Macdonald campus, home to McGill’s Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Food Science, and Nutritional Sciences programs, lacks adequate food access. Marché Richelieu in Sainte-Anne-De-Bellevue closed its doors in early January, leaving students and residents without access to a grocery store within walking distance. Café Twigs, one of the two eateries on campus, shut down on February 1 due to asbestos cleaning in the Raymond, Macdonald-Stewart and Barton buildings. Nearby Provigo in Baie D’Urfé, which previously provided a weekly shuttle for students, announced that they would close for 3 months at the end of March to convert into a Maxi.

Students living on-campus without a car must choose between ordering groceries online, taking transit to a grocery store further away, or using McGill’s grocery bus service. McGill currently runs two shuttles that leave from the Laird Hall residence at 6:45 p.m. to the Walmart in Vaudreuil and depart the store at 8:30 p.m. These departure times may interfere with students’ other commitments. In an interview with the Daily, Zell Song, Vice-President External of Macdonald Campus Students’ Society (MCSS), reported that they conducted a survey of grocery needs among the student population to see which times might work better. 

“We didn’t get a lot of responses, but from those that we have, [we found that] most people are concerned about food access,” she described. “We suggest[ed] Monday 6-8 p.m. and also Thursday 6-8 p.m. [to the housing office] so it’s spread out over the week, but that’s something the school needs to negotiate with the bus company to see if it’s possible.”

These problems are not new for the Macdonald campus. Maya Côté, who studies at Macdonald campus, informed the Daily that Marché Richelieu “didn’t have as many items as you could find in big Maxi or IGA stores, and [she] also felt like it was more expensive as well, so on a student budget, it’s really not convenient.” She noted that the Provigo is also in the higher price range and that the weekly shuttle could be stressful. “I kind of like to take my time, look at the items, compare the value, the nutritional value, stuff like that. I felt like you couldn’t really do that,” Côté pointed out.

There are two eateries on campus, Café Twigs and the Ceilidh restaurant. Café Twigs is the second location of a locally-owned small business in Sainte-Anne and sources ingredients from the Macdonald Farm. While it has been closed due to asbestos cleaning in the Barton and Macdonald-Stewart Buildings, the buildings are currently set to open Tuesday, March 14. The Ceilidh restaurant is still operating and is fully run by the MCSS. According to a statement from McGill, the John Abbott College cafeteria next door is also accessible to McGill students and faculty. 

Sam Liptay, another student at Macdonald campus, told the Daily that Café Twigs and the Ceilidh are relatively affordable and healthy compared to the downtown cafeterias. “When I’m on campus here, I certainly don’t skip meals necessarily as much as I would downtown,” he said. Côté agreed, adding, “I really enjoy Twigs and the Ceilidh. But then again, they close at like, [3:00] p.m […] let’s say you have a class that finishes at 5:30. If you want to grab something to eat, everything’s closed.” 

Students on campus are working to fill the gap left by the administration, but face a lack of institutional support. Côté is the co-president of Happy Belly, a volunteer-run organization that provides free vegan meals on Thursday mornings and gives out leftover perishables on-campus. “We can’t address the whole food desert problem because I feel like we’re just kind of a bandaid on a womb,” she expressed. “We only cook one evening a week […] we can’t serve everybody on campus.” They cannot provide more meals because they rely on volunteers. 

Liptay is a member of the Macdonald Student-Run Ecological Gardens (MSEG), a fully student-run vegetable farm that sells to hundreds of members of the McGill, Montreal, and Sainte-Anne communities, and experiences similar challenges. “It’s really hard, this choice between  […] not pay[ing] anybody enough money at the farm and also feel[ing] like we’re selling our vegetables for too much money,” he described. MSEG has always provided a student discount and is offering five half-priced Community Supported Agriculture baskets this summer and fall in order to improve accessibility. 

Finding a balance between eating sustainably and affordably is a common struggle at Macdonald campus. Marché Sainte-Anne is a year-round farmers’ market that students and residents can access, but maintains a higher price point. The Mac Market also sells produce from the Macdonald Horticultural Center from July to November. 

Macdonald campus offers numerous classes on food topics. “A lot of people get more involved in food systems and realize how much work goes into making a good food system and paying more money for good food,” Liptay noted. “But there’s also this problem of food insecurity and people not being able to afford food and skipping meals.”

The academic focus on food security leads to many student-led initiatives, such as the Ceilidh, Happy Belly, MSEG, and Buy Your Own Bulk, which provides zero-waste dry food at an affordable price. However, much of this programming is unable to expand due to inadequate administrative support. Song explained that Ceilidh would likely be unable to increase its hours while covering costs and accommodating the student-workers’ schedules. Côté mentioned that she could not implement a composting project she was working on, expressing that “it’s always a lack of funding that kind of comes into play.” 

