This was the year that things got personal.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday evening, VUSAC co-presidential candidate Rahul Christoffersen accused opponent Chris Knipe of “appropriating the language of equity and representation” that featured prominently in his and running-mate Stuart Norton’s platform. Knipe’s original post reiterated his claim that VUSAC doesn’t do a good enough job representing student interests, but it changed the source of this lack of representation from the insular nature of VUSAC that he’d been criticizing throughout his campaign to the lack of diversity on the judiciary.
The exact content of the post isn’t what I’m trying to document here. What Tuesday’s back-and-forth between Knipe and Christoffersen represented was the boiling over of tensions that dominated the week-long race. Knipe’s post, made on the eve of the final voting day, was just the inevitable combination of his anti-establishment stance and the equity-based rhetoric that slowly took over the campaign. The result was the idea that the reason that VUSAC doesn’t do enough for students isn’t just a programming issue, but an equity one.
An informed reader will have realized by now that I haven’t brought up how Knipe’s post outlined solutions to these problems. That’s because, with the exception of a proposed census, there weren’t any. Instead, the post was a good example of how many candidates in this election diagnosed a host of problems in VUSAC and offered abstract restructuring as the cure-all. But abstract it remained: the list of concrete policies proposed to make this change happen started short and stayed short.
The sense that VUSAC could be doing more for students can’t be resolved by simply acknowledging the presence of structural problems. When you promise “better representation” without taking the time to think about how you would actually achieve it, you create the erroneous impression that the system is not working anything like it should. This impression does a disservice to both students and the candidates who create it.
It’s not that VUSAC is a lost cause, forever serving as nothing more than a glass-doored bubble. It can be a source for good, and we’ve seen it in some of the things that the council has done: this year’s mental health and sexual violence focus groups, which played an effective part in the battle for real change in administrative policy that’s currently happening on campus; the work to make Highball more accessible and truly formal; inclusive fundraisers for homeless LGBT+ youth. But these are all tangible events that occurred over the course of the year, elements of a portfolio that directly affect Vic students and those outside of the College.
Some may claim that this year was a reconstruction year, and not indicative of what VUSAC is capable of doing. This is true, but only to a degree—it doesn’t take twelve months for an organization that’s open 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, to build itself back up from some certain disaster. And even if it was, much of what VUSAC accomplished this year was outlined in the platforms of the candidates who ran for their positions. None of the platforms were based much around the structure of VUSAC (save for Vice-President Internal, but that’s literally their job). By focusing on what they could do for students, they didn’t foster a sense of dissatisfaction by setting up unrealistic goals for themselves. They aimed for the opposite.
So there’s a paradox that arises from making a perceived problem with VUSAC the crux of a campaign, and that’s the lofty expectations you set yourself up with. If you spend too much time diagnosing a problem, then you have less time to actually solve that problem when you step into office. This leaves students doubly disappointed: the change they were promised doesn’t come, and the programming that they’re used to, that nobody even campaigns on anymore, is one of the casualties of this half-step. It’s much easier to demolish a house than build one.
I keep thinking back to a question that VPSO-elect Hannah Brennen asked near the end of the Town Hall. “There’s not very many people here right now, and barely anybody watching on the live stream,” she said with the tone of somebody who just realized their illness was terminal. “How do you really plan to get more students to care about student politics?”
The better question is, why should more students care about student politics? Does caring more about student politics mean spending five hours sitting in NF 003 watching people debate the ideal structure of VUSAC, like what people did during the Elections Town Hall?
I have hope for VUSAC, and you should too. Knipe’s candidacy raised the very real question of what more the council can do for students, and Christoffersen’s engagement on that Tuesday evening proved, if anything, that Knipe’s concerns have become a real issue. But VUSAC is a union representing some 3,000 students, many of whom never set foot on Vic campus and are simultaneously represented by the UTSU. We need to keep in mind what we can expect from it.
“Collaborating” with other campus groups, “integrating” organizations with the students of Vic, “representing” students’ interests and identities—these are all the exact things that a student union should do. But these are things that should come from the regular interactions that students need to have with their student union. They’re ultimately just byproducts, and that’s why, when used the way that they were this year, they were empty buzzwords. By overstating the need for VUSAC to change, you run the risk of overstating VUSAC’s jurisdiction, and all that manages to do is leave people disappointed about something that’s outside the realm of possibility.
A more diverse council and a strong focus on equity issues, especially at a college that’s as white as Vic, are the best way to ensure that students are properly represented. But it’s doing a disservice to what VUSAC can actually do for who it represents—from both an equity and a student body perspective—to promise this representation before telling students how.
