By: Takhliq Amir
The Student Representative Assembly by-election nomination period officially closed on Oct. 20, setting up the upcoming week for the campaigning period that will conclude with the election of three new SRA members.
Currently, there are two vacant seats on the SRA social sciences caucus and one seat on the kinesiology caucus. These seats had been filled in the 2016-2017 year when elections were initially held but have since been vacated by the elected representatives for various reasons. One of these representations, Kathleen Quinn, SRA Social Science, had been re-elected for her second term, but has stepped down due to other commitments.
“My co-op with the city of Hamilton was extended and I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. With the new board I was already making progress on my platform so it was a tough choice, but I had to go with the best opportunity for me and my career plans,” said Quinn.
With two empty seats on the Social Science caucus, however, there is arguably greater strain on the remaining members to adequately represent their faculty.
“As caucus leader, two open seats means we’re missing 40 per cent of our caucus. This means most of the decisions we make are usually tentative as we can’t set out to do a whole lot until we have a full caucus that can make decisions together,” said Uwais Patel, SRA (Social Sciences) caucus leader.
“The SRA is a leadership opportunity that is mostly self-driven; you get what you put into it. It means we have two less caucus members not fulfilling a platform, representing their faculty or supporting the caucus as a team,” he added.
He states that although such situations should not have adverse impacts in the long run, they do cause difficulty in managing responsibilities in the short term.
“We’ve had to put some of our projects on hold and re-evaluate some of the projects our former members had set out to accomplish. This ultimately means that we have less representation within the faculty and less support internally as a team. I believe the more voices you have, the more you can accomplish,” Patel said.
"The SRA provides support as it can through one-on-one [sessions] and setting firm deadlines, but one of the difficulties is that this organization relies heavily on volunteer labour."
Kathleen Quinn
Former SRA member
To compensate, Patel personally decided to run a stronger outreach and communications plan for the by-election in order to have greater outreach. On the MSU website, there is also a page by the SRA Social Science caucus that aims to smooth the election process for those running for a seat in this by-election.
Taking on greater responsibilities is not uncommon in the SRA, where representatives sit as active members on other MSU committees in addition to their own workload to effectively represent their constituents. However, this can also take time away from other extracurricular and work commitments and potentially present as a source of stress for the members, something that was acutely felt by Quinn.
“The SRA provides support as it can through one-on-one [sessions] and setting firm deadlines, but one of the difficulties is that this organization relies heavily on volunteer labour. I found it difficult to balance my job outside of the MSU, school and responsibilities I have as a mature student that others may not have. I think it does affect your mental health as there has been an expectation in the past to work beyond what one should to maintain balance,” she said.
Quinn suggested that there are options that the MSU should explore in lessening the workload of SRA members to ensure that they can balance their responsibilities with their academics or other commitments.
“I think that an honorarium, better compensation and accurate staff hours tracking is key. The culture needs to shift,” she said.
“Ambitious platforms are great, [but] they shouldn’t come at the expense of staff and volunteers… I think we need to discuss with the school how many basic services we are providing as a union and ask for more support,” Quinn added.
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You deserve to know what is affecting you as a student when it comes to decisions the city is making. When it comes to informed decisions, we have generally kept you covered about topics like the LRT, the HSR, the additional bylaw officers in Westdale and trans health equity.
In the future, we will continue to cover these topics and more such as the city council’s decision to change the ward boundaries and the appeals filed with the Ontario Municipal Board, which includes the potential for student neighbourhoods to move into other wards and split the student vote.
The purpose is to help you make an informed decision. That comes with the assumption that you will make a decision in the first place.
In the 2014 Hamilton municipal election, ward 1, encompassing the west end of Hamilton where a significant portion of McMaster students lived, had 21,770 registered voters. Only 8,870 votes were cast. The current councillor, Aidan Johnson, won by 640 votes.
The mayoral election had a total of 122,756 votes with Fred Eisenberger winning by 10,314.
Students at McMaster have the capability to rock the vote and radically alter the results for the wards they are in and the city as a whole off of numbers alone. A motivated student base would be able to demand any changes the city could provide and continuously put pressure on city council to fix any number of things about Hamilton that negatively affects McMaster.
As time goes on, I become more and more pessimistic that this will not happen. The assumption that McMaster students will not vote, likely an accurate one, has resulted in decisions that do not cater to McMaster students. I fully expect that we will be spending the next four years reporting on issues that could easily be solved if students bothered to care about the city they will be in for part or all of their post-secondary education.
