punditry.ca — uncovering DSU elections

Lisa, John and I were all at the Studley debate today.  I think Lisa’s going to do a full recap, so I’ll just stick with a few of my “friendly observations.”

President:

Only Snow and Zimmerman showed up.  Debo made a cameo during the VP Education portion of the programme, but had left by the general question period.  I’m sure he had a class.  I’m also sure half of the other candidates also had a class…but I digress.

Snow isn’t confident at the podium, Zimmerman looks relaxed and at ease.   Zimmerman doesn’t have awesome voice modulation, Snow is an engaging speaker.  They both need to work on their eye contact.

They both answered questions well, but let’s face it, this is for all the marbles, they aren’t going to screw it up.

VP Internal:

Can we just elect them both?  They are so committed and really know their stuff.  I am concerned/confused about Mark’s plan to have a DSU website that can be updated by anyone.   There’s info on his website about how we could do this. I have no question that it *can* be done, I’m just not sure we *should* do it.   Mark did, however, show that he was a class act when he stood up for his opponent in the face of attack.  Bravo.

VP Education:

I’m surprised how much Burns knows for being a newbie to the scene (he’s so young looking I feel like if I got close enough, he’d smell like womb).  LeForte demonstrated that he knows both a whole lot about the intricacies of PSE funding and also how to tie a double windsor knot.  I approve of both.   Once again CASA is a hot topic.  Burns says we should drop down to associate member status.  He hasn’t given me a good reason why.

VP Student Life:

Kris is running unopposed.  Like John, I say if he wants the job again, we should give it to him.

Senate:

Best.  Race.  Ever.  Between Simms’s quirkiness, Evans’s adorable/genuineness and Blake’s general smile inducingness, this is by far the best group to listen to.   Big points to everyone for reading up on the Academic and External committee and coming to class knowing the answer. Extra points to Simms for picking up the microphone so that he didn’t have to slouch at the podium (Snow, Burns et al. take note!)

Board of Governors:

Why aren’t these people running the country?  They’re all so well-qualified and eloquent it makes me a little queasy.  Give me something to nitpick about, people!

Harris has commented many a time about how he was the President of “another institution” and he used to live in Antigonish…people can put two and two together Harris, why not just tell them that magical institution was St. FX?  Also, would it kill FPW or Horne to smile?  I know BoG is all serious and stuff, but come on.  Look at that, I totally found stuff to talk about.  Crisis averted.

There were general questions from the audience (which was quite full, actually.  Nice one) but I only half paid attention.  Bad pundit.  Lisa took better notes than I did.

• Today the excitement of the election took a back seat to the DSU Annual General Meeting. It was covered in depth here, before and during. Jen promoted it, then live-blogged it, Lisa twittered it, readers commented on it, and punditry.ca broke.  I won’t do a recap, but I highly recommend Jen’s liveblogging and the ensuing 97 comments.

• Kudos to Mat Brechtel, chair of Council and therefore chair of the AGM.  Managing debate and trying to maintain some amount of decorum in a highly-charged atmosphere is no small task.  Maybe for April 1 they can get you one of those classroom performance systems for vote recording.  I read on Lisa’s twitter that the “chair enters Council Chambers to thunderous applause from Council”, and that applause was well deserved.

• Apparently there was vandalism in the SUB during/after the AGM, along the lines of the DSU being fascist (unconfirmed reports).  The expectation of an organization that it take instruction from people who hate it and everything about it is something I suspect is unique to student associations.  Most people who hate a given organization just want said organization to leave them alone.  (e.g., people who hate the federal government want to be left alone to collect guns and hate black people).

• William Horne made an interesting point on his blog, saying “could be just the particular turnout last night, but it seems to me that Dalhousie students are far more polarized that I had previously realized”.  I reflected on that, then decided I disagreed.  Polarized in the context of politics means opposite ends of the political spectrum.  I’ll grant that the anti-war, anti-corporation, etc. viewpoints are near enough the polar end of the traditional “left-wing” side of politics.  But the right-wing-as-used-today view was not well-represented in that room.  If that room had elected a federal government, the Liberal party would look right-wing.  And I don’t know what Student Appreciation Nights are like these days, but even a small fraction of the ones in my day would convince you moral/family values aren’t at the top of the agenda of campus student leaders.  If anything, the polarity of DSU policies has shifted to the left in recent years.  Take a look at campaign material from 2005 and tell me how many times you use the word “sustainbility”. 
    The other use of polarized is to take opposite sides on an issue: pro-peanuts, anti-peanuts.  Taking for example an anti-war motion, those who opposed it at the AGM aren’t saying “war is awesome”.  They are saying, for example, “war sucks, but it’s pretty far out of our mandate as a student union”.
    I also think it probably WAS the particular turnout; the “people who came to the AGM in support of a particular agenda (be it *for* or *against* the motions)” demographic are a terrible sample set of Dal students.  It’s hard to be polarized when you don’t care.
    Though I disagreed in the end, Horne asked a good question that inspired thought, and I appreciate that.

