Fun with the Charlatan

Carleton's student newspaper brings out the best in early year Student Union frustrations. Some inside-carleton venting.

- Shawn Menard, CUSA (the student union) president favours restricting smoking on campus, but still manages to find fault with Admin's good idea. It's kind of like he started to see that they were agreeing with administration, and then backed away.

- Gone are the days, apparently, where the Charlatan ran screaming headlines about how our student pub lost more than 100,000 dollars. This might be the most confusing thing ever written, but here, with more than a half decade of straight losses, is the sign of the manager drinking the oliver's koolaid:

But Portt remains optimistic that despite setbacks, Oliver's is going to have an amazing year.
"It's going to be so different that people are going to say 'wow,' " he said, referring to the bar's renovations, which include a new 30-foot bar, a patio, two flat-screen televisions, a fully-functional kitchen and more.

Apparently they also may look into the advent of some "wireless" technology for the "internet." Only in student politics would it be acceptable to run a "business" that has lost significant chunks of change over the last years that I have been here. Losing money at a bar? On Campus? You figure it out.

- But they (kind of sort of) trim costs and the other campus business?

- That said, I know when I anticipate greater losses, I increase spending on existing priorities and create new ones.

- Admin has withdrawn from the proposed student building plan. Apparently, he took the defeated referendum on the matter last year as a sign that people didn't want to pay for a building. CUSA seems to disagree. Maybe CUSA wants to do the Quebec thing, having lost this past time only on having no clear plan and asking students to spend a fortune. That's how I like to build my mandates for construction. The real shame? I liked the idea of a building.