have money for that either. The departments are also constantly saying, ‘We don’t have money for this, we don’t have money for that,’ so I don’t know where they would suddenly find extra money to pay for study space.”

“All grad students deserve a place to work,” Essert said. “It’s not a privilege, it’s a necessity. You have got to have a place to store your books and you’ve got to have a quiet place to work in. That’s not some kind of special frill that people can pay for, it’s a necessity. The idea of charging for a necessity like that just struck me as absurd.”

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The SACOMSS fee renewal, which takes place every three years, had the highest percentage of student support, with 79.5 per cent of voters choosing to renew the $0.75 fee.

The creation of a SSMU Charity Committee, which passed with 75.8 per cent of the vote, was initially proposed by Max Luke, a student who sits on a Senate subcommittee on the environment.

“It was an idea of mine in late August,” said Luke. “Initially I had the idea to create a charity week or festival on campus that includes all faculties and departments and that’s the core thing: it’s about community building. … It started as an idea to raise money strictly for international aid, but as I spoke to more and more departments and faculties in September and October, I realized that it’s best to open it up, because there are so many views on campus.”

The concept has expanded to include both international and local aid, which will be supported by two different initiatives: the Charity Fund and Charity Week. The Fund will be directed mostly at international aid, and the Week aimed at work in Montreal.

“For the the Charity Festival, I’ve also formed a partnership with a Masters’ student in the school of Social Work, who is doing his thesis on credible financial flows within the United Way Montreal. So they’re affiliated with 300-some local organizations. That’s going to be a big part of the charity festival,” explained Luke.

The fee for the Charity Committee is $0.50 per semester and is opt-outable, although Luke said that in the original concept it was not: “It started out as a non-opt-outable fee, and then through consultation with various people it devolved into an opt-outable fee.”

Although the plebiscite question is not binding, the results showed support for a separate SSMU councillor for Arts and Science students, a faculty whose numbers are currently under the 2,000-minimum for a faculty to be represented at SSMU Council.

Clubs and Services Representative Maggie Knight, one of the councillors who submitted the question to Council, said that the process of consultation taking place will now lead to another referendum question.

Knight told The Daily, “We’re in the process of consulting with all the stakeholders very thoroughly…to make sure that if we take this to a referendum in the winter – which would be what we would have to do in order to amend the constitution to include a seat for Arts and Science students – that we would have a very strong plan, that everyone would have a good degree of certainty about what it would look like.”

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The mise en demeure is the latest in a series of student reactions to the renewal of Concordia’s exclusive beverage contract with Pepsico last Friday. The university’s current contract expires on December 10. Several student groups, including Sustainable Concordia and TAPThirst (Tap Drinkers Against Privatization), which Beach founded, opposed the renewal of the contract. They pointed out that renewing the exclusive contract would contradict the advice of Concordia’s own environmental advisory committee.

The discovery by Concordia students that a new contract was being signed on October 29 prompted a rally and sit-in to oppose both the contract and the secrecy with which it was negotiated. Beach was among the speakers at the rally, which took place on October 27 in Norman Bethune Square at Guy and Maisonneuve.

The mise en demeure, however, does not address the contract itself, but rather the lack of student consultation about the renewal of the contract. Beach claims that the university acted in bad faith by signing the contract while claiming that negotiations were not taking place.

Beach, also the Sustainable Ambassadors Coordinator for Sustainable Concordia, wrote in an email to The Daily, “The members of admin (Marc Gauthier and Johanne De Cubellis) made a verbal agreement with myself and Faisal Shennib that no negotiations/decisions regarding the beverage contract would be made prior to a meeting with myself, Faisal, Johanne, Marc and a representative from Pepsico. This verbal agreement was made in a meeting on May 12.”

“This promise was reiterated in an email from Johanne De Cubellis a month later,” she continued. “In September I received another email from Johanne, stating that there had been ‘no movement on the Pepsi file’ – however, by all administrative accounts an agreement in principle had already been signed with Pepsi at that time.”

The administrators to whom the mise en demeure was given are Marc Gauthier (Executive Director, Finance and Business Operations) and Johanne De Cubellis (Associate Director, Hospitality Concordia), with whom Beach claims to have made an agreement, as well as Michael Di Grappa.

For Di Grappa, the mise en demeure came during his last days as an administrator at Concordia. Di Grappa, who served as Vice-President (Services) at Concordia, is starting as McGill’s Vice-Principal (Administration and Finances) on November 15. He could not be reached for comment.

The mise en demeure is not a notification of a lawsuit, but instead the notification of the potential for one. “It pre-empts the legal procedure. It requires someone to address the situation or to admit wrongdoing,” explained Pawel Porowski, External Communications Officer at Sustainable Concordia.

Thus far, however, none of the Concordia administrators have moved away from their position on the contract, maintaining that the university is not guilty of breach of trust. Chris Mota, the university’s Director of Communications, told Concordia’s The Link that, “the university is confident that we handled everything according to the best practices.”

“The admin have responded by denying having acted in bad faith, denying having ever made a verbal agreement, despite the email evidence I have provided,” Beach responded. She has not yet decided whether she will go ahead with legal action.

