Official results are up at dsu.ca/elections
Turnout: 16.5%
President: Saghar Jha, 68%
VP A&E: Aaron Beale, 65%
VPI: Ramz Aziz: 55.7%
VPSL: Danny Shanahan: 61% of the vote (third ballot)
BoG: JD Hutton, 75%
Senate:
Referenda
DSU passed- 51.6%
NSPRIG passed- 52%
Loaded Ladle passed – 55%
Gazette failed- 39%
CKDU failed- 42.9%
Nursing (only Nursing students) passed (69%)
It’s time for the 2013 Election Candidate Video Awards. And by time, of course, I mean roughly a week too late. I’m filling in for Lisa this year as she is currently behind the Iron Curtain and without proper internet access (I don’t know what she is up to, but I can only assume that a PED-pumping, scientifically engineered Chinese lawyer literally killed Jen Bond during a supposedly friendly moot court exhibition recently, and that Lisa is doing something along the lines of this in preparation for her grudge match.)
A few disclaimers before we start:
1) I am not Lisa Buchanan. Dial back those expectations.
2) I wrote this at some point between getting home from a twelve-hour shift at work at 11 pm, and waking up for my inconveniently scheduled morning shift at 5:55 am. The “humour” (such as it is) may reflect this.
3) Even if I joke, I still have major respect for anyone with the guts to run. Congratulations to all of the candidates for surviving under the election microscope for this long.
Anyway, I can barely see straight, so let us begin the ceremony before I pass out.
I am the kind of person who is always prepared. Seriously, you should see my office closet: I have a pinstripe suit, a casual blazer, a ballgown, 3 pairs of shoes with different heel heights, and multiple pairs of socks. I can look good for whatever my job or social life throws at me. If I’m this prepared in my everyday life, you can imagine how prepared I was for election night all those years ago (note: I’m old) when I was hoping it would be my name that topped the ballot.
Back in 2008 I ran to be the Vice President Internal at the Dalhousie Student Union. I was running against a good guy and we had an amicable race which was saying a lot for that election cycle where we had two sitting VPs running against each other for the presidency. I had been urged to run for the, at that time, VP Education position but I didn’t want to lobby governments as I thought it would be boring (little did I know that four years later I would do external advocacy for the Dal Grad society and really enjoy it). For once I picked not the position I probably had a great shot at winning, but the position I thought I wanted to do the most. I was being true to myself and it bit me in the butt.
I think my subconscious knew well before anyone else that the election wasn’t going to go my way and maybe that’s why I applied for a term at a school in the south of France. When the election hit full swing I had already been accepted but hadn’t confirmed my attendance as I was pretending to be confident I would win and therefore couldn’t attend that year.
On election night the bartenders gave me an empty pitcher so I could have something to puke into instead of being in the bathroom and missing the results due to my nerves. I sat with good friends who were rooting for me and had specifically asked a non-Dal friend to come and make sure that whatever happened I would keep my dignity. Thank god he was there! I lost by 26 votes – enough that it was decisive for me to accept that I wasn’t the right choice for the DSU but not so much that my pride was injured. However, I started bawling my eyes out. One of the past DSU presidents came by and told me better things would come my way as he squeezed my shoulder but in the moment, my world crumbled around me. Trusty non-Dal friend was watching where the Dal Gazette reporters were in the room and decided that I would hate whatever interview I gave that night so he took me out through the kitchen and past the victorious VP candidate, now President-elect, popping champagne in the SUB lobby. I was taken home, given a shot of rum, and left to wallow. But my subconscious didn’t let that happen for long.
I immediately accepted the offer for the French school, booked my flights, and began planning what I would do during my weekends. In the morning a Gazette reporter had rustled up my cell number and called me for an interview. I think I gave a pretty good interview where I didn’t come off looking like a bad loser. And I had the best answer to her question of what I was going to do now I’d lost: I was going to school in France! When the paper came out I actually read the story of the VP Internal race with my winning opponent. When I came back from France and started my MA at Dal it was my opponent that hired me back to the DSU Council. It paid to not burn bridges in the heat of the moment of losing.
What’s the point of this weird story? Always be prepared, always have a Plan B. If you have something lined up that is just as good as doing whatever job you’ve fought to get, it is that much easier to have dignity in your loss and be able to hold your head up. The SU world is tiny and people have long memories. It served me well that I was gracious in the aftermath. Plus, I am a firm believer that things happen for a reason. Just because it’s hard to see it in the moment the losers almost always have a good, if not better, life afterwards than those that stick around. Everyone that runs in a SU election are hard working, driven people. The ones that don’t have to stay around another year take that drive and make awesome lives. Take comfort in the fact that you have the abilities to make your life great and you get a year’s head start on your opponent. University lasts only so long, real life lasts until you die.
So, moral of the story:
– Have a Plan B
– If you’re a crier get the hell out of there before the student paper finds you
– Lose with dignity
– Go and make an awesome life for yourself that the winners can only wish they had.
Good luck to all the candidates!
