Issue date: 1/29/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Karen Ho UTSC students better get a bite while they can

In the midst of a recession, it seems that even student unions aren't exempt from financial disasters.

This Monday the Scarborough Campus Students' Union at the University of Toronto announced the Feb. 6 closure of the campus restaurant Bluff's due to "severe financial difficulties".

This announcement comes after executive pay hikes and allegations of financial misconduct.

In a letter e-mailed to all students, SCSU President Zuhair Syed said that with funding from the Council on Student Services and an emergency bridge loan from the SCSU both exhausted, Bluff's was no longer financially viable.

But the closure of the campus restaurant is just one part in a series of events regarding the SCSU finances in the past few months.

Last semester, Syed fired SCSU accountant Henry Climaco without consulting the rest of the board of directors or the union's standing committee on finance and services.

Soon after in late November, the student union was asked to undergo an additional third-party financial audit by the university's office of the vice-provost students.

And at their last annual general meeting, the SCSU passed a motion immediately granting its executives large increases in pay.

From then on, SCSU presidents were to receive an extra $7,000 per year, vice-presidents an extra $8,000, and chairs and vice-chairs each receiving an extra $4,000 per year. Some of these pay increases amount to more than 30 per cent the previous year's salary and bump executive pay up by $63,000.

Syed reasons that despite the recession, the pay raises were long overdue.

"We're getting paid one of the lowest salaries in all student unions," he said. "We can't even sustain ourselves. Many executives I know who have to take other jobs, even two part-time jobs, just in order to survive."

Syed emphasizes that their salaries were some of the lowest in Canada, and that students were the ones who had voted for the raises at the general meeting.

Still, there is tension inside the board on the manner in which many of these decisions are being made.

Last semester, Kenny Wang resigned from his position as chair of the union's standing committee on finance and services. The humanities director says he left after noticing a number of financial irregularities (like cheque requisitions and conflicts of interest).

Continued...

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