Two people are running for president: Aideen Reynolds and Victoria Gibbs. Reynolds (she/they) is a third-year student in gender studies and contemporary studies, while Gibbs (she/they) is a third-year international development and political science student.
The president of the KSU represents the union on the board of governors, as well as in discussion with the university and multiple levels of government. Candidates are listed by order of first name.
Aideen Reynolds
Q: What experiences equipped you for this position?
A: I was the residence representative in my first year at King’s. And then I was a board of governors representative. And then I was the external vice-president. And I’ve learned a lot about different spaces on campus. I know how to navigate life on campus. I know how to navigate as a day student. I know how to deal with difficult administration environments. And I’m also really lucky to have been educated in activism in Kjipuktuk. I make the choice to go to a lot of actions around allyship and justice. I believe that the union has a number of roles to play on campus. And I think that I have experience managing all of those roles.
Q: What do you feel is the biggest issue for students on campus and what do you plan to do to fix it?
A: I think what’s true is that every student has a different need. A different set of circumstances and needs [need] different accommodations. But I think that I can summarize my belief in the kind of, I admit vague term “access.”
I will work with my fellow executive members to prioritize, because we can’t be everywhere at once…I commit to taking into account the capacities and abilities of my executives. And I also commit to making sure that they are able to take things on.
I will work with administration who are willing to work with us. I’m willing to work with folks who are willing to hear us out.
Q: What’s one thing you’ve done to improve the lives of students at King’s?
A: I try to not assume that everything I do is just me. And my fellow executives proofread things for me all the time.
…I was really honored to be on the executive when we implemented a $15 minimum wage for student workers. That is something that students and the student union have been working for for years before I got here; before other folks got here. I think it was about five years ago that they struck a committee to look into a $15 minimum. And goals like that are really long term. And a lot of students don’t know how long it takes or that we work all the time to try to meet these goals.
Q: You’ve committed to working towards increasing student business workers’ wages to living wages in the long-term. How will you work towards this?
A: I am really excited to work with our incredible hospitality coordinator and our financial vice-president to build a plan. And I’ll say it’s pretty vague right now. I’ll admit to that. I don’t have a timeline, and I can’t make any concrete commitments other than I’m going to try really fucking hard to make it happen.
I’m not going to lie, numbers are not my strong suit. But, I have a lot of faith in this executive, in the students who go to this school. The last AGM, when the budget went out – and wasn’t perfect yet – the exec came together, and we talked through the whole budget. And we talked about everything, and we pulled out our calculators and figured it out, and made it work for folks. And that’s kind of the spirit I want to bring to leadership. I don’t want to make any big decisions, any big moves without talking to folks.
That’s a really good memory for me, we did it at the Ardmore. It was really fun. We had coffee and breakfast, and we talked about the budget. That was also an incredible day, because it was the day that we got to put it into numbers that everyone who worked for the union was getting $15. So I want to have a big meeting, I want to spend…a week of prep, and then a number of hours on one day figuring it out.
Q: Concerns have been raised about the mental health coverage in the Green Shield health plan not being enough. How will you address these concerns?
A: Every year, the exec, the president, the services and campaigns coordinator try to negotiate a better plan.
Maybe we’ll have another ad-hoc committee. Those are not decisions that I would be comfortable making on my own or just with the exec. I want to know how much folks will be able to pay for a health plan. And I want to know what they need.
One of the things that we could do just off the top of my head, is have some sort of forum about those concerns. And I think we just have to reach out to students in as many ways as possible.
We can try to stay up all night, we can write letters to our MPs and our administrators, and we can picket and we can sit in and we can do all these things. But at the end of the day, we’re not going to be able to do everything. We can’t be everywhere at once.
There are many things we can do to reach out to students and see what they need. And I’m really interested in doing literally all of them at once.
Q: Community is a pillar at King’s. How will you work to strengthen it, both within council as well as within the general student body?
A: I have it on my platform to meet with councillors more often. I also want to encourage executives to work directly with council members on the goals of the council members and also to include councillors in their work, in their goals. …And I think that for example, when I was a councillor, I had a hard time. I got a lot done, I will say, but I had a hard time because I felt kind of like a burden to the union as opposed to a part of it.
