One Carleton’s full-slate win in this year’s Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) election marks the victory of similar platforms and policies the student body has seen over the past four years, and has some students questioning whether this represents a so-called “dynasty” in the CUSA offices.
Starting with Alexander Golovko’s 2012 victory under the A Better Carleton slate, subsequent slates Your Carleton and One Carleton included previous executive members, with similar promises.
More funding for clubs and societies, increased financial transparency, and updates to the health and dental plan are some of the platform points that have been pushed since A Better Carleton won in the 2013 elections.
In March 2015, during Folarin Odunayo’s term as president of A Better Carleton, CUSA ran a referendum on increasing the cost of the health and dental plan by $14, which failed. In April 2016, while Fahd Alhattab was president, CUSA raised the cost of the health plan at an emergency CUSA council meeting.
In Golovko’s first term, all Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) material was removed from CUSA service centres in favour of in-house awareness campaigns. CUSA also stopped supporting CFS campaigns and initiatives during Golovko’s term. Later in his term, CUSA ran an unsuccessful campaign to defederate from the CFS.
Zameer Masjedee, CUSA president-elect for 2017-18, ran on a platform of defederating from the CFS.
For Elly Alboim, a journalism and communications professor at Carleton, campus slates resemble political parties as they need a brand to be successful and emerge.
“Political parties can’t exist without some sort of brand,” Alboim said. “Brands stay static even when circumstances change and leaders change.”
Critics of the lack of diversity have called the electoral result patterns a “dynasty” aided by the voter base of past slates, shown through the large number of supporters present at the executive debates.
“The One Carleton volunteers weren’t just people who bought into the ideals, they weren’t just people who supported the slate, they were people with connections in the community and they were leaders,” said Ruth Lau-MacDonald, a fourth-year sociology student who ran as an independent executive candidate in this year’s election.
“That’s the power of the dynasty,” she said.
Fahd Alhattab, CUSA’s outgoing president who ran under Your Carleton for two elections, said an essential aspect of leadership is “people development” when explaining his support for Masjedee, who was part of Alhattab’s executive and will soon replace him as next year’s CUSA president.
“Experience is not an institutional resource, you can’t take that away. That’s how politics work, the person in power will campaign for the next person,” he said.
Alhattab said he did teach and encourage Masjedee, but all the teams running CUSA over the past few years have been separate.
“Zameer is not Fahd, and Fahd is not Folarin, and Folarin is not Alex, and nor were the other executives,” he said. “Yeah, there was crossover . . . but I think we as humans love narratives and the narrative is fun.”
Much of the criticism towards the past year’s election results has been intertwined with a more general criticism of slates themselves.
“When we become focused on these ideals or these versions of things that we want then we just end up talking to the same people who share those values, so we get tunnel vision,” Lau-MacDonald said, arguing that slates can lead to less diversity of student input amongst the executive.
But Alhattab said mixed slates in the CUSA executive ultimately harm students as there is less trust between members, resulting in fewer policies implemented.
“To my soul, I would rather lose all six positions than have a mixed slate. Mixed slates are toxic, people play politics,” he said.
Lau-Macdonald also highlighted the decision of CUSA council to not implement a ranked ballot, and said it greatly impacted her and other independents’ odds of being elected.
“It wasn’t about a majority, it was about a plurality, it went from being a fair process to a popularity contest,” she said.
– Infographic by Shanice Pereira
