For the second year in a row, Carleton’s Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) elections are going uncontested.
Graduate students will get to vote on referendum questions, but won’t have a say in deciding next year’s acclaimed GSA executives.
Despite not having a typical political campaign climate, co-chief electoral officer Jon Scheiding said the acclamations don’t affect the legitimacy of the GSA government.
“I would say that although there is a tendency for people to think, ‘Oh, well this is just a case of everyone patting themselves on the back and giving themselves a position,’ I think it speaks more to the fact that there are a lack of students that are able to find the time to commit to this type of a job,” Scheiding said. “Especially because Senate and grad faculty board are volunteer-type positions.”
The problem rests in the nature of graduate students’ study, he said.
“One of the big problems is that with the graduate students being a fairly small community and being very busy with their own things, it’s very difficult to get a lot of candidates out,” Scheiding said. “I think it’s a year-to-year endemic problem.”
Although this year’s election almost saw a bit of competition, a couple of candidates for executive positions dropped out. In one case, “it was in the good spirit of not wanting to run against another candidate that they thought would do a better job,” Scheiding said.
Kelly Black, president-elect and current vice-president (operations), said there are also other reasons for the acclamations.
“Generally, in student union elections, you don’t usually see a large slate of candidates unless the year before has been quite divisive or people feel that things haven’t been run the way they would like them run,” Black said. “I think we see that at the undergraduate level. A lot of the positions at that level, even for council, are highly contested because people disagree quite a bit with what has been happening.”
The position of president has gone uncontested for four years in a row.
Because people are generally happy with what the GSA has been doing for the past few years, he said there isn’t much disagreement on the idea that the previous executives should continue what they’re doing. If problems do arise, there are other places to turn.
“There’s a reason that we have a GSA council and a reason that we have a board of directors,” Black said. “These are the other checks in the system. It’s up to the GSA council and it’s up to GSA members and it’s up to board directors to make sure that the GSA executive is doing a good job and is doing what they would like to see.”
GSA members were still able to vote on whether to approve the U-Pass fee increase, whether they want to call on the university to divest from companies with links to Israeli armed forces, and whether they support the expansion of the GSA’s office on the sixth floor of the Unicentre.
