Twelve positions acclaimed in Students’ Union election

By Fabian Mayer, February 11 2016 —

Twelve Students’ Union positions, including two executive posts, were acclaimed yesterday after relatively few candidates put their name forward in this year’s SU election.

Forty-one candidates are running or acclaimed in this year’s election compared to 45 in 2015. Only seven positions were acclaimed last year.

Current nursing representative Alicia Lunz will be next year’s vice-president academic, while Branden Cave will take over the operations and finance portfolio.

Cave said he has mixed feelings about acclaiming the position.

“At the same time it was kind of disappointing because I was looking forward to the campaign,” Cave said.

Cave was surprised that no one else ran for the position considering the high stakes of the MacHall negotiations.

SU president Levi Nilson also said he was also surprised by the high number of acclamations, but isn’t worried about the quality of candidates.

“It’s unfortunate when there are acclamations but the two people who are acclaimed [for executive positions] have pretty great track records,” Nilson said.

Nilson suspects the commitment level of working for the SU may have kept people from running.

“I think that the way SU elections happen it’s a very intimidating prospect to even run in the election,” Nilson said. “We’ve seen with our voter turnout and the total number of candidates year to year that it’s much higher than most campuses.”

Other acclamations include the faculty representative positions for arts, nursing, medicine, veterinary medicine and law, as well as the Board of Governors student-at-large position.

Voting for the remaining SU positions takes place March 1–3.

 

Acclaimed Students’ Union Positions 

Vice-President Academic — Alicia Lunz

Vice-President Operations and Finance — Branden Cave

Arts Representatives — Matt Abalos, Frank Finley, Peter Friedrichsen, Courtney Leblanc

Medicine Representatives — Sam Sirianni, Steeven Toor

Law Representative — Mark Shearer (incumbent)

Nursing Representative — Jessica Revington

Veterinary Medicine Representative — Erik Burow (incumbent)

Board of Governors Student-At-Large — Shubir Shaikh