“We don’t get any money from the university apart from the land [… ] So it doesn’t really feel like I’m running a lovely educational experience for students, which is kind of what you’d hope at a university,” Liptay added. “It feels like I’m running a business that also has to deal with [bureaucratic processes] from the university.”

Working to solve food access can be daunting for students both downtown and at Macdonald campus. “Students are organizing against the food desert situation in general, but then it’s really hard because it also involves the cities and municipalities and bigger scale governance,” Côté said. “Student groups and student organization can go a really long way in creating change, but I also know with the high turnover that there is in any university, it’s hard to maintain organization,” Liptay described. 

Students in MSEG spend their first growing season as apprentices learning from the managers, then become managers their second growing season. This cyclical management system has allowed MSEG to continue running for more than 10 years. Liptay called for similar “institutional avenues of student participation in decision making and governance” at McGill. 

He added, “The most important part for me is for McGill to allow space for students to be more directly involved in their food system and have the opportunity and be encouraged to operate student-run cafes, food spaces, and food systems.”

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The Rabbit Hole Café  is a long-running vegan collective kitchen that provides inexpensive meals for community members during the academic year. The service is cash-only and they ask visitors to either bring their own container or eat in the coffeehouse downstairs.

This year, it is run by four dedicated and kitchen-trained volunteers who oversee the entire food preparation and serving process. Nicky DiCaprio, Admin and Communications Coordinator for the Yellow Door, told the Daily that “they all have cooking experience […] and are trained in food safety and cleanliness, so they’re trustworthy, and it’s just seriously so good. Everything they make is with love.”  

In an interview with the Daily, Rabbit Hole volunteer, Viva Noronha explained that the café was “the perfect intersection of cooking as a passion as well as just spreading my love for food to the community.” Noronha described that the kitchen works very collaboratively, “I stir a pot, I wash some dishes, I drain the beans [..] if anybody needs help, we help them.” 

Noronha expressed that “everyone has been really receptive to the food.” So far, they have served a $3 Indian chickpea curry, $3 homemade squash ravioli, and $4 Cuban congrí, as well as $1-2 desserts. “The chickpea curry we did was my mom’s recipe, so that was very close to my heart,” Noronha said. “It was really empowering to see people just enjoying food that I grew up eating.”

Both Noronha and DiCaprio emphasized the need for services like this in the McGill community. “With inflation prices being crazy, like grocery prices are insane, I think this is a really good resource for students,” DiCaprio stated. “To eat healthy is super expensive these days. So this gives students and the whole community an affordable, vegan, delicious, warm meal.” 

McGill currently operates under an exclusivity agreement with the Compass Group. Some students claim that privatization has led to a decrease in diverse and affordable food options on campus. Noronha also pointed out the Compass Group’s role in the prison-industrial complex, as it provides food services to correctional facilities in Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. 

In contrast to most of McGill’s food services, Noronha explained that Rabbit Hole allows “community members to gather and really enjoy and respect the food they’re eating and know where it’s coming from, [which is] maybe the main reason why I wanted to do this.” McGill students can also take advantage of Midnight Kitchen’s free weekly vegan meal servings or register for the SSMU Pilot Grocery Program before November 30th. 

Community members interested in becoming involved with the Yellow Door are able to participate in their free intergenerational wellness initiatives, such as the Art Hive, their reading groups, or Friday Night «Hootenanny» Open Stage music events. They can also volunteer with the Generations program, which pairs them with a senior to provide support to.

The Rabbit Hole’s last lunch service of the year will be this Friday, December 2, but they will be back January 6 for the Winter semester. 

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In an interview with the Daily, AMPL Interim President Evan Fox-Decent revealed that his “first inkling that [unionizing] might be something that’s appropriate was when we lost our pension or the kind of pension that we had.” All other universities in Montreal offer a defined benefit (DB) pension plan, which guarantees a set income for employees in retirement. McGill offers a defined contributions (DC) plan where retirement incomes are dependent on investments in the stock market. 

According to a 2011 newsletter by the McGill Association of University Teachers, until 2009, McGill offered a hybrid pension plan which primarily relied on returns on investment, but had a pension fund that would make up the difference if retirement incomes fell below the minimum defined in the plan. Fox-Decent explained that McGill professors essentially received “70 per cent of the income that [they] had earned during the last five years [..] as is standard in the public service, as is standard across all universities in Quebec.” 

Employees hired from 2009 onwards moved to a pure DC plan, where retirement incomes are now fully tied to the stock market. Fox-Decent said that the market “generally, odds on, does well. But sometimes it doesn’t. And when you have a crash and a third or half of the value is lost, it can take five to ten years to recover if it’s recovered at all.” 

