Unity wins decisive victory

It’ll be another year of Unity. The party maintained its control of both the executive and council in last week’s CSU elections.
In addition to wining control of the union, all of the student representatives being sent to the university’s highest decision-making bodies, senate and the board of governors ran under the Unity affiliation.
Over the 27 seats on council, 22 were taken by Unity; three went to opposition group Be the Change and two to independents. While Unity currently controls 21 seats, with the reduction from 30 to 27 seats on council, Unity’s share has increased by 11 percentage points to 81 per cent.
However Elie Chivi, VP-elect for communications said that just because the party will have such a strong majority on council doesn’t mean that all members will vote as a block. “Each and every person running with us is an individual, they will all be exercising their right to vote and they’ll all be exercising their own minds and I don’t expect them all to vote one way or another because they are affiliated with Unity.”
Voter turnout was down significantly this year, dropping over 9,000 from the last election, to 3,463. Chief electoral officer Jason Druker blames the drop on a lack of competition. “There’d be more participation, more people would feel the need to be involved because it’s a competition,” he said. “I guess people are happy with Unity.” Adding, “if there’s a need to change, then students will vote.”
“It’s low compared to the past two years, but it’s still higher than every year before that for the past two decades,” said outgoing VP communications and governor-elect Noah Stewart. “With only one choice for the executive . . . people feel a little less enfranchised,” he said. “They knew who the winner was already and they didn’t need to go out and show their support.”
The unopposed executive slate got 2,022 votes in favour; 712 votes against; and 607 abstentions, along with 122 spoiled ballots.
“40 per cent of people who voted in the executive slate election voted no, abstain or spoiled their ballot, despite the complete absence of any actual opposition candidates,” said Be the Change leader Andrew Fernandes.
However Stewart sees it differently, referring to the fact that only 20 per cent of the ballots were actual no votes. “It wasn’t a huge percentage, I think what that shows is that there wasn’t a huge movement against Unity this year.”
In arts and science, Be the Change member Catherine Dicaire, received the most votes overall, 933. She was the only member of the affiliation elected for the 13 seats available for the faculty. Unity members Bryan Solloway, James Barry, Prince Ralph Osei, Alejandro Lobo-Guerrero, Julie Girardin, Dabchy Amine, Nicole Murphy, Kenroy Broderick, Kevin Thompson and Dalia Guy were also elected to represent arts and sciences. Independents Louise Birdsell Bauer and Nicole Devlin were also elected in that faculty.
Unity swept the John Molson School of Business electing to council, and the successful candidates were Kaysy Marie Paolucci, Duy Ba Christopher Nguyen, Sean Zimmermann, Jessica Cohen, Stephen Paek and Eddie Fuchs.
Fine arts elected the only other members of Be the Change: Katherine Bélanger and Kayla Cardinal. The third fine arts council seat went to Unity member Samantha Banks.
Engineering and computer science also went Unity, with Daniel Madero, Heather Gore, Shandel Jack taking seats on council.
Unity members Catherine Reimer and Noah Stewart will be taking seats on Concordia’s Board of Governors.
On the university senate, Audrey Peek will represent arts and science, Kalil Diaz will represent the JMSB, and Samuel Bellemare will represent independent students. They were all Unity candidates.
As well a non-binding referendum question asking students to support renovations at the Loyola athletics complex passed 2,243 to 865.