“I would be happy with a formal apology from the administration, a formal commitment to the creation of an institutionalized framework for student consultation on future contract negotiations, and a formal commitment to the creation of an enforceable ethical purchasing policy.”

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“This [current] contract is ending,” explained rally organizer Cameron Stiff, “and there’s another contract on the desk of the VP Services to be signed. And we’re saying, ‘Don’t do this.’”

Roughly forty students staged a sit-in outside the office of food service contractor Hospitality Concordia as the protest wore on, after attempting to occupy the negotiation meetings and being locked out by Concordia security guards.

The student anger stems in part from the lack of consultation between the administration and students on the deal, which will affect all beverages sold in vending machines and cafeterias on campus. Marc Gauthier, Executive Director of Finance and Business Operations at Concordia, met with students from campus environmental groups over the summer to discuss the beverage contract.

According to Concordia student Alex Matak – who was not at the meeting but part of TAPThirst, members of which were in attendance – Gauthier misled students. “He said there would be no negotiations until student representatives had met with Pepsi,” she said, calling his claim “an outright lie.” TAPThirst is a campus group that advocates against privatization. There have been no meetings between student representatives and Pepsico to date.

According to students, the deal also ignores the recommendations of Concordia’s own environmental advisory committee. “How can you plan to be a leader in sustainability if you put money above all other objectives?” said Laura Beach, a rally organizer who spoke at the protest. “And second, what is the use of an environmental advisory committee if you don’t listen to their advice?”

The committee had four primary recommendations: first, that any contract make Concordia bottled water-free; second, that the contract be open to competitive bidders; third, that negotiations be transparent and democratic and include student input; and fourth, that the contract not be exclusive.

Stiff explained that exclusive contracts with large companies are harmful not only to the student body, but also to local food services. “We want to give organic companies and local companies the option of selling their products here on campus,” she said. “And the way the contract is right now, they can’t do that.”

A handful of members from the fledgling Mobilization McGill, which has been active around the closing of the Architecture Café, attended the rally. Much like some of the student activism taking place at McGill, Concordia students are looking to confront the issue of food on campus on more than one level.

“This contract, this thing that they’re doing on Friday, is the tip of an iceberg,” said Matak. “It’s not like this is the only exclusivity contract that Concordia has. It’s probably not the only one they’re ever going to have. This year we’ve signed at least two exclusive contracts with ad companies at Concordia. We have an exclusive contract with Chartwell’s over all of our food. Tuition is being increased and more and more we’re seeing corporations granted exclusive rights over our space, our lives and our money.”

Dana Holtby, a student activist at McGill and a member of TAPThirst, who attended the protest, said Concordia’s food services policy has a lot in common with McGill’s. “We see the same kind of processes…especially with a lack of student consultation,” she said.

Holtby also accused administrations at both schools of behaving as if “the school’s bottom line comes before student needs.”

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The main issue up for discussion was the upcoming Quebec tuition defreeze, which will take place in 2012. All four groups expressed strong opposition to raising Quebec tuititon, and drew a connection between education and freedom. “Most countries know that education is the basis of their social contract and their society,” said Robert Sonin, the representative from FEM. “The more education you have, the better the country. The more education you have, the lower your crime rates. The better education you have, the higher your incomes. So to put a block in the way of that impedes people’s freedoms.”

Louis-Philippe Savoie, the president of FEUQ, agreed. “Universities are a very smart public investment . … it would be shooting ourselves in the foot, as a society, to reduce access to universities.”

Although all groups were in agreement over key points regarding tuition increases, the discussion also centred around the groups’ differences, and whether Quebec’s student movement is, or even ought to be, united. “If there is a unity to be built, it has to be built on a common basis which has to be either material, ideological, or both,” said ASSÉ representative Martin Robert. “What we can see right now is that that basis is not quite there.”

The issue of a unified student activist movement is particularly relevant for McGill students, as SSMU is affiliated with QSR and PGSS is a member of FEUQ. However, Sonin is confident that, with regards to tuition at least, the groups will be working together in the future. “In times when there isn’t such a big issue, student associations should disagree…when we have to fight a battle like this, it’s time to put those things aside.”

The groups are also confident of the support of the student body in Quebec. QSR vice-secretary general Joël Pedneault drew a parallel between the support he expects for the fight against tuition increases and the support shown recently at McGill for the Architecture Café.

“To me, that shows that people do care about issues related to universities and university settings. It’s just a question of informing people enough that they can link different issues together,” he said.

Moderator Erik Chevrier linked the issues of university funding in Quebec to other situations in Canada. “If we look at the financing of two major events that have happened – the G20 and the Olympics – had close to three billion dollars of security costs,” he said. “So when you talk about not being able to fund public services, maybe we’re just putting it in the wrong place.”

All of the panelists were called upon to explain their organizations’ policy proposals for funding universies without raising tuition; the solutions ranged from philanthropy to payroll taxes but ultimately, said Sonin, the question is one of priorities.

“The question here is not only one of where the money is going to come from. We have the money. Look around you. We are living in a very rich country, and we have the money to fund what we want to fund. So the question is, are you going to fund…things that contribute to an individualization of people…or are you going to fund things that we can do together?”

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