694 Camosun students voted in the April Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) elections, bringing in new faces and shuffling familiar ones around on the CCSS student council. The elections took place from April 9 to 11.
Fillette Umulisa is the new external executive, replacing Mitchell Auger-Langejan, who is now the Lansdowne executive.
Umulisa says she intends to sit down with CCSS executive director Michel Turcotte and Auger-Langejan to discuss matters relating to the national student movement. She hopes Camosun can be “liberated” from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), the national student organization that Camosun students are all paying members of (see nexusnewspaper.com for our ongoing coverage of controversy surrounding the CFS).
“In my experience, going to a CFS meeting is a waste of money and time because all that happens there is discrimination on people from BC and the voices are not even heard. We just attend meetings to be discriminated upon and to be pissed, for some reason,” she says, adding that the CFS should allocate more time for women’s rights. “So I feel like if we all fight together with the BCFS [British Columbia Federation of Students] and all of the member locals of the BCFS to be liberated from the CFS it would be a really good outcome.”
Umulisa also feels that more sports need to be offered at the college.
Luke Mione was voted in to the Interurban executive position at the elections, while Isaiah Jurkuch is the new sustainability director. Eleanor Vannan is the new student wellness and access director and Hayley Lamb was voted in as an Interurban director.
There was a tie for the position of international director: Donna Chow and Gultash Singh Waraich each pulled in 347 votes. Turcotte says CCSS bylaws require a meeting to be held to decide what will happen with that position.
“We have to have a discussion as to whether it would be worthwhile to hold a general meeting at this point because you have to give two weeks notice of a general meeting,” says Turcotte, “and many of the people who’ve just been in the election will be gone at that point.”
Turcotte says one option is to do the vote electronically to give more students the opportunity to participate, regardless of where they are.
“When that section of the bylaws was written we weren’t envisioning having the ability to conduct electronic votes, so one has to determine how democracy might be better suited. But right now the bylaws would require the calling of a special general meeting, but in light of the time of year I can’t help but wonder if that might be the best way of resolving this issue,” he says. “If you do something that is more democratic than the standard bylaws you usually can’t be faulted.”
Rob Smythe and Waraich were also both voted in at the elections to be student representatives on the Camosun College board of governors.