Laforest and Gallardo officially reinstated

At the March 16 Concordia Student Union judicial board hearing, two formerly disqualified executive candidates in the upcoming election were officially reinstated.

Presidential candidate SchubertLaforest and VP academic and advocacy hopeful Lucia Gallardo of the affiliation A Better Concordia were notified of their ineligibility to run via an email sent March 7 by the chief electoral officer, Ismail Holoubi. He stated that Laforest and Gallardo were not registered students and thus barred from running.

At the judicial board hearing, A Better Concordia presented evidence indicating that Gallardo and Laforest, both international students, had experienced trouble with their visas and this was the cause for the temporary deregistration.

“When you’re an international student, your status is volatile,” said Laforest.

The presentation of the cases for both sides became fairly tense as the hearing progressed. At one point, one of the members of JB had to ask Holoubi to be more aware of his tone and “be nicer.”

Laforest commented that “this has been a very arduous process,” and he is looking forward to moving on.

“I feel I kind of lost out on the whole experience,” hesaid. “I had to spend all of my time dealing with this case as opposed to actually campaigning. “

With the ruling in favour of A Better Concordia’s candidates ,Laforest said he will be hitting the ground running come next week.

“I’m going to keep going and campaign my heart out Monday,” he said.

Polling for the elections takes place March 20 to 22.

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