By Vanessa Broadbent (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 15, 2014
Nomination period for the Student Union Society’s (SUS) upcoming by-election recently closed, and only one of the open positions is set to be filled. SUS has become accustomed to having low numbers of people running in their elections. SUS president Ryan Petersen explains that this is nothing new.
“Sometimes there are still a few vacancies. We’re really lucky that the executives were all filled [earlier this year]. The student board that represents all of the faculties of the university is what we’re missing,” he says.
There are four positions open: aboriginal representative, faculty of access and open studies representative, faculty of trades representative, and school of graduate studies representative. The faculty of access and open studies, as well as the school of graduate studies positions are new, but the trades position is not. Despite that, it has only been filled once, five years ago.
Requirements for the elected representatives have been reduced to make the position more manageable and possibly more appealing for candidates.
“It [used to require] a rather large amount of your time,” Petersen explains. “We wanted to change that because we wanted more people to get involved. Now they don’t have to be on any committees; this is the only thing we want them to do.”
Although the representatives are only required to sit on the SUS board, there is still a large commitment that comes with the position.
“[With] engaging their communities, their main job is to represent their community on the SUS board,” Petersen says. “So when we bring forward an issue they’re always looking at it [for their students’] benefit.”
Petersen realizes the lack of representation on the SUS board is not ideal, and shared what will be done next year to ensure a better turnout for candidates.
“We really have to be more intrusive and go to the department heads [for help],” he says. “If this is the response that we’re getting, where [students] don’t know [about the positions] or are not interested, then we need to get in touch with them to figure out how we can better communicate with them, or what can we do to make it more interesting.”
Despite the fact that only one of the positions is being filled, Petersen is staying positive.
“We’re really happy to have Morris Prosser running [for Aboriginal Representative] … it’s very important,” he says. “I’m just disappointed that we didn’t get more from the others. I can understand why we didn’t, but that’s not good enough; we need to work on that for next time.”
Students will be able to vote through their myUFV accounts from October 20 to 26.