The closer we get to next year’s elections, the more promises and policies you will see out of the city and other hopefuls to cater to demographics that they want voting for them. If you have been paying attention, you should have noticed this starting to increase long ago.
While the student union has become increasingly engaged in Hamilton advocacy over the course of the last year, it will take far more than that to get councillors to make promises to you and follow through with them.
There is plenty of time before the next election, but not a lot of time before candidates finalize their campaign strategies and policies. Act now, vote later or risk waiting and complaining about it when no one in city hall is listening anymore.
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As the school year winds down, so does this volume of the Silhouette. The end of something usually begs for some kind of retrospect to think about what we did, how it could have been done better, or what we need to continue to do.
When I flip through the editorials and the news pages, I see a noticeable difference in our news and opinion coverage. There were more stories this year about the greater Hamilton community instead of simply focusing on McMaster and McMaster Students Union issues. Hamilton city politics has been equally entertaining and frustrating to follow, as I’ve written for reasons before.
If there’s one takeaway I hope our readers have from this year, it’s that students need to make their voices heard in the Hamilton community. In 2018, we have to go out and vote for the councillor we want to represent us, because we haven’t done that in the past and that’s why students are consistently forgotten by Hamilton city council as a whole.
Last week provided a great example. Hamilton Street Railway proposed two cuts to bussing routes that directly serve the McMaster campus. The proposal, which council voted against, was to eliminate the extra busses provided at peak times.
The MSU was never consulted on this, and if it wasn’t for the reporting of Joey Coleman of the Public Record, it never would have been on the Sil’s radar. The HSR was proposing to cut service less than two months after McMaster students agreed via referendum to keep the same service levels at a higher cost. We would have been paying more to get less.
Instead, students spoke up. They tweeted about it, maybe some emailed the Ward 1 councillor Aidan Johnson. Within the day, the proposal was dead. Students won, right?
No. The cuts really never should have been on the table. But its par for the course, and McMaster students have done it to themselves. Our voices can be ignored because we don’t vote in municipal elections. I’ve written about this before, but I’m writing about it in the final days of this volume because I think it’s that important that students actually go vote in 2018.
City council will not ignore us if we vote and show up to the meetings. The trans rights protocol passed earlier this month featured a number of speakers from McMaster and I believe they made some of the best arguments for why Hamilton needed to support this.
And I understand that voting in municipal politics isn’t that exciting. The stakes don’t seem as high as provincial or federal politics, and making a decision is difficult as the coverage is much lighter. Local politics gives you the opportunity to see change in action that you can’t get at the other levels. Some seem insignificant, like decisions on when to open splash pads, but the trans rights protocol mentioned above is a tangible and meaningful impact. Hamilton city council is currently working on a landlord registry too. City hall talks about much more than zoning changes and parking rates.
We need to be proactive rather than just reactive. As the media landscape continues to change in Hamilton, it is less likely that we will be able to rely on journalists to shine a spotlight on changes that will impact student life. McMaster students can and should make themselves a political player in 2018. We are not an afterthought.
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This week has the McMaster student body gearing us up for the event of the year — the MSU’s General Assembly! Just joking, no one actually cares that much about the GA.
Typing that last sentence, I feel a pang of remorse for all those that have dedicated time to planning this year’s assembly (hell, I even feel bad for my own staff because we take the time to report on it each year). But the reason most students genuinely do not care that much about the GA is because most students have, unfortunately, grown accustomed to the fact that Mac doesn’t always care that much about our feedback.
Let me preface this by saying, I do not think that Mac never considers our feedback. But historically, in part thanks to logistics, policy framework, and general challenges that come from working with thousands of students, it can sometimes be challenging for our university to hear and interpret our feedback.
The GA functions as a public forum where students can voice their concerns related to the MSU and all trepidations can be motioned and eventually voted upon. Sounds pretty democratic, right? Well, not completely. The GA is often dominated by a few motions that overshadow “smaller” issues students want to bring up, making it hard for all voices to be heard. In addition, for a motion at the GA to be passed, the assembly itself needs at least three percent of the student body, so roughly 650 students, present at the event. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but historically this number has been hard to reach. What is supposed to be the most democratic form of discussion for students has its limits.
