The Strand sat down with Thomas Siddall, Board of Regents Candidate in the 2018 VUSAC spring elections.
The Strand: Could you give me a brief overview of your platform?
Thomas Siddall: I’m trying to go for more transparency because most people don’t even know who the members of their Board of Regents are because they don’t hold office hours.
I’m going for fiscal responsibility because I know that gets a lot of flak for the conservative movement and I hate to use the term because I’m like a liberal, more liberal than I should be.
And then the third point would be advocacy. I really have respect for people who can be out there and just fighting for their presence, so marginalized communities. I want to advocate for those rights especially in the Senate. So, we have the Ryerson stream in VicOne, that’s beyond ridiculous; as you know, Edgar [sic] Ryerson basically came up with the whole residential school system. To this day we can still feel the effects of that marginalization within our social and justice systems, which equally contribute to the current cases in terms of dramatic differences between white living standards, verses native-indigenous people standards, even worse than in Ontario and in Ontario. University campuses are the breeding grounds for changes, socially, traditionally, and I’m quoting VUSAC’s current president Zahava at Orientation when she said that VUSAC and student organizations need to be fueling that, and I want to take that to the highest administrations of Vic and if not that, the whole University of Toronto as itself.
Looking over your platform, you have very strong opinions on the UPass vote. Could you go into that a bit and why you have those views and how you are going to accomplish what you want to about that?
So, I have my personal opinions and opinions that I believe are not so personal but benefit the community. Now my personal opinion would be that I would vote no to the UPass [proposal] as it stands, and I recognize the history that this may be the last chance that if we vote it down, the TTC would not renegotiate with the Universities and Colleges again for a transit pass. While I’m a commuter coming from Mississauga, it doesn’t benefit me because I take Go-Transit. It would cost me an at least extra 200 dollars a year, but at the same time while I personally would vote no, I do hope it does pass because it is beneficial to people who do buy metro passes or who don’t live exactly within walking distance of the university. I really do hope it passes, and the reason is it benefits them and what I would do in my position if I’m elected to Board of Regents is that I think with Vic with the money that we do have here, the amount of services we can provide, we can do so much more such as internalize the cost of the UPass for students who are international students and already pay exponentially higher tuition fees than we do or people who are commuters but coming from Mississauga, Brampton, or Pickering even. While I am vocally against the UPass, if it does pass, I still think that it is a good thing, so both outcomes are good for me.
You’ve mentioned that the Vic community is a big part of your platform, what do you want to do to change up the Vic community as a whole?
It’s not like I would change the community or make different people different things, I don’t have that power—I’m sorry that was a joke, that was a bit sadistic. Under the UofT act, we are a federated University, and while it does help make communities smaller, and allows for a more intimate feel in the college system, what I’m talking about changes in the Vic community is I want to see Vic even more active within the wider UofT community. I’ve talked to certain UTSU members about this and I think that whole Vic has a very proactive voice, there are changes I want to see the whole UofT community adopt. What I mean by changes is I want to see changes with the way that leadership at Vic works, especially student leadership works. And how people in positions can work with other colleges so that we can make better connections and kind of have similar ideas beyond the same platform so that we can pursue changes.
I’m coming from this because the UTSU is very toxic. In fact, I may be a first year but I’ve done research into past elections including the current election. What you’ve seen in the last election is there were pushes to see changes within the UTSU and that just hasn’t happened. Because of that disenfranchisement, we now have this one slate running and a number of uncontested positions, and a number of director positions are uncontested and then the year before that there was a number of lawsuits being brought against the UTSU. The same pattern has followed this year. The governing council is slow and has not enough student representation to bring forward academic needs of students. Let’s put it this way, if the Ontario Human Rights Commission has to get involved with university politics, that’s when you know the governing council is not acting in the best interest of students. And then, the third thing is the St. George roundtable. If you go on their website, you can see their last update was 2015 and it’s supposed to be all of the heads of organizations that are supposed to meet, and no one really hears about it and so what I want to do is get proactive people to work together. I would go further into detail with this but I can’t exactly share at this moment right now, as it is a bit of a project that is going on that is not to be shared.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
