We’ve now reached everyone’s least favourite time of the year: Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) elections.
For the next two and a half weeks, you will be approached by students asking you seemingly innocuous questions like
“Have you voted yet?” or my favourite “Do you have a second to talk?”
It is at this time of year when want-to-be Stephen Harpers and Justin Trudeaus will approach you in the hall and lie straight to your face. I should know, I’ve done it for the past two years.
In what is perhaps the worst-kept secret in regards to CUSA elections, candidates for council positions will band together in teams, or slates. An executive slate, such as last year’s A Better Carleton or United for Carleton, almost always leads these slates.
This happens despite the fact that it is in direct contravention of the electoral code, and candidates have been disqualified in the past for this very offence.
A change to the electoral code was recently proposed which would have fixed this situation. Yet the councillors present—many of whom I had worked with during either the 2012 or 2013 election—vehemently denied ever being part of a slate. The change failed, and we are left with the status quo for this year.
Want to have some fun during election season? Ask a council candidate “What slate are you on?”
If you get someone who has been involved in the process, you’ll likely receive a convoluted answer about how slates are prohibited. However if you happen to catch a rookie you may be greeted by a sufficiently awkward response as they dance around the issue.
It is unfortunate that we make candidates lie to students, and even more unfortunate when councillors who know better lie. If you catch yourself looking at posters this year, take a second and see how many posters share the same font, or give the same vague platform points on “responsibility and transparency.”
It is these same candidates who are lying to students before they even take office. Students deserve better than candidates who are in bed with the executive and not willing to broadcast that fact publicly.
One of the reasons CUSA’s politics are so divisive and broken lies in the way we elect our representatives.
At the end of the day, the students that we purport to represent should know if the person they’re voting for is going to be just another yes vote for the executive, or whether they will hold the executive to account.
Carleton students deserve better than the sham that our elections have morphed into.