• One interesting indirect outcome of the AGM is a petition aimed at taking away NSPIRG’s funding, promoted on a new website, www.stopnspirg.org.

• Debogorski was levied two fines tonight, for asserting/implying that people were Nazis.  One was out loud during the AGM, and the other was on punditry.ca after he was removed from the SUB by the police.

• Ok, that’s it for the AGM.

• You might have missed it in the AGM excitement, but candidate posters are available online, though the conversation seems to have boiled down to AmIHotOrNot.

• Sexton debate coverage is not up to Lisa’s level, but I do want to follow-up on last night’s wrap-up.  I congratulated Simms on finding answers to a question he hadn’t been able to answer at the Carleton debate, and said I suspected Evans & Blake could do the same.  The results are in: Evans nailed it, Simms was shaky but got the gist of it, and Glenn Blake didn’t know much more but still wanted to learn.  Two out of three ain’t bad, and Blake will have another shot at demonstrating this willingness to learn at the Thursday debate  (SUB, noon).

• I’ve tried to keep this locked up, but the rage is just too much.  I have a weakness: I cannot read text without spotting most spelling and grammar errors.  This makes my thrice-daily rounds of candidate websites extraordinarily painful.  Forget knowing how to spell, and a typo is a typo, but when did we stop teaching people how to use a spell checker?  If you can’t spell and you don’t have a web browser that spell checks as you type, get one.  Surely you all have noticed this as well:

Edgar Burns: “I Belive they would be well attended … If u have any others then please feel free to email…”
Rob LeForte escapes my wrath, but he also has been writing less than the other candidates.

Shannon Zimmerman: “This is more then just better communication” is fairly prominent, but not bad.
Eric Snow: “encouraged to see so many Sexton students ask very thought prevoking question”, but generally not bad or at least quickly corrected.
Gregory Debogorski: … I don’t need to present evidence here, right?

Hobbs: “maitenance”, “simple terms that is”, “debate on the much contentious issue”, “Studly debate”
Craig Jennex escapes my wrath, plus gets bonus points for spelling “camaraderie” correctly.

• Most candidates have Facebook groups to which they’ve invited all and sundry.  I wrote a little script, as I am prone to do, and it tells me how many members are in each group:

• punditry.ca served an astounding 6,000 pages to 550 unique visitors today.

• Yesterday I was impressed with 53 comments; the total as of midnight-ish was 240 comments.

Here’s what I found interesting today.

• The punditry.ca online debate is going ahead!  Stay tuned for more details, and keep this Sunday at 2pm free.  If you want to suggest questions, you know how to reach us.

• A few candidates have added online content.  Mark Hobbs got his shit together per our request and launched markhobbs.ca.  Janet Conrad has a blog & Facebook group, and I found a Shane Simms blog and Facebook group.  To my knowledge, the links in the sidebar are now up to date.

• With so many candidates blogging, it’s hard to keep track of it all.  The punditry.ca blog aggregator keeps an up-to-the-15-minute list of posts from candidates & pundits, and gives you a direct link to listen to the candidates speak to you.

• Today was the poorly-attended Carleton forum/debate, and Lisa’s coverage of it right here was top-notch.  Tomorrow’s debate is in Alumni Lounge on Sexton campus, be there. 

• Pundits Beringer and Tipping weighed in with their inaugural posts.  

• Mark Coffin went to great lengths to determine that LeForte’s classroom talks are not long and boring.

• Lisa took aim at Senate candidates for missing some relatively basic questions, and rightly so.  But I’d like to say I am impressed with Shane Simms.  According to  his own account, after missing the question about what the Academic and External committee does, he went and found out the answers.  

• The other two candidates made a similar promise to know the answer tomorrow, and from what I can tell of Evans she’ll do it without a problem.  I can’t tell anything about Blake beyond what Google tells me: he likes drugs and he drinks the NSPIRG kool-aid like a dromedary drinks water.  

• Simms’ point about the Senate portion of the debate being a lame trivia game probably isn’t far wrong.  It’s tough to ask interesting questions of candidates who don’t even know the basics.  You could ask questions that result in candidates spewing out platitudes, but where does that get you? The other option is job interview questions: what skills do you have that will enable you to stand up in front of a bunch of faculty members and advocate for students?  Or “What expectations do you have regarding  your duties as a Senator?”

