The Students’ Union election season has come again. It comes like clockwork every year at the end of February. Though, honestly, you did not need me to tell you that. Walk on campus and it would be evident to you simply from the sheer number of posters that are plastered to every surface.
As someone who has been involved with STUSU since my second year, I am honestly excited to see so many qualified and amazing people contending for positions and trying to get involved. In fact, there are a record 35 people running this year for a host of positions. They are all passionate about helping the student body and making student life better. They all claim to be socially conscious people who want to take a stand on important issues. We honestly need people like them to take action and to fight for social justice issues on campus and to lobby government. We also need people like them to sometimes just make student life a little more enjoyable.
What we do not need is the outrageous amount of superficial, brightly-colored leaflets that have been excessively sprayed with disregard across the entire campus. Every table in JDH has been blanketed in business cards, flyers and page-sized table toppers for the supposed purpose of “securing the vote.” For a progressive university “with a social conscience,” the complete waste of paper is disgraceful and the situation has just gotten out of hand. It is shameful for a progressive Students’ Union to allow this to happen. We should all be ashamed that this has been permitted to continue without a second thought as something that is acceptable.
There are more productive ways to secure students’ votes than for everyone to abandon their environmental conscious for a week as they binge on colored ink and print credits. The candidates and the STUSU need to step back and ask if showering campus in a plague of leaflets is really in line with what they believe in? As students, should we not expect more of our student leaders? Or are our beliefs simply meaningless words to be tossed aside whenever an election season rolls around?