And then in terms of community, there’s some super great things we can do. I really want to put some effort into…bringing life to societies. There are societies that are not going to come back, and that’s really sad. But there’s some new people on campus with incredible ideas.
I want to make it easier. I want to have templates, I also want to update our website, because our website is very old, the pictures are out of date. I think that we can do better.
Q: This year, there’s been some disconnect between councillors and executive members. How will you work to bridge this gap?
A: I want to meet with councillors, kind of as a group in the same way that exec meet. Probably not as often.
I want to be super cognizant of the fact that councillors are not paid. They represent really important constituencies, but they are not paid. And that kind of blows. And I also want to look at, I’m not making any promises, but I want to have our financial vice-president look at honoraria for them. I know for a fact that if we do that, it won’t be a big one. It would be pretty small. But these folks put a lot of time into our union.
I probably want to meet with councillors about once a month as a group all together, and document what their goals are. And I want to have some sort of shared way to communicate directly with councillors.
Q: Can you tell me about a time when you advocated for students and why that was important to you?
A: I think I have to say that in my time as a Board of Governors rep, when the members of the board were discussing the budget, and I was able to speak out against tuition increases directly to the board, I didn’t know what I was saying going into the meeting. I had been thinking about this meeting for probably weeks when we got the budget. It’s an awful feeling. I felt sick, because I knew – well, I didn’t know exactly what I was in for, but I had an idea. I had heard stories. I knew the attitude that folks in that room can take. And I was terrified. And when I started speaking, I kind of felt an enormous calm, because I knew that I had a mandate from students to do this. I knew that I was in the right to be voting against this budget. The reason I was able to do that is because I knew that I had an obligation to the students of this school. And I think it’s a great lesson that sometimes we lose, right? And we have to be able to take care of ourselves.
Victoria Gibbs
Q: What experiences equipped you for this position?
A: Currently I hold the position of financial vice president on the union. And prior to that I was a councillor – a member at large. But beyond that, I have a lot of leadership experience. While it has been more difficult, I acknowledge with the pandemic, to gain that sort of experience in the past couple of years, I have a lot of experience from high school. So I helped organize food drives, multicultural events. I was also a manager at McDonald’s, which I know sounds a little silly, but it’s a very high-paced work environment and involves leading, often large groups of teams.
More than anything, I don’t necessarily think, in order to be a good president, you need that kind of experience. I think, especially with our campus at King’s, what’s most important is just having that connection to the community and wanting to be involved. I have auditioned and I’ve been in KTS productions in the past.
I loved being an orientation week leader because it was just such a great opportunity to interact with new students and also old students. I made acquaintances with the other orientation week leaders like people I hadn’t talked to. And that was a really fun experience. And I just want to be able to do more of that and connect with more of our community through the role as president.
Q: What do you feel is the biggest issue for students on campus and what do you plan to do to fix it?
A: Honestly, I can’t say that there is any one issue because all students are very different. And that being said, their needs and what the biggest issue is for them is different. For me, I think one of the biggest things that I have heard, kind of repeated over and over again, even more so this year than last is that when there are resources, students don’t know how to access them.
I’m planning on creating a campus resource guide. And I really want to work with administration and also the societies and collectives we have on campus and Isa and Jordan and everyone that can provide resources and also getting in contact with the Dal Student Union and contacting the administration at Dal and trying to put together this guide that’s going to fully encompass all of the resources that we have available.
Q: What’s one thing you’ve done to improve the lives of students at King’s?
A: The number one thing for me isn’t some big…show or motion or anything that’s passed in any meetings. It’s more so the students that come into the office or email us and reach out individually. …Students have come to us with concerns about not being able to afford tuition or not knowing where to access, like food, having food security issues, not knowing how to access bursaries or scholarships, needing help finding housing. And it’s like those little interactions that, at least for me, have the most impact. That one on one.
Q: Can you tell me about a time when you advocated for students and why that was important to you?