And the GA isn’t the only student-driven method that has its barriers. Every year we fill out course evaluations, create petitions and write countless articles asking for change, but don’t always see it, or even hear people acknowledging our feedback. Take for instance the yearly petition that students have created to request their majors be listed on their degrees (this year a Google Feedback Form entitled “Program on the McMaster Degree” if you wanted to sign it). For the last few years, students have gone to the university with the same request, and every year their appeal is denied, and as far as the signees can tell, isn’t even acknowledged.
With this as the current standard for accepting student requests and input, it’s not surprising that events like the GA tend to pass by unnoticed by the majority of the student population. Why should students make the extra effort to push forward a change if they feel their voices will not be heard?
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We might be lying to you. We don’t actually know if Justin Monaco-Barnes will be your next MSU President. Given Sarah Jama’s disqualification, which she is appealing this week, it’s possible that if she is successful, the vote recount will tell us that Justin isn’t the winner of this year’s election after all. The truth is that for many people, including most of the candidates, the election isn’t over yet.
However, we made the conscious decision to give Justin the presidential cover page he deserves if he is, at the end of it all, still the president-elect. But we aren’t ruling out the possibility of having another presidential face on our cover next week either.
From an outsider’s perspective, these elections have been messy. However, more than anything else, we have been surprised by the shortcomings of the rules governing MSU elections. Several things have happened in the last week that point to the need for change in how elections are carried out.
The most glaring shortcoming was the public announcement of a candidate’s disqualification without providing clear and detailed reasons behind this conclusion. While the results of the elections were released when the Elections Committee finished their deliberations in the early hours of Jan. 29, the general rules that Sarah Jama broke that led to her disqualification were made public approximately 12 hours later.
The minutes for the meeting, however, are still not posted on the MSU website at the time of this writing. It’s understandable given that the Elections Department wants to make sure the information that they release is accurate and that those involved are also full-time students, but the lack of available information does a disservice to both candidates and the student body.
Currently, Jama’s post is the only place where a student curious about the events that have taken place can find a detailed account. The problem with this account is that it is told through the lens of a candidate who is appealing her disqualification. We emailed the CRO to ask her to confirm the details shared by Jama, however, she did not want to comment on the veracity of the post.
More than failing to provide students with information in a timely manner, the process as it stands now also tarnishes the reputation of the disqualified candidate. When appeals are filed right before the end of the elections period, the targeted candidate does not have the opportunity to respond to the complaint. In the case of severe violations, the candidate should absolutely have the opportunity to present counterevidence before a decision as extreme as this is made. Unfortunately, the current system allows for campaign sabotage, especially if the Elections Committee is failing to reach out to the campaign in question for information. There have been only two presidential candidates disqualified in the MSU’s history, and the last one, in 2008, was overturned following more than a month of discussion. It is clear that disqualifications are rare and the decision to disqualify a candidate should be carefully examined and as transparent as possible.
In a high profile disqualification such as Jama’s — one only has to look at the attention her page’s status on the disqualification has garnered — the current results of the election should not be treated as if they are official. While the MSU Elections Department makes it clear in their post that the results are unofficial, you wouldn’t know that looking at the posts Monaco-Barnes or any of the other candidates made on their Facebook pages.
Several things have happened in the last week that point to the need for change in how elections are carried out.
While we sympathize with the Election Department and Committee’s other responsibilities as students and understand that this is a sensitive process, we also think it is unreasonable to keep the student body in the dark so long after this decision was made. If the Elections Department is aware of its limitations, it should not make drastic announcements based on what appears to be incomplete evidence.
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By: Gabi Herman and Isaac Kinley
From Jan. 26-28, in addition to electing their next McMaster Students Union President, McMaster students will be able to vote in a referendum concerning the election of MSU Vice Presidents. The MSU has three Vice Presidents: Administration, Education and Finance. Currently, the Vice Presidents are elected by the Student Representative Assembly, a student council that includes faculty representatives and the current MSU President and Vice Presidents.
The current referendum will allow students to vote in favour of keeping the current system or switching to an at-large vice presidential election. Since this change would require altering the MSU constitution, the “yes” side will have to garner at least two thirds of the vote in order for it to pass.
The motion was put forward by Eric Gillis (SRA Social Sciences) at the 2015 MSU General Assembly in March. Earlier this school year, the Student Mobilization Syndicate uploaded a petition to Change.org asking that the question of direct election of Vice Presidents be put to McMaster students in a referendum. The petition gathered more than 800 written signatures and subsequently, the SRA voted to hold the referendum. However, going into the campaign period, they voted to maintain a neutral position on the referendum question. Looking forward, students will have to decide where they stand on the issue.
