Thompson Stubbs, a third-year software engineering student, is one of six candidates running for president of the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA).
Stubbs said he decided to run in the byelection because only one candidate ran for the position in the first election.
“It was silly, and it shouldn’t happen the second time,” Stubbs said.
While he doesn’t have much campus involvement, Stubbs said he believes he is the ideal candidate because of the skills he has developed through different jobs.
“Engineering can be very demanding at times, but I usually end up as team leader on the software projects I work on,” he said.
The main change Stubbs said he wants to implements is to lower the fees students pay to CUSA.
“As much money as CUSA has, I think sexual and mental health is something that the university should be doing. I want to cut student fees by reducing executive compensation because they’ve been going up at the same rate as tuition,” Stubbs said. “CUSA’s still bleeding money in and out.”
Stubbs said he believes that a lot of students didn’t participate in the first CUSA election because they didn’t know about it or because they believed other candidates might run against the One Carleton slate
He said a suitable presidential candidate “needs to be the face of CUSA.”
“They need to be able to hold speeches, managing the CUSA council, and they need to be able to negotiate with people,” Stubbs said.
Stubbs is also running on a promise of democratic reform. In a post on his campaign’s Facebook page, he said he would reform the process used to elect CUSA councillors from a first-past-the-post system to a single transferrable vote system.
“If I am elected as president of CUSA, I will reform the council elections to use a single transferrable vote system, which is proven to work for multi-member elections around the world,” a post on his Facebook page stated.
Photo by Meagan Casalino
