Two executives acclaimed as 2019 SU General Election candidates announced

By Jason Herring, February 15 2019 —

The Students’ Union officially announced the candidates of the 2019 General Election on Feb. 15. A total of 42 students are running in this year’s election, slightly lower than the average of 49 students over the past five elections.

Two executive positions are acclaimed. An acclamation occurs when the amount of students who apply for a position is less than or equal to the number of positions available.

Kevin Dang is acclaimed as next year’s vice-president academic. Dang is currently the SU’s vice-president operations and finance. Alisha Gordon, currently a student-at-large on the U of C’s senate, is acclaimed as next year’s vice-president student life.

Acclamations also occurred for five faculty representative positions. Mathieu Chin and Candace Cho will return as kinesiology and nursing representatives, respectively. Dalal Souraya is acclaimed as the law representative and Georgia East is acclaimed as the education representative. Maggie Shortt is acclaimed as one of two Haskayne School of Business representatives — the second business representative position is vacant.

Two other positions — the veterinary medicine representative and the social work representative — are also vacant. In total, 10 positions are either vacant or acclaimed, the highest number over the past five elections. Over the past five elections, an average of seven positions were left vacant or acclaimed.

Four candidates are contesting the presidential position: Harrison Montgomery, Renzo Pereyra, Jessica Revington and Quinn Stevenson. The three candidates vying for the VP operations and finance role are Omer Mansoor, Briana Stallcup and Jarin Thundathil. The vice-president external election is a three-way race between Austin Caron, Sadiya Nazir and incumbent Anayat Sidhu.

Six candidates — Marley Gilles, Justin Gotta, Rayane Issa, Tomiwa Oje, Adrian Ongteco and Malika Qurishi — are running to fill four arts representative positions. Angie Hu, Luke D. Iremadze, Chaten Jessel, Michael Nguyen, Manpreet Sahota and Maryam Zaheer are contesting three science representative positions.

Students in the faculties of medicine and engineering will elect two student representatives each. Amy Beevor-Potts, Jameson Dundas, Fady Mina, Alam Randhawa and Siavash Zarezadeh are the medicine representative hopefuls, while Khaled Elmalawany, Keely Lindsay and Barney Miao are running for engineering representative.

Ananya Ayachit and Frank Finley are running for the sole student-at-large position on the Board of Governors, while Raquel Jackson, Dilpreet Samra and incumbent Jonah Secreti are battling for the two student-at-large roles on the U of C’s senate.

For all candidates’ platforms, visit the SU’s website. Read the Gauntlet in the coming weeks for extensive election coverage and vote through your myUofC Student Centre between March 5–7.