The referendum question, as it will appear on the ballot, is:
This referendum concerns the MSU Vice President elections. Currently, the three Vice President positions are elected through the Student Representative Assembly (SRA). A proposal has been put forth to move the Vice President elections away from the current system to an at large election. The format of this at large election is currently undefined and can take on many forms.
This is a constitutional referendum, which means it requires two thirds of the vote to pass. Abstentions will not be included in calculating the vote.
Are you in favour of changing the MSU Constitution to include an at large MSU Vice President Election?
Yes
No
Abstain
For more information, visit https://www.msumcmaster.ca/services-directory/31-elections-department/referendum-2016. Information on the “Yes” side campaign is available at http://www.vpref.ca/
Below, two Silhouette contributors examine the advantages and drawbacks of both positions.
The “Yes” side:
There are a number of problems with the current system. For one, while a respectable 42 percent of eligible students turned out to vote in the 2015 presidential election, most faculties saw turnouts below 30 percent in the SRA elections. This means that the people tasked with choosing vice-presidents are themselves only elected by a small minority of MSU members.
Furthermore, there’s little anonymity in a group as small at the SRA. If its members know Vice Presidential candidates personally, this will likely bias their vote and impede their ability to make a disinterested choice on behalf of all McMaster students.
Allowing the entire MSU membership to elect its Vice Presidents would solve both these problems. If voter turnout for vice presidential elections is close to that of our presidential elections, this would make VPs not only directly elected by McMaster students, but elected by a larger proportion of them than are represented in the SRA.
Additionally, vice presidential candidates would have to make their cases to the student body directly rather than behind closed doors to the SRA, increasing the transparency of the election and giving students a better idea of the platforms of student government hopefuls.
It seems odd to have people as powerful as the Vice Presidents elected by an intermediary group that only represents a small minority of eligible voters. Voting “yes” in the upcoming referendum will allow McMaster students to have a greater say in the decisions affecting them.
The “No” side:
Selecting a vice presidential team is no easy job. The election process for each Vice President is a long process. Every candidate is required to meet individually with each member of the SRA. This allows every SRA member to gain a deep understanding of each candidate’s platform, one that would be near impossible to achieve for every student at large. In fact, the job has become so difficult that last year’s meeting lasted 22 hours. A motion for all MSU members to be eligible to vote for VPs will be voted on in a referendum this coming election, but many believe it would not be the right decision.
An at-large vote would require VP candidates to campaign, which many report make VP positions less accessible to prospective candidates. Robyn Fishbein, a fourth year Sociology student, was a voting member of the VP Election Reform Ad-Hoc Committee last summer. “It’s not the VP’s job to be the face of the organization, and I think that makes a really big difference,” says Fishbein. Vice Presidents work mostly behind the scenes, while the MSU President and SRA members have inherently public roles. The highly public nature of the campaign creates a barrier to students who are ultimately interested in holding leadership roles that are less public than the President and SRA members.
The challenges of allowing all MSU members to vote also include student disengagement. The Ad-Hoc Committee report points out that at-large voters may be vulnerable to “voter fatigue,” which might contribute to a lower voter turnout. The VP elections would also require many names and positions on one ballot; with more names on a ballot, voters are more likely to vote at random. And, says Fishbein, “let’s face it, so many elections can get annoying.”
Although counterintuitive, many believe that the MSU democracy functions best without more opportunities to vote. Regardless of the result of the referendum, major restructuring will have to take place to prevent more inefficient, daylong meetings.
By: Chukky Ibe
What happens when we treat student politics like warfare?
With ideas as our weapons, we convince ourselves we cannot concede one inch of ground lest we lose. Direct opposition becomes the only acceptable way to win. Debates and arguments replace collaboration and dialogue, and there is no honour in changing one’s mind once you have stated your position. This adversarial style of debate does not incentivize moral diversity. It does not explore various ideological certainties and the experiences that lead people to reach their diverse moral and ideological predispositions. This warlike culture is pervasive in all aspects of society. It limits the information we get rather than broadening it. It is the knee jerk reaction you experience – but may not entirely think through – when you hear something you disagree with. It is the Bill O’Riley of dialogue.
This paradigm is exactly what we have seen happen with debates surrounding vice presidential elections on campus. Last year, a proposition was put forward to the General Assembly that students, not the SRA, should elect their student body Vice Presidents (Education, Finance, and Administration). Debates on VP reform have been framed as the two sides – students and representatives – in opposition to each other; as direct democracy versus representative democracy. Some basic nuances have been lost.
