John Sweeney is a fifth-year Chemical Engineering student. He ran the Engineering Society’s pub Suds from 2015–2016 and was Editor-in-Chief of the Toike Oike newspaper from 2013–2014.
Sweeney was also a representative on the Engineering Society’s Board of Directors. Sweeney describes his Whomst’d’ve slate name as “more just making fun of the ridiculousness of adding more and more contractions on.”
Sweeney is generally positive about the progress the UTSU has been making and wants to continue down that path. He is supportive of the fee diversion agreement between the Engineering Society and the UTSU, which calls for 50 per cent of fees collected by the UTSU from Engineering students to be remitted back to the Engineering Society.
Sweeney wants to go forward with the defederation of Engineering students from the UTSU. Given the range of services provided by the Engineering Society, Sweeney believes that the current fee diversion still allows for some redundancies in student services.
He is confident that he can convince non- Engineering students to support his push for defederation with the promise of their own colleges’ or faculties’ future defederation “on a case by case basis.”
“There is quite a bit of support [for defederation] already from the engineering students, so there we have it, and then it just has to get sold to the Arts & Science and the faculties… For example, some of them, we can show them, ‘Hey, look, we have our own student union that is much more specialized in its purposes, so if you want to, at some point in the future, have that happen with yours, this is a bit of a stepping stone towards making that a reality’,” he said.
– With files from Reut Cohen and Jack O. Denton