This decision was made with no consultation or discussion with faculty members, causing Fox-Decent and other faculty members to question the way they are organized. Fox-Decent described that “for many of my colleagues, this has been a long time coming due to what they feel is a creeping centralization of the delivery of the academic mission of the various faculties in McGill.”

What Fox-Decent called the “bale of hay that broke the camel’s back” was the administration’s response to the vast majority of the law faculty’s request to require proof of vaccination for those returning to campus last fall. The only response from the Office of the Provost was a memo that encouraged chairs and deans to inform the Office of the Provost of faculty members who wished to teach from home. It stated that “fear about campus safety, residing in another jurisdiction, or concern about relatives who might be at heightened risk or exposure to COVID-19, including those living under the same roof” are not valid reasons to teach remotely. 

These conditions led Fox-Decent and his colleagues to decide that they would like to have more control over their workplace and work on the basis of a collective agreement rather than one-on-one negotiations. Collective agreements govern the conditions of work for a group of employees, and result from bargaining between an employer and a union. They are revisited every few years to better represent the current needs and concerns of the employees. 

Kiersten van Vliet, Mobilization Officer of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM), expressed the value of a collective bargaining position in an interview with the Daily: “It is much easier for McGill to negotiate with an individual rather than a collective. Collective negotiations are hard and they take a lot of resources. There’s a potential in that period when somebody is negotiating collectively that they could withhold their labor or they could have other sort of mobilization tactics.” 

According to Fox-Decent, the AMPL strives to use their bargaining position to “contribute to the mission of the university. Most of the time, our interests and the university’s interests are aligned, but we would just like to have a firmer say in the development of policy.” 

Van Vliet agreed that unions can align with the university’s interests, stating that “unions can actually make the workplace better for everybody.” AGSEM’s demands are “very focused on what would improve pedagogy, on what would improve teaching conditions, on what would improve learning conditions.” Van Vliet added that “if an employer is open to it, it doesn’t have to be adversarial […] But my concern from my experiences with McGill unionizing, negotiating, and in labor relations is that McGill is not necessarily ready to take that step.” 

This was proven by McGill’s decision to immediately pursue litigation after the AMPL petitioned the Tribunal for certification in November 2021. According to the Tribunal Decision Transmission, McGill’s argument was that the AMPL “does not take into account the converging interests of another group of employees that the Association is attempting to divide and the history of labour relations at the University.” Instead, they proposed a unit representing “all tenure-track or tenured faculty members of McGill University.”

Van Vliet explained that in order to unionize in Quebec, “you need 50 percent plus one of that group of workers to say ‘yes, I want that union’.” This threshold was surpassed by the AMPL in their 51-person faculty, but would become much more difficult with all 1744 McGill professors. McGill has used similar tactics with AGSEM, “changing the lists, changing the groups of employees that are included or not included, or what could count or not count,” currently demonstrated by AGSEM’s campaign to unionize Teaching Support workers such as graders or tutors who do similar work to teaching assistants, but are not protected by a collective agreement.

Due to the fact that there is no existing professors’ union, the court declared that “the Tribunal did not have the necessary demonstration that this unit cannot in any way serve as a basis for establishing collective labour relations.” The ruling was highly in favor of the AMPL. Fox-Decent reported that “we literally ran the table five for five, with the judge saying that not only did we meet the threshold, but in many cases, we far surpassed it.”

McGill is currently weighing whether or not to challenge the decision of the Tribunal through judicial review. Fox-Decent discouraged further litigation, arguing that it is “quite literally inconceivable that a reviewing court would set aside the decision of the tribunal.” He has “encouraged [his] friends in the administration to prepare for collective bargaining.”

The question remains as to whether other McGill faculties might follow the AMPL’s example. Fox-Decent noted that the judgment from the Tribunal suggests that “there are materials there that could be helpful for colleagues who may wish to organize either as individual faculties, as multiple faculties together, or potentially, McGill itself.”

“It’s amazing in terms of a type of building block,” van Vleit said. “If we think of the history of labor organizing on campus, like with AGSEM: you have one union that can lead to other groups of employees getting them.” 

Both Fox-Decent and van Vleit encouraged students to get involved with their own unions. “I think probably the most important thing for students to do is to support their student union that is authorized to represent them collectively,” Fox-Decent expressed. “And so when the student union asks you to go out for a march, for a protest, take part in an action to support them where you find your conscience allows you to do so.”

Many McGill student positions are unionized. “Know your union, know your contract, know your rights,” van Vleit urged. “If you want to be a part of a union, talk to your fellow workers, because that’s where it starts, right? It’s workers sharing their experiences and coming to the conclusion that if they work together, they will improve the conditions for everybody. And it just starts with a conversation.”