The VPs have different portfolios and are responsible for different facets of the MSU. To compare them is to compare apples and oranges. Is it useful for the VP Administration to be elected by a referendum? Should the general manager and the comptroller, as people directly involved in the MSU’s accounting, get more say about the VP Finance? What do the VP Education, and VP Administration have in common? Should they be chosen the same way? Giving students the simple choice on their ballot of “yes/no/abstain” doesn’t allow Marauders to explore or understand the intricacies of each position.
This dichotomy that students have been forced to choose from has stemmed from the “argument culture” – or warlike debates – surrounding the issue. By presenting the options as oversimplified extremes, argument culture has limited our understanding rather than expanding it. Rather than seeking various forms of evidence, the debate has simplified complex phenomena with a “Yes” or “No” binary that does not account for all available possibilities. The truth has become the winner of the debate, and the perspectives of the losers are nullified and invalidated. Issues have been presented as having only two sides; winner takes all.
The MSU leadership has spent more time and talent defending outlandish claims than advancing their ideas. Suggestions for dialogue are laughable. Both sides are in the pursuit for victory and not truth. There is little consideration that current options may be inadequate, because opposition is viewed as our only method of inquiry. When opposition does not acknowledge complexity, then argument culture is doing more damage than good.
Issues have been presented as having only two sides; winner takes all.
Although the issue is going to referendum, the outcome is now of little significance. The union leadership continually showcases its inability to embrace its diversity of opinions. Warfare and argument culture remains its default position. In this, Marauders will always lose and common sense will never prevail. Democracy dies when debate trumps dialogue.
Photo Credit: Jon White/Photo Editor
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After an eventful campaign period, Filomena Tassi was elected as the Member of Parliament representing the area around and including McMaster University.
With a turnout of over 60,000 voters in the newly created Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas riding, Tassi is part of a returning wave of support for the Liberal Party, a party that has been conspicuously absent in representing Hamilton at the federal level for the past nine years.
The Liberal Party achieved a historic victory this October, reaching a parliamentary majority with 184 out of 338 seats, ousting the previous Conservative majority government. The Liberals now represent two of the five Hamilton ridings, with Tassi in the HWAD riding and Bob Bratina, former mayor of Hamilton, representing the Hamilton East-Stoney Creek riding.
Since 2006, Conservative MP David Sweet had represented McMaster University in the now defunct Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale district. With Sweet running for and winning the new Flamborough-Glanbrook district, the battle amongst candidates in the HWAD riding was expected to be far more open without an incumbent involved in the race.
Despite this, Tassi won with 29,698 votes, a comfortable margin of nearly 10,000 votes over her closest competition, Conservative candidate Vincent Samuel.
In an election defined by voters desperate for change, it seemed apparent that strategic voting helped shape the outcome of the riding. However, it’s arguable that Tassi’s large margin of victory was also in part due to the criticism that NDP candidate Alex Johnstone faced over comments she made regarding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Although candidates declined to comment on the issue during the race, Johnstone’s absence from her campaign to visit the camp, as well as an absence from the All-Candidates debate hosted in McMaster’s student atrium, contributed to a fairly straightforward result that was expected to be much closer between all three parties.
With some of the Liberal Party’s key promises directed towards student tuition and the transition to the workforce, students can expect to see some direct benefits from Trudeau’s government. This includes a grace period for loan repayments until a graduate is earning a minimum income of $25,000, and the investment of $1.3 billion over three years in the creation of new co-op placements for students in science, technology, and business, as well as over 40,000 youth jobs.
Although it’s unclear how much students will be able to save by simply delaying their loan payments to the government, or what exactly Trudeau’s “youth jobs” will entail, Tassi emphasized the importance of students to the Liberal party’s plans in a previous conversation with The Silhouette.
“We’re just trying to bridge the gap from education to work,” said Tassi. “They’re saying the average student debt is $26,000; this is why we want to work with students to try and ensure that the cost of going to school is lowered, and that when they graduate they won’t have to repay [right away].”
Unfortunately, Tassi did not respond to The Silhouette’s request for an interview in time for the print issue.