Determination: deciding that you will be the last guy to fall down.

• Like Jennex, Leforte offers a set of LeForte clothing pictures, and ups the ante by adding kittens.  That’s right folks, kittens.  There were a few smart-assed remarks I considered, but then I saw this picture.    Now all I have to say is… vote LeForte!  (I kid, of course: I’m safe here in Edmonton, protected by a brave phalanx of -40 degree air and the thousand miles of nothingness called Saskatchewan & Manitoba.)

• Just over 2000 page views on punditry.ca today, to just under 500 unique visitors.  Not bad, we can do better…

• Counting this one, punditry.ca has 18 posts and 53 comments in basically 3 days of coverage.  Wow.  (21 of those comments are on the day 1 wrap-up).

All reports indicate the Carleton debate was rivetting this afternoon. I hear Mike will be getting some interesting photo captions of the event later on today. Stay tuned. 

Right now I’m seated in the Potter Auditorium set up to liveblog class talks from Eric Snow and Rob LeForte. The things I sacrifice my lunchbreak for. After the rumors of Rob’s longwinded ramblings I’ve decided it best to see for myself. 

2:36 PM: Professor is explaining what student government is.  This professor is out of the loop, he just stated that students can have a significant impact on senate. 

Eric Snow 

2:37 PM telling us how to vote.

2:38 PM Talking about his past experience and his five focus areas (see his platform).

2:39 PM and on and on. Did I mention Eric is wearing a shirt and tie today? 

2:40 PM Eric wants us to vote for him. 

Not a bad class talk, very well spoken. Although, I’m not feeling as inspired as I would like to be. 

Robert LeForte 

2:41 PM Explaining what the VP Education is. Oh no he’s pointing at me! Now the whole class is looking. Thanks Rob. 

2:42 PM Talking about the tuition freeze and the risk of loosing commitments from government. 

2:43 PM Rob is making the analogy of being in a storm of nasty tuition increases, and saying he should be the captain, because he knows boats. Hmmm… is it okay that my brain immediately jumped to THIS? 

All in all Rob’s speech was good.  In spite of my own scatter-brained mind, the last part of his speech was very captivating. Yesterday’s reports must have been wrong, biased, or Rob has cleaned up his act.

This is it. The big stage.  Punditry.ca.

Please pardon any formatting errors as I’m new to this blogging business. Hopefully there’s nothing too unreadable about the following!

 I hit the ground running today, determined to earn my place on this panel alongside so many DSU luminaries. Between 11:30 and 2:00, I walked from building to building, from Studley to Sexton, keen to report the sights and sounds of the election fever that I was sure had swept all three campuses. I marched until the backs of my feet were grated down to two flaps of bloody, mangled skin, driving myself onwards by repeating the mantra that no sacrifice was too great in the quest to witness democracy in its purest form. What inspiring acts of candidate outreach did I see over the course of this epic journey?

1)      Mark Hobbs reading the student pulse in the Killam food court.

2)       Shannon Zimmerman making a screaming retreat from the black hole of student interest that is Carleton campus.

 

…like the fearsome crocodile, he clearly believes in biding his time, feigning catatonia, and waiting for the opportune moment to deliver a fatal strike.

 

All in all, I had a great time meeting and greeting the candidates. I probably would have hung out with them all afternoon, but Mark Coffin started to do that whole “manifesting into a demon and bending the space-time continuum in the process” thing again, so I figured that I’d better catch a bus before things got ugly. 

 

Edgar Burns spelled ANSSA “ANNSA” three times on his website, thus undoing the seal that normally binds the ancient evil within Mark Coffin.

I’m looking forward to the first debate tomorrow, and wish all of the candidates the best of luck!

Instead of studying the title subject any further, I’ve decided to dedicate my next few minutes to sharing my thoughts on day one of the DSU elections. I hope you realize I’m sacrificing my grades to provide you with invaluable commentary on the democratic process. 

On Web Presence

I spoke with many candidates before the election, and my advice to all of them was to have a top-notch website that is easily accessible and user friendly.  Yet, only five of the sixteen candidates have bothered to register a domain name, and many don’t even have blogs. Janet, Shane, Gregg and Glenn don’t have even facebook groups yet! I tried to get on to Hobbs’ website,  but it asked me for a password. I tried logging in with my dal netID… no dice. 

