U of T students watch out. In lecture halls, study spaces, and residence rooms, wannabe student leaders are out stumping for your vote. And although the campaign is barely a week old, with voting to take place later this week, the elections for SAC (soon to be UTSU) have drawn their share of controversy.
Last week, Trinity college director Gabe De Roche complained after finding out there would be no polling station inside Trinity College’s The Buttery, as in past years. He claimed that Trinity’s student population was being “disenfranchised.”
“This presents a problem for me because my base is the resident population at Trin,” De Roche wrote in an email. “I interpret this as SAC shutting down the only polling location at which Trin students actually vote in order to cut off my base.”
SAC chief returning officer Eric Newstadt said that “Trinity isn’t being used this year because Trinity simply wasn’t available. Neither was Vic, which is why we went with Wymilwood.”
Voting goes on from Wednesday until Friday, with polling stations at Sid Smith, Woodsworth College Residence, the Bahen Centre, Gerstein Library, Wymilwood at Victoria College, and the South and North Buildings at UTM campus. A candidates’ debate is scheduled for Tuesday at 4 p.m. at the Bahen Centre.
On the campaign trail, meanwhile, the mud has begun to fly.
Last week, the New Deal campaign publicized the fact that David Scrivener, Your Team’s candidate for VP external, was one of a dozen student leaders from Toronto-area universities who posed as campus journalists to gain entry and raise ruckus at a Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities press conference last month. The incident received coverage from as far afield as UBC (see our Comment section for more.)
Meanwhile, opponents of New Deal have seized on the fact that Sam Rahimi, a VP external at SAC in 2004/05, is managing the slate’s campaign. Paul Bretscher, who was SAC president last year, called Rahimi’s involvement with New Deal a “blunder.”
“It energizes people,” Bretscher said, such as student leaders who clashed with Rahimi in the past.
Alex Tepperman, a fifth-year Classics student who has been involved with SAC since 2003 and has butted heads with Rahimi claimed that Rahimi “sees New Deal as the anti-[SAC], a group of card-carrying Conservatives and Liberals who will clean house.”
Rahimi dismissed those criticisms.
“Students aren’t electing a campaign manager. The issue of me backing this ticket is irrelevant.”
He reiterated New Deal’s central message that “[SAC] really needs a change. It needs to become more democratic and less of a clique, which is the way many people perceive it.”
But some students disagree with this polarized assessment of the campaigns. David Warde-Farley, a fourth-year student a vice-president of the Computer Science Student Union, who will “likely” vote for the New Deal slate and considers himself “left-leaning,” said the election is about shifting the student union’s priorities.
“We’re a bit fed up,” Warde-Farley said. “We’d prefer our student union to be focusing its resources on programs with broad, immediate benefits to the student community, and picking battles that it can win.”
According to him, the campaign to freeze tuition fees, which culminated in the Feb. 7 Day of Action last month, is not one such battle.
“I think there’s real potential for a culture shift away from the realm of pet causes and partisanship towards a frugal, effective representative body with a clear mandate from the voters.”
Tepperman meanwhile speculated that “There will be some people who will vote Your Team because they approve of the last two efficiently and professionally-run SAC executives. There will also be people who will vote New Deal, though, because they imagine that a total about-face for SAC will somehow make their lives easier.”
The campaign continues this week on campus and online. All the candidates have used the online network Facebook to put out the message to students, and their groups boast varying numbers of members.
“I’m not sure how many votes [Facebook] turns out,” said New Deal’s Rahimi. “But it creates a base of supporters whom you can rely on as volunteers later in the campaign.”