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By: Chukky Ibe
The Student Representative Assembly is too small. Decisions made by a small sample of people are likely to be skewed because of the outlier effect, meaning that if there is one biased member of the sample — in this case the SRA — it can directly affect the outcome of an election. If 35 people are selected to reflect the opinion of the student body, one outlier, one person who votes for their partner or friend, does not read platforms or decides not to listen to debates, will directly affect the outcomes of any election. Simple behavioural psychology reveals that it is easier to trust people you know. It is easier to believe people you have relationships with, and it is much harder to identify you have a bias toward them. Our current VP Finance was elected by a difference of one vote, which highlights some vulnerability in our system.
The 35 SRA members represent 21,000 McMaster undergrads. A scientific sample of the general population of Mac undergrads requires 10 percent or 2,100 people to claim scientific validity. The current system asks for 35 people or 0.0017 percent of the population. The system is deeply, methodologically flawed. Any decision that comes out of it cannot claim to be a valid representation of the student population. I concede that an election is not a scientific experiment, but it is not revolutionary to ask for a system based on mathematic principles, one which does not solely hinge on the altruism of strangers who are elected to represent people they will never meet.
The representative powers of the SRA are not absolute. We know this because the SRA does not vote for the MSU President and incoming SRA members. We recognise there are limits to representative democracy. This is why the MSU constitution defines the General Assembly, a direct democratic forum, as its highest space of governance. Students vote for the MSU president and the SRA officials, and this does not make the SRA less representative. It defers representative elections to the highest governing student body — the students. This deference reduces the outlier effect as it broadens the sample size. Any numbers larger than the 35 SRA members we currently have further reduces the outlier effect and the margin of error. A larger sample would mean that SRA members still get to vote, but it also opens voting to part-time managers, service volunteers, faculty representatives, welcome week reps, and club members. As an assembly member, I must empower my constituents to vote and not make excuses why they should not.
The next conversation to have is one of the logistics. If this is the greatest challenge, then we must support our elections committee as they find collaborative solutions. Timelines can be adjusted to optimize our combined democratic model. VP elections can be moved to the end of March, and we can adopt a debate model with time limits as recommended by the VP reform committee. This draws from the strengths of the representative and direct elections to optimize our democracy. This means successful candidates will have extra weeks of transition with their predecessors, and the SRA has fewer meetings during the exam periods. A class talk schedule that rotates according to faculty, so you do not have all candidates going to one class at the same time, and no one has an undue advantage. Candidates can also table-share to maximise traffic flow in the student centre.
The ideas I present in this short article are not solely mine but are a synthesis of conversations I had with 23 students who are not involved in student politics. More than anything, while talking to them, I was reminded that the people we serve will make rational decisions when they have the information they need. They must be treated with dignity and respect. By increasing the number of people who vote, we reduce the mathematical errors present in our current VP electoral system.
Photo Credit: Eliza Pope
With elections taking place during reading week, we are using this week’s issue to share as much as we can with you about candidates and knowing your options.
For myself, and many other students, this will be my first time voting in a federal election. I have voted in provincial and municipal elections before, but this will be my first time approaching the beast that is our national electoral system.
As someone who is ready to see our current overlord shimmied out of his current throne, I am making sure that before I go to the polling stations this year, I am informed, aware, and prepared to vote strategically. There has been a large amount of discussion this year about our ability as voters to create the change we want by voting in or out certain parties, and using majority voting tactics in swing ridings to ensure one progressive party receives the majority of votes, instead of having them evenly split across the spectrum and going to the wayside with not enough support.
Our current first-past-the-post system allows for a party to win with a minimum of 34 percent of the votes when split between three parties. This means the two remaining parties could receive up to 33 percent of the vote each, but that one percent would make the difference.
My priority as a citizen, and as a student, is to elect one of the progressive parties that can create meaningful changes for students, education and job prospects, among many other issues.
In the 2008 federal election, a website called strategicvoting.ca identified 68 districts where the combined progressive vote was greater than that of the Conservatives. Meaning there were overall more votes for left wing parties, but the votes were split in a way that made them each negligible.
If the method of strategic voting was followed at that time, we would currently have a minority progressive government.
If you live in a swing riding, look online to see which progressive party has the highest chance of being elected, and if you support the difference this could make, use your vote to count towards that, instead of falling into an almost even split between parties.
As McMaster students alone, we account for thousands of potential voters. It is important that we use this position wisely in order to incite change where we see it fit. In this month’s issue, both our News and Opinion sections look at ways students can benefit from each party’s platform. And while the point of this whole article is to emphasize the importance of strategic voting, it is even more important to know who you’re voting for, and how they can make a difference to you — that’s the real strategy behind voting.
