In this year’s Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) election, the Students First slate won a clean sweep, their candidate filling every executive position. This result may entice students to think, logically, that Students First must be the best possible choice.
However, a critical look at the election results doesn’t paint a picture of a popular slate winning over the hearts and minds of students, but rather that of an apathetic voter population without much real choice. Looking at the official vote tallies makes it obvious that a legitimate election didn’t really happen. For some executive positions, up to a quarter of voters either abstained or voted “No Confidence.”
As for the other votes, the choice was frankly between a well-known large slate with the power to out-spend and out-market all its opponents, and some independants with little public presence.
We have to acknowledge the slate system allows one very well-funded (and almost suspiciously omnipresent) group to hallway harass and spend their way to the executive offices. An election like this is no more legitimate than the Communist Party winning every seat in the old Soviet legislature.
That being said, it was no surprise Students First took the win this year. It’s a worryingly noticeable pattern in Carleton’s student politics: a slate forms, wins the election through brand recognition, gets into a major scandal (financial, or otherwise), repeat ad nauseum with new names and t-shirt designs. To flesh out the comment about scandals, Carleton’s new VP of Student Life, Osman Elmi, has made record time in showing off his true colours, already proclaiming “fuck the rest!” when celebrating his victory.
To give credit to Elmi, he apologized after the fact—but who wouldn’t? Besides, after winning all the seats, who’s going to stop a little celebration? Hopefully, this event doesn’t prove to be prophecy for a play-by-play repeat of the 2018 scandals with Abdullah Jaber– no matter how happy a candidate is about a victory, rudely making fun of your competitors on social media is never appropriate.
When it comes to finances, Tyler Boswell, in an op-ed in the Charlatan on the slate system, noted slates have the power to share financial resources, and thus are a tough match for an independent candidate limited to $600. This is a fundamental problem with the slate system, which essentially allows for one-party elections, barring some rare exceptions. CUSA elections are in a rut. It makes sense to run in a slate.
Financially, marketing-wise, and politically, the elections are fundamentally biased to favour slates. The proof for this is anecdotal but clear. How many people do Students First have signed on as volunteers in brightly-marked t-shirts? How many times have they begged for you to give them a high-five or grab their environmentally-disastrous fliers in the hallway? Independents simply can’t stand up to the resources which slates can easily afford to wield.
Nevertheless, it is applaudable what Students First pulled off. All the executive seats are theirs, giving them complete free reign over the hefty CUSA budget. While it is highly problematic that a single slate somehow manages to steamroll the election almost every year, Students First deserves a hearty congratulations.
There’s no diminishing the hard work and money they put into the race. The student body can surely be confident—2020 is definitely the year CUSA will have no financial scandals, no misbehaviour, and no cronyism. As we all know, one-party executive boards always produce unbiased and fair results.
But, how can all this be fixed? How can the years of ingrained bias be removed from CUSA elections? How can we encourage independent students to run serious campaigns? How can we turn the current CUSA apparatus into an actual force of good for the students? To that, the appropriate response is “good question.”
Photo by Spencer Colby.
