Walking through the tunnels on a cold winter’s day may seem like a blissful escape from the latest installment of Ottawa’s winter, but at the end of January, it’s near impossible to avoid the flurry of flyers and faces of fellow students as Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) election candidates vie for potential votes.
While some students go out of their way to avoid eye contact or wear headphones in a silent plea to be left alone, few can escape being handed a flyer and getting asked to cast their ballots a certain way.
But how do CUSA elections really work on campus? We attempt to break it down:
The slate-independent rivalry in recent years
Under names that suggest unity, inclusivity, and reform, many hope to sell undergraduate student voters on a team of candidates running for all six of CUSA’s executive positions—a slate.
These groups of candidates run with a shared platform, and this style of candidacy has become increasingly prominent in CUSA elections in recent years.
This year, two slates are campaigning for student votes, compared to three in last year’s election.
While slates have seemed to dominate the CUSA election scene during the past five years, Carleton ombudsperson Jim Kennelly said they aren’t anything new.
“I bet you slates have been around [at Carleton] for 15 or 20 years,” Kennelly said.
Others choose to brave candidacy alone in the sea of students and slates; but in the past five years, only four CUSA candidates have run independently.
Ian Gillies and Josh Noronha both ran as independent candidates for president in 2014, while Kevin Pei ran as an independent candidate for vice-president (finance) in the same year.
In 2016, Ahmed Hassan was the sole independent candidate, running for vice-president (student life).
But this year’s election sees an increase in the number of independent candidates.
Three of five original presidential candidates are running without a slate: Carson Fischl, Caleb Broeker, and Jonathan Marshall—who has since formally stepped out of the race.
There are three independent candidates running for other CUSA executive positions: Ruth Lau MacDonald for vice-president (internal), Victoria Lalande for vice-president (finance), and Danny Ford for vice-president (student issues).
Why run with a slate?
“I think it’s more for the convenience of the people running than it is for a message,” Kennelly said. “It’s really hard to cover campus if you’re a single campaigner—you’ve got to have a lot of volunteers. But if you’ve got a slate of a half dozen people, and they each have five people that will help them, then you can set up a campaign team.”
Zameer Masjedee, presidential candidate with the One Carleton slate in this year’s election, said teamwork and collaboration are the reasons why he chose to run as a slate candidate.
“It’s nice to be able to have a holistic view of what you’d like to see CUSA provide students,” Masjedee said. “There [are] certain factors that fall under each executive’s portfolio, and being able to sort of brainstorm together and collaborate together, and work together on what your vision is for the school, I think is very powerful.”
When deciding to run as an independent or slate candidate, he said he thinks slates have strength in numbers.
“You’re not just presenting your own view, you’re presenting a group view that’s really diverse, and I think that will resonate with more students,” Masjedee said. “You have 25,000 undergraduate students at Carleton, and you want to make sure that as a team what you propose really serves as many of them as possible. I think that’s one of the greatest benefits [of] running as a team.”
For Carleton student Keith Burley, who ran for vice-president (finance) with the Change slate during the 2016 CUSA election, the decision to run as a slate candidate was one of practicality.
“I chose a slate because if you run as an independent candidate in the elections, it’s kind of like running for the Green Party at a federal level,” Burley said. “People want to vote for you, but they’re not going to, because you don’t have the dominated volunteer base that a slate would have. You have six people with all different friends that help you out. If you run independently, that’s one person.”
Partisan politics on campus
Reflecting on his election experience, Burley described the atmosphere between competing slates as “a toxic environment.”
“You’ve got people who are friends with people in different slates, and they don’t know who to vote for because they don’t want to choose one friend over the other, and that’s nepotism at its finest,” he said. “The promises that I saw getting made, and the trash talking that was happening at a volunteer level, that’s really where the toxicity comes from. It’s the fact that it’s an ‘us versus them’ mentality.”
Burley added he thinks slate politics are “embarrassing to democracy,” and independent candidacy can lead to a less toxic election environment.