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Midnight Kitchen is a worker- and volunteer-run collective that strives to combat food insecurity and provide food aid on McGill campus and beyond. Their larger goal is to serve as an alternative to oppressive, profit-driven systems of food production and work toward social and environmental justice, according to its mandate. 

Midnight Kitchen has been forced to scale back their operations since March 2018, when renovations on the University Centre building began. As a SSMU service funded by student fees, the organization operates for free out of a kitchen in the SSMU building, but it had to pay to relocate to a smaller kitchen in St. Henri until the building reopened in September 2021. According to an article from 2019 in the Daily titled “Banking on Our Bellies,” Midnight Kitchen shifted from serving about 200 to 300 meals Monday through Thursday to serving about 300 meals for pickup weekly. 

The free meal program was only further reduced by the pandemic. In an interview with the Daily, Midnight Kitchen staff member Delali described their early pandemic programming: “When the pandemic started, we paused for a bit and started a food bank instead as an emergency response to COVID alongside a different meal delivery service in partnership with several different groups.” Midnight Kitchen also received a grant to create a temporary emergency gift card program, which provided some students with one-time gift cards to grocery stores. 

Midnight Kitchen’s free meal pickups were reinstated in the Fall 2021 semester with about 30 meals bi-weeekly, but these ended in the Winter 2022 semester.

There has been great demand since the return of the service in the Fall 2022 semester. Alina Shimizu, U1 Science, told the Daily about her experience at the free lunch service on September 29. She said that “there was a big lineup before it was even 1:00, so the people who actually got there on time didn’t even get meals […] even though I arrived five minutes early, by the time I got to the front, they just had one side left.”

When asked about increasing the number of meals they serve, Delali explained that Midnight Kitchen is “looking to expand but in a sustainable way. We pre-package our meals and try and make it so our staff don’t feel overworked and people don’t burn out.” In the case that staff members get sick, they “want to make it so that it’s still possible to meet the minimum that we said we’d serve, but we’re looking to slowly scale up a little bit through the semester.”

Delali noted that the free lunch services were “as busy as we expected considering there’s not a lot of great affordable food options on campus.” Another Midnight Kitchen staff member, Aishwarya, explained that, “the need is always greater than we can provide […] as there are other obstacles to getting affordable meals near or on campus.”

Shimizu agreed that “food options on campus in general are overpriced, and now that I don’t have a meal plan, I don’t eat on campus because it’s financially smarter to make my own meals […] More services like free lunches would be awesome.” She also added that “the fact the service was vegan was definitely really impressive because some of the on-campus meal options don’t even have a vegan option, just vegetarian.”

These sentiments echo those described in “Banking on Our Bellies” three years ago. The authors pointed out the lack of affordable or diverse food options on campus, citing the 2014–2015 SSMU Student Experience Study that revealed that about 80 per cent of McGill students felt food options on campus were unaffordable. However, they argued that this hasn’t always been the case. In 2001, “nearly every faculty had their own student-run cafeteria or convenience store, the profits of which would help fund the faculty student association” that would serve food at a lower cost until 2000, when “McGill made moves to consolidate food services under the control of the university administration.” This privatization culminated in McGill’s 2004 exclusivity agreement with the Chartwells brand, which switched to Aramark and then back to the Compass Group, the company that operated Chartwells. The authors claimed that this privatization led to the decrease in diverse, affordable food options.

Midnight Kitchen has sought to fill the need for food security initiatives on campus since its inception in 2002, but, as Delali put it, “as a single organization of five staff members, we’re not going to solve food insecurity on McGill campus and McGill does nothing to address it.” Aishwarya clarified that “McGill should make campus more accessible for people, but technically our formal relationship isn’t with McGill but the SSMU … there’s maybe something to be said about food security being a greater goal in their agenda if students feel like that’s a particular issue they want addressed.” 

Midnight Kitchen is running a fee levy referendum in the winter in order to continue providing food aid to McGill students –  and to potentially obtain more funding to expand their services to run more programming or hire another staff member. 

They currently offer three other kinds of programming McGill students can take advantage of: discretionary funding for initiatives whose goals they support, solidarity servings (free catering for community organizations), and a garden to grow their own ingredients. Their community garden on the east side of Burnside Hall operates from May to October, and students are welcome to volunteer Mondays 3:30-4:30 PM, weather permitting.

When the garden closes at the end of October, Midnight Kitchen will begin serving meals weekly, depending on how busy their other programming is. The free packaged meal service schedule is posted on their website: https://midnightkitchen.org/calendar. 

If you are interested in seeing what Midnight Kitchen has to offer, their next free meal service will be held on October 13 at 1:00 PM. They ask students to wear a mask to keep the community healthy and the service running.

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