That’s the ticket! will be a weekly column covering UTSU elections this spring. For more on opposition slates since Change in 2008, be sure to check out next week’s issue.
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As election season draws near, the modest beginnings of an opposition campaign have begun to appear around campus and on the Internet.
If recent history is any indication, there’s no reason to believe that Stop the Salaries will succeed — not for a lack of effort, but because for years, no opposition team has managed to break a long-standing pattern of incumbency at the UTSU.
The last four years have seen three UTSU presidents, all with close connections to the CFS: Sandy Hudson, Adam Awad, and current officeholder Danielle Sandhu. Each successive president has been inculcated to student politics under the prior administration; all have known each other personally for years. After her second term, Hudson went on to become the chairperson of CFS-Ontario. Awad has since been hired as the national deputy chairperson. In short, the UTSU has proven to be fertile ground for CFS recruitment, and previous executives have been known to return to campaign for their successors.
Although all three candidates have publicly objected to the use of the term “incumbent,” there is an undeniable coherence to their actions while in office and in their political ideologies. No candidate in memory has been able to win executive office at the UTSU on an anti-CFS platform.
This status quo has not been without its challengers. In 2008, a group known as Change slate ran the most effective opposition campaign to date. Change came within a few hundred votes of the presidency and several vice-presidential offices. Its well-organized and highly visible campaign came during the perfect storm of popular discontent with certain UTSU activities.
Hudson, a two-term president first elected in March 2007, had made a handful of radical decisions that divided opinion on campus.
Hudson commented in a February 2008 incident involving CFS and Lakehead University Students’ Union (LUSU), where the CFS supported LUSU in their decision to refuse anti-choice organizations from accessing student union-owned space and resources.
In an interview, Hudson told Ryerson’s The Eyeopener that she thought it was “strange and vaguely offensive to say that anti-choice groups should be given money on the basis of free speech.” However, as the Women’s Commissioner, she didn’t have a vote on the provincial level. She wasn’t UTSU’s president at the time.
In July 2009, The Varsity reported that Hudson appealed to GTA student unions for donations to a UTSU-created legal fund for the arrest of then-executive director Angela Regnier. Hudson has denied this allegation.
Change almost certainly benefitted from the widespread negative reaction against the Fight Fees 14 during the previous year. The disconnect between UTSU advocacy and the opinions of the student body at large had never been more clear.
Ultimately, however, Hudson prevailed over Change’s Jason Marin.
Also aiding Change was the fact that many of its candidates were former UTSU officers and volunteers. Prior experience within the union helped the slate navigate the byzantine electoral rules, an area where later candidates would encounter significant difficulties. Change candidates were carefully vetted and strategically chosen to tap into demographics that tend not to vote in campus elections, such as the engineering faculty.
Although Change reprised its campaign in March 2010 under the leadership of Steve Masse, it was not nearly as successful. That year, Adam Awad was elected by a generous margin. He presided over a relatively benign administration, and at the end of his term, Sandhu and the rest of her slate cruised to victory essentially unopposed.
Like Awad, Sandhu has maintained a fairly non-controversial profile while in office.
Today, only senior undergraduate students can recall the Fight Fees 14 and the 2008 election from their first year. As the memory of Change fades, subsequent opposition groups have been unable to recapture the same energy that nearly propelled the team to victory.
The most important question for this year’s election is whether nascent opposition groups like Stop the Salaries will manage to tap into these masses of the politically uninitiated. The bulk of undergraduates on campus today have not experienced a full-on confrontation between supporters and detractors of the UTSU and CFS. If groups like Stop the Salaries fail to rally support among these younger students, Sandhu’s successors too will enjoy a cakewalk to office.