“Carleton’s student politics is a microcosm of the federal level. Party whipping occurs, backstabbing occurs, if somebody gets elected to council you owe them something,” Burley said. “I don’t think that’s going to change unless we get rid of partisan politics on campus, and the only way to do that is to start electing independent individuals.”
But Kennelly said he doesn’t think the increase in slates has led to a more divisive election environment—it makes for a more organized election.
“If you run as an independent candidate in the elections, it’s kind of like running for the Green Party at a federal level. People want to vote for you, but they’re not going to, because you don’t have the dominated volunteer base that a slate would have.”
—Keith Burley
candidate for vice-president (finance) with the Change slate in the 2016 CUSA election
“Instead of having 15 individuals out there running for various spots not knowing all of the rules, and brochures and flyers and everything all over the place, I think if you’re in a slate you’ve got people who are really informed about the election rules and they’ll tell the other members of the slate, so it keeps everybody responsible to follow the rules,” he said.
“Sadly, you’re always going to have divisive things happen, whether it’s a single running or a slate. But I don’t think it’s any more divisive with a slate,” Kennelly added.
As an independent candidate for president in this year’s CUSA election, Carson Fischl has taken an anti-slate stance in his campaign platform.
“One of the major points of my candidacy is that I’d like to abolish slates from the electoral code,” Fischl said. “If it’s not in the electoral code currently, it’s ingrained. Abolishing slates from the electoral code would discourage the formation of alliances in the future and avoid partisanship.”
Fischl added that abolishing slates could lead to an increase in the diversity of election candidates.
“I understand slates are very established here, but I feel they limit students’ choices in who can run in executive council. I believe that having only independent candidates will open up choices for students,” Fischl said. “It’s an ingrained system, and it might not be what’s best for the student body here.”
For Fischl, the decision to run as a slate or independent candidate is a personal one that ultimately comes down to candidate preference.
“At the end of the day, we as candidates are doing this because we feel there’s something we have to offer the student body at Carleton,” Fischl said. “We have to run as we see fit, what we feel is best to accomplishing our political goals, and if running in a slate is not conducive to that, even if it does mean sacrificing volunteers and support, that’s how we have to run.”
Are slates similar to political parties?
“Generally, there are reasons for different political parties getting established aside from seeking power,” said Jon Pammett, a political science professor at Carleton.
“It would strike me as less likely that there would be quite distinct ideological differences between the [slate] groups. At the student level, you probably wouldn’t have one slate proposing to run a large budget deficit, for example,” Pammett added.
Kennelly also said that slates are less likely to have differences in ideology as distinct as those between political parties.
“I don’t see a lot of issues from each slate. It’s more like, ‘we can do it better,’ than it is ‘we’re a socialist slate,’ ‘we’re a pro-business slate,’ ‘we’re a green party slate’ or whatever,” Kennelly said. “I don’t think there are enough issues to make the slate like a political party. I think it’s more of ‘we as a group think we can do a better job, and here are the highlights of what we would change.’ ”
While Pammett said he doesn’t closely follow student politics at Carleton, he added it would be “logical” for students to run in slates.
“It’s quite possible that if there’s a group of people who are standing for office together, they will collectively have given a bit more thought to developing a program, rather than just saying they’re in favour of good government, or appealing on the basis of personal friendship groups,” he said.
2017 CUSA election:
2 slates, 6 independents
2016 CUSA election:
3 slates, 1 independent
2015 CUSA election:
3 slates, no independents
2014 CUSA election:
3 slates, 3 independents
“On the negative side, I can imagine that people who don’t have this kind of network of other people that they’re working with might feel the slates are hijacking the electoral process, and they’re not allowing the good individual candidates to come to the fore as much as they should in their own estimation,” Pammett added. “It’s possible it might discourage potential individual candidates from even engaging in the process at all, saying ‘what’s the point in trying to run if I’m facing these slates that are already established?’ ”
Voting for the 2017 CUSA election takes place on Feb. 1 and 2.
Until then, students can continue to look forward to being approached with flyers and volunteer testimonials in the tunnels from independent and slate candidates alike.
– Graphics by Christophe Young
