Arthur MacatangayThis article expresses opinions based on the Campus Saint-Jean Forum of the Students’ Union 2022 Election on March 2, 2022.
The first forum for the Students’ Union elections this year was the Campus Saint-Jean forum. As candidates were discussing how to make school more accessible and embrace hybrid options, the hybrid forum itself was failing to perform on both of these points.
Those who attended the forum in-person would have heard everything clearly but those watching remotely experienced consistent technical difficulties. Entire sections of audio were extremely muffled and impossible to hear. While it is understandable that audience questions would be difficult to hear — and those questions were thankfully typed into the chat — the candidate answers themselves were undecipherable at several points throughout the forum.
Overall, the scheduling and planning of elections forums has been poorly communicated to students. Despite having an elections team in place for weeks, the time and date of every forum — with the exception of the Myer Horowitz and the residence forum — were only announced at the candidates’ meeting, less than a week before some of these forums took place. Additionally, the beginning of the campaign was pushed back by a day through an impromptu vote at the candidates’ meeting because a typo on the UASU elections website incorrectly said the campaign began on March 1, rather than the planned starting date of February 28. The result was a mad scramble to get everything ready for the start of elections.
This renders forums, which already experience low turnout at the best of times, inaccessible to students.
Even then, up until last night, Friday’s residence forum did not have a scheduled time. This time was only confirmed after The Gateway reached out for a public comment regarding the Elections Office’s lack of communications on the forum — the time was decided less than two days in advance.
Unlike the CSJ and Aboriginal Students’ Council (ASC) forum, it also had not been advertised on social media until The Gateway reached out for comment on this column — potentially because there was still no confirmed time.
Students are busy; they have classes, exams, and jobs. For many, not knowing ahead of time when these forums will be, means they cannot attend. This lack of concrete scheduling ahead of time hurts turnout to the forums and accessibility.
The Gateway reached out to the election’s office Chief Returning Officer (CRO), Lucas Marques and his team for comment.
They said that while there were audio problems for the Zoom livestream, the Instagram livestream provided by Association des universitaires de la faculté Saint-Jean (AUFSJ) was “very clean” and they informed people of this in the Zoom chat.
While the Instagram audio is certainly better, it is still difficult to hear candidate answers at times as the audio is not very clear and picks up background noise. The Elections Office team also mentioned the technical difficulties throughout the forum were “due to the resources available and the fact that we were only able to have one person managing all three platforms [in-person, Zoom, and Instagram live].”
In regard to the residence forum, they “did not receive any confirmation from the other organizations (such as the residence associations) in a timely manner or any confirmation at all.”
The Elections Office also noted that they’re only required to hold one forum — the Myer Horowitz — during elections, adding that other forums are “the responsibilities of the organizations in which the forum pertains to.”
“Forum organization is a collaborative process that is dependent on more bodies than just the Elections Office. As per SU Bylaws candidates will get 24 hours of warning and the Zoom link or invitation before each election forum.”
However, these scheduling issues are by no means new; the elections office has had issues with scheduling for years. The fact that this has consistently been an issue reflects the fact that this is an institutional problem and not necessarily any single person from the elections office — perhaps the Students’ Union needs to hire more people to serve on the Elections team for things to be able to run smoothly. That being said, this is an issue and needs to be taken seriously.
Leaving things undecided or making last minute changes is frustrating to students, student journalists like myself, and the campaign teams of those who are running. But worst of all, the scheduling issues and technical difficulties hurt accessibility for students. This erodes the entire purpose of these forums: to educate students so that come election day, they can make an informed choice on who to vote for.