A: [On the Budget Advisory Committee], I am continuously advocating for students, and one of the main things, or the most recent things is the current residence structure.
And one of the main things I advocated for recently was with Cochran Bay, it isn’t fully renovated like the other tri-bays are, but students are paying the same price. And we’ve had students come to us saying that they don’t feel it’s fair, especially after being able to see their friends in the tri-bays dorms. And as somebody who lived in the bays, and lived on residence in first year, and has seen the renovated rooms, I understand where that’s coming from. I’ve been advocating for next year for Cochran Bay to have a lower cost for that reason. And again, those are things that are still kind of in progress. So I can’t definitively say what that looks like at the moment. But hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, I will be able to.
Q: And why is that important to you?
A: Well, I myself am in a lot of student debt. And I understand that even the smallest amount of costs can add up. And it just isn’t equitable to have students in brand new bays and students in not randomly renovated bays, paying the same amount.
I understand that it kind of represents a bigger issue of equity at King’s…It might seem like a minor issue compared to a lot of the things going on, but we can look at it and say, well, this is one place where it’s not equitable.
I think that any discrepancies on campus represent a larger issue that our campus has with making sure that everything we do is equitable for all students.
Q: Community is a pillar at King’s. How will you work to strengthen it, both within council as well as within the general student body?
A: I can’t 100 per cent guarantee that when it comes to in-person anything that I can promise it’s going to happen next year because for the safety of everybody, it would be irresponsible for me to do so. But it is my hope that we can gather on campus. I know that there’s kind of a disconnect.
I felt like our first-years and our fourth-years [used to be] well-connected, and a lot of that just came from being on campus. Campus events, society events, just these things that haven’t been able to happen at the same level and the same capacity for the past couple years. And I want to bring those things back. And for me, that starts with a bit of a smaller commitment, which is I really want to be hosting little socials in the office maybe once a month…that will have our councillors and our executive so that we can work closer together. But also so that we can invite students into the office.
Because big events are also important, I would ideally love to host something along the lines of a Winterfest, which I know is something we wanted to do this year.
But first, I really want to do these small events because I feel like it can help. You know, a big event’s so fun for everybody, but the little events can really help us connect with students one-on-one and doing them often over time can really help bring students in. And I think that’s going to really help strengthen the bond within council and also between students and council. And that’s really important for me.
Q: Concerns have been raised about the mental health coverage in the Green Shield health plan not being enough. How will you address these concerns?
A: In my opinion, anything that’s less than full coverage isn’t enough. And unfortunately, we do not have [that]…We may have universal health care in Canada, but that doesn’t cover everything that really should be considered under health care. So I will continue to advocate for that in my current position as finance VP, and also in my next position as president if I am to be elected.
And I will advocate for increased coverage because it’s very important. And another thing is that I’ve heard [are] students’ concerns about the fact that we don’t have a counsellor directly on King’s campus. And I would love to start conversations about that with administration and start advocating for…a Dal health counsellor or hire our own counsellor that can be on campus once or twice a week…that’s a place to start.
Q: This year, there’s been some disconnect between councillors and executive members. How will you work to bridge this gap?
A: This year, there’s been so much back and forth and uncertainty and rules changing. And because of that, it hasn’t always been easy to connect with the councillors and make sure that the training is done and make sure that everything is prepared and everyone feels connected. And that’s part of the reason I want to have those small socials that invite students on campus in, but also, you know, it’s for the councillors as well to connect with the exec.
But one thing I’m certainly going to be doing is I’m going to be extremely on top of councillor training. I’m hoping that I am able to kind of set those things in motion. In August, prior to actual elections and getting back on campus, I want to have dates and plans and just kind of be ready to go with it.
Q: You’ve committed to working towards increasing student business workers’ wages to living wages in the long-term. How will you work towards this?
A: To be honest, I cannot give you practical steps at this point. I want to do a thorough overview of the budget and how it currently stands. I want to do some research into living wages and try to see if there’s any examples of particularly student or small businesses that have been able to accomplish a living wage recently or in the past.
Editor’s note: this article originally listed incorrect pronouns for Gibbs. This has been updated at their request.