(Taking a page from my fellow panelist and fellow caper’s book) 

To Candidates: Make an informative website. Getting a domain name is relatively cheap, and the DSU reimburses your expenses if you make almost the tiniest effort. Also, it doesn’t hurt to run a spell check on your website. Call me a prude, but if you can’t stupid-proof your own campaign materials, I don’t want you signing letters to public officials on behalf of myself and the other 16499 students at Dal. 

To Voters: If the candidate you are considering voting for hasn’t taken the time to communicate their platform to you on the easiest information sharing medium there is, how well do you think they will communicate with you after you’ve given them a 1 – 2 year leash.  

—

On Senate 

Todays senate meeting was a short and quick one. I was impressed at the eagerness of senate and VP ED candidates that showed up. Robert, Edgar, Meredith, and Shane all showed up. Eric was the only presidential candidate present. There was a report from the Senate Governance committee, and although the committee chair was absent, Mr. Snow stepped up and essentially filled in for Dr. Butler in answering questions that senate had on the report.  I may be mistaken, but I think I may have seen some of the Senate ladies batting their eyelashes at Mr. Snow. 

On Wasting Tax Dollars 

On a side note, Industry Minister Tony Clement visited Dalhousie today for a “major government announcement”. Prior to his visit, it appeared that there was no indication to anyone below VP at Dalhousie as to what the announcement would entail. Immediately after his visit, it appeared there was no indication to anyone at all why the minister flew in from Ottawa. He simply dropped in to reannounce the fact that the government had allocated upwards of $2.0 Billion for infrastructure in the Federal Budget. As only Senate members were invited to this announcement, Eric was the only candidate present.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

I can’t tell you all how excited I am to be part of such a stellar team of DSU pundits. This really brings election geekery to a whole new level and I love it.

The official list of candidates has some familiar faces and some ones that this old hack doesn’t recognize. Mike gave a good overview, so I won’t rehash it all but just a few more thoughts.

Debo is back! Man, you have to admire that guy’s tenacity. He recently found my blog post from two elections ago where I inquired as to whether his youtube video was encouraging me to vote for him or let him out on a day pass. I also asked him to stop his ill planned act of shit disturbing. His response was thus:

I was just browsing the internet; after hearing rumours from a colleague of this post I cannot help but giggle on discovering it. I find your abrasive comment quite humorous in the context of current affairs within the DSU. I love it when personal aversion of the truth leads people to hatred of those whom promote it.
If I could procure “a day pass” for the entire Union to egress from the administrative insanity occurring within our Union I would.
Criticizing our Union for disenfranchising students and providing good times for the DSU “in crowd” never equates to an “annoying act of ill planned shit disturbing.”
I can only hope that the author of this post will revisit their opinions when considering future political activities and comments.
The Union should operate under the following principle:
Each according to their need; each according to their work!!!
I shall leave up to the reader to interpret its meaning.

I no longer think Debo is an ill planned shit disturber. I think he genuinely cares about students and the union. I do not, however, think he has a clue about the big picture or how to actually, realistically go about serving students. Regardless, his addition to the field should make for some fantastic entertainment.

The VP Education field (one that is close to my heart) only has one candidate I recognize, LeForte. From what I know of him, he seems genuinely interested in the issues and has kept very well abreast of the PSE goings on, even before the election started. He has on occasion asked me questions that have left me stumped and needing to do some research. This is a good thing. I hope to be able to form an opinion on Burns soon.

Internal is also one where my knowledge of candidates is lopsided. I have worked with Jennex on various projects and know him to be very dedicated, organized and good at what he does. He also has a very good grasp on union goings on, which comes from being an employee for the past couple of years. I don’t know anything about Hobbs except that he was the communications commissioner, which is a good start (for him, not me…well I suppose me too). We shall see how this one unfolds.

When did a BoG seat become the new hot item?! Whatever it was that sparked this little trend, I’m glad of it. The field is also amazingly solid. Conrad is a familiar face around the council table and has always impressed me with her maturity and her zealousness in advocating for the students on Sexton. Rai has been very committed to the Dal Debate Society, Sodales, and as a result became very involved during the society review overhaul. Harris is a med student who was the President of the St. FX Student Union in his previous life. He thus already has a lot experience in this type of role, especially coming from X where their union has a very close working relationship with the administration. Welch is the current law rep on the DSU and on the Law Student Society Board. Anyone who has had to work with the law school administration will find the university’s administration a cake walk. I sadly know nothing about Horne.

Senate is yes/no this year. Sad making. I have worked with Evans, she is solid. Like Mike says, though, unless someone unleashes the crazy this will be a bit of a yawn race.

I’ll update my bio soon, so you all know who the crazy ranting lady is.