Popovic is ready to make his soup and bread program a reality

With lessons learned and a renewed commitment, Jovan Popovic will finally bring his food-security project to life

After winning his second term as president of the McMaster Students Union in January 2024, President Jovan Popovic made the decision to fast track one of his campaign promises to a referendum.

The promise: to deliver a free meal program featuring soup and bread to students based on the successful Loaded Ladle program offered at Dalhousie University. The referendum failed to reach quorum, with only 9.4 per cent of the student population casting a ballot one way or the other.

As a transfer student from Dalhousie who witnessed first hand how the Loaded Ladle impacted hundreds of students each day, I see this as a tragedy.

But it may not stay that way for long.

As of September, the Student Representative Assembly approved a motion to rerun the referendum. It seems Popovic might have learned more this time than last about what made Dalhousie’s experiment so successful.

The Loaded Ladle began life as an unsanctioned food service organization on Dalhousie’s campus serving soup from an ironing board. Despite problems with campus police, the organization gained popularity among students and garnered support that eventually saw them granted a kitchen space in the student union building, as a carve-out from the union's exclusive contract with corporate food provider Aramark.

Its origins — and continued existence — as an explicitly political, anti-capitalist student activist group meant that the Loaded Ladle needed to garner community support from its beginnings.

While I supported Popovic’s proposal, I think that this difference helps explain why his referendum failed to gain enough votes to either pass or fail. What was at Dalhousie a student-run initiative, would be under Popovic a single presidential candidate’s, albeit well planned and thought out, campaign promise.

The proposal itself reflects these differences too. At Dalhousie, the Loaded Ladle is an independent non-profit, run largely by volunteers, now with some paid positions at $23.50 per hour. The proposed program at McMaster would be run out of the TwelvEighty Kitchen and would be staffed and operated by existing MSU employees.

This difference is understandable. The President alone would have a hard time building an activist organization during a one-year-term and his current proposal would deliver results to students soon and for a modest fee.

But I think it's these differences that explain why the referendum failed to meet quorum. Without a group of student activists raising awareness, most students wouldn't have bothered checking the email from elections services.

Luckily, Popovic himself seems aware of this fact.

In his request to the SRA to suspend the rules on referendums that would have prevented the referendum from being re-run until next year, Popovic acknowledges that his referendum failed exactly where the Bike Share referendum succeeded.

“[T]hey were only aware of one . . . a student-led campaign team was openly informing students of the [Bike Share] referendum," read Popovic's official motion to the SRA.

This time around, Popovic says he has a “group of students” ready to raise awareness about the referendum to the student body. This, along with Popovic’s other reasons for rerunning the referendum — a commitment to his campaign promise and to the democratic process — demonstrate his interest in the kind of student-led politics that helped the Loaded Ladle and the Bike Share referendum to succeed.

Whether he follows through on his commitment and sees the soup and bread program through or not, Popovic is clearly attempting to move forward with these valuable lessons in mind. His new plan is a clear path to success. With this revised plan, I think Popovic has everything he needs to succeed.