Several nights ago, I posted a “where are they now?” list of the DSU presidents who served between 1980 and 2000. It seems that a few people on this blog are at least as dorky as I am and actually enjoyed slogging through the info contained within. With this in mind, I figured I’d offer up seconds to those five or so poindexters by digging even deeper into the past and posting a sequel. The following list picks up where we left off the other night and features biographies of every DSU President between 1960 and 1980, listed in reverse chronological order. This list was more difficult to put together than the first, because whereas most of the more recent presidents have used the internet as a marketing tool to advance their careers, many of the individuals on this list (particularly the earlier dates) have already made their mark in their chosen fields and no longer need to network their way to the top or impress potential clients online.
One thing in particular that fascinated me is the number of lawyers that appear in the pages below. Three quarters of the presidents from 1960-1980 were either law students or final year undergrads on the verge of becoming law students. I have some thoughts on this matter, but I’ll cover them in a separate post, as I don’t want to bury this already lengthy list beneath several extra pages of ponderous, long-winded personal opinion (I would hate for my writing style to throw any of our battle-damaged veteran pundits into violent flashbacks of council meetings past.)
Let us begin.
The campaign period has, for all intents and purposes, ended. Voting begins tomorrow. Who do you think will win? We’re searching for 2013′s Preeminent Punditry Prognosticator. Sound off in the comments. The person who predicts the most races correctly gets a free drink (or reasonable substitute for those who don’t imbibe) on me. The terms are pretty simple: meet up with me somewhere in Halifax, I buy you a drink. To claim your prize, I’ll be emailing you using the email address you commented with, so make sure it’s real! (It can still be identity-obscuring, like a NetID).
Bonus points (er, drinks): if you predict the percentages within +/- 1% I’ll buy you another drink. If you predict the number of ballots it takes that’s another drink. If you predict voter turnout within +/- 1%, that’s another drink. If you get 2 of the 3 bonus questions, I’ll buy you a pitcher. Bonus questions are only considered if you win the grand prize.
So, get to it. Contest closes at the same time as voting.
I have to work through the entire election period this year, and I’m pretty bummed about the situation. Not to date myself or anything, but this marks the first time since the Wasko/McGrath anarchy of 2004 that I won’t be lurking in the shadows during a DSU election.
I’ve barely stepped on campus since the last election, so I don’t have any particularly relevant information to pass on about the current batch of candidates. Apart from the grammatical curb-stomping I’ve been considering laying down on a few candidates after visiting their websites (I’m looking at you Aaron “Im Not Entirely Familiar With The Rule’s Surrounding The ‘Sucsessful’ Use Of Capitalization Or Apostrophe’s” Beale), I have very little to add to discussion this election cycle.
While I may be a bit out of touch, it doesn’t mean that I’m any less excited. If you’re reading this, you understand. For the breed of wonks that make the yearly pilgrimage to the House that Smit Built, March Madness has nothing to do with college basketball. I’d hate to let this year pass by with out making some sort of contribution to the festivities, so I’ve been working on a little project that might be of interest to those who have ever wondered what happens to the brave, ambitious young men and women who win the biggest prize on election night.
I’m in the process of compiling “what ever happened to…” information about as many former DSU presidents as possible. I’ve already discovered some fascinating things about individuals ranging from the late 1800s to the modern era. For the sake of keeping a coherent, comprehensible timeline, I’m going kick this off with a chronological countdown of the first twenty names on my list—the presidents who served between 1980 and 2000.
I’m starting this time-travelling adventure at the dawn of the current millennium for two reasons:
1) It generally seems to take most people a decade or so after graduating to really settle down and start advancing in their chosen careers.
2) I’m fairly certain the most of the presidents since 2000 are either pundits, friends of pundits, or Punditry.ca readers, and thus you can find out what they are up to from sources that are far more reliable than these half-assed attempts at research that I’ve been undertaking on my lunch breaks at work.
Finally, before we get started, I’d like to say a quick word about my methodology.
“Google.”
Now that we have that out of the way, let us begin.
It’s been a rough few months for Justin Bieber. First his celebrity girlfriend, Selena Gomez, breaks up with him, and then he has a series of embarrassing celebrity meltdown moments leaving us to wonder if Selena/Justin was the new Spears/Timberlake is Bieber the new Spears? At this point you may be wondering how I came to the conclusion that Beale could actually be said Bieber in disguise. Let me explain…
It all began with fellow pundit, Mr. Wedge, using the term Beale-iever in his latest post, associating my mind with Beliebers (ie. Justin Bieber fans). Wedge also describes Beales’ shitty website in his post so I went to investigate for myself. I acknowledged the normal challenges associated with wix.com sites before I noticed something a bit odd. Beales’ ‘accomplishments’ chart can be read in English or MANDARIN. Why Mandarin? I thought. Why not provide Google translator to have access to a number of different languages? To my knowledge Dalhousie does not have an especially big Mandarin speaking community. Could Beale himself speak Mandarin? Something fishy was going on…
Leaving his site to let my thoughts wander, I went on to my next favourite past time; Google searching a number of different things relating to Justin Bieber. It was then that I stumbled upon this interesting Q & A from wiki answers:
Does Justin Bieber speak mandarin?
Answer:yes, he does
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