Archive for May, 2010

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This is a post about youth politics, specifically at the university level. While it is divergent from my regular topics this post highlights things that can be broadened to politics in general. I would love to hear your comments at the bottom of the page if you think anything stands out or anything seems rather intriguing.

Also, before you start reading please note that these are students that are engaged in these activities, and that running in elections and losing/winning them are part of a unique learning experience in life. These students, along with myself, are learning a political craft when we engage in these activities that will, most likely, last us a life time so some careful study and gathering of lessons learned are important. If I seem a small bit extreme on some of my points, well, I have felt that bite before and want to communicate it to those who are about to feel the same so as to remove as much pain as possible.

Anyways, SAF stands for “Students for an Alternative Future”. It’s pronounced ‘safe’. It was a slate (a “party”) in the University of Calgary’s student government’s election in 2010. It ran thirteen candidates and in the end only had three representatives elected. The only ones elected were faculty representatives at that, as well, and no executives were pulled from their ranks.

The combined budgets of thirteen candidates, the combined effort of thirteen people with their individual networks, and, on top of all of this, in possession of a familiarity with each other within a core piece of that slate for the last two years, fell short. I had the joy of being at the table when the slate was first floated, actually. And from the very second it was started I knew it was bound to failure.

It was easy to see. First of all, there were five instances (five!) where a vision was crushed in favour of having an agreement amongst the members of the slate. The example that sticks out to my mind the most was the idea of having a liquor store on campus (for safety and alcohol awareness, etcetera) which was shut down by one of the candidates. Things that would have differentiated them as a group were tossed to secure cohesion.

So they ran a bland, ideological slate based on three principles:

TRANSPARENCY
EQUALITY
ENHANCING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE

The problem, however, is twofold: everyone was running on this platform and it was misapplied to the audience they sought to target.

On the first point, of the principles being shared by all in the election, well, it’s obvious. All of the candidates running had to deal with transparency, equality, and serving students. Nobody–nobody–went against that grain. Nobody said they wanted an opaque executive or government. Nobody was promoting inequality. Nobody said they wanted to turf the student experience and make student’s lives a never ending hell.

It didn’t differentiate itself from the other guys. It was vanilla, and didn’t do anything to inform or change the opinions of students.

On the second point, a group of people who have never had to deal with a un-transparent organization, unequal organization do not have the emotional push to react to a policy such as theirs in such a manner that would cause them to vote for SAF. A dominant voting group at the university would be the resident students who tend to be 17-19, in their first year of university, and who have never held a job or paid taxes. Unchallenged youths entering, for the first time, a place away from home and ready for an experience that would educate them about the world both emotionally and scholastically.

And this runs counter to those who are interested in cynical, second-guessing politics of demanding transparency and equality–the emotion and the logic required to think about politics in terms of transparency and equality requires one to have an opinion strongly about it and the group SAF targets did not gel to that norm.

Secondly, SAF had no internal structure other than it being a group of friends. A party, or a slate, requires that control and leadership takes place. A group of friends working together and very much unwilling to argue or debate passionately to avoid hurting feelings is destructive to creative energies required to generate quality policy. You need the authority, the law, and the codes to contextualize any debate within it and keep the group functioning… but at the very same time, you need that vitriol and passion to jump in and bash some heads. SAF avoiding this process and created lacking policy because of it.

What was created was, as noted earlier, a vanilla level of policy with no vision.

Thirdly, the candidates were dramatically unprepared, both in knowledge and in time commitment. I suppose this is, sadly, a side effect of having no incumbents and only one past candidate in their slate. They just were unprepared and provided bland answers that dithered and dathered without saying anything concrete. This is likely another compounding factor in their inability to generate policy.

Time commitment, quite frankly, was also lacking. In terms of researching the Students Union, reading on the changes to the way that the government existed, and following Student Legislative Council meetings, only one or two showed any effort to show up and learn. And the slate candidates who bothered to show up? They were elected.

Fourthly, the slate did not have the experience necessary to challenge certain positions. The Students Union at the University of Calgary manages almost $20million each year and is one of the most powerful student unions in North America. Seriously. It controls 20,000+ square feet of commercial property, has an operating budget in the millions, and is expected to represent students to the university, within themselves, to the governments at all three levels (municipal, provincial, and federal), along with to private interests. This is complicated stuff.

And none of the candidates had the experience of either running before (except for one) and no incumbents were with them, so they were uninformed about the gravity of what they were trying to take control of.

Fifthly, the opinion makers were solidly against the slate. You know the conversant, bubbly people who talk to everybody about everything? And who, by virtue of their connections, can spread knowledge, both good and bad, about a group of people? That’s the group that SAF didn’t talk to and didn’t try to at least curtail.

It hurt them, too. I am positive that one of the executive candidates would have won if it wasn’t for her name being tied down to the SAF slate, and the loss to the students at the university if huge because of it.

Sixthly, there was a branding issue. The supposed leader of the slate didn’t utilize the slate logo on his posters. Not only this, though, but the supposed leader was generally seen to be (because of point five) controlling the slate to engender his ego (which the slate was never meant to do, by the way). So the first thing most people knew was that the slate was the tool of a person who was disliked, power hungry, and, well, probably uncaring about student needs because of this.

Seventhly, the SAF were not bold. The first thing on their site that pointed as to why they should vote for them is that “We want to take in the ideas of those involved, incorporate those who wish to be and give the best student experience to all students.” That is not bold. It isn’t even populist–it’s not delivering what people want but hiding in a corner until you grab power… and then your in a position where it doesn’t matter what small promises you made to listening to students were.

Eighthly, they did not have a uniform method of communication. They did not share a twitter account, but had 10. They had separate facebook groups, while having a shared one at the same time. If they were interested in having one message to the largest audience possible they had to bring their resources together and target–hard–the students at the university.

Ninthly, and this bleeds into point eight, this leads into a greater point of there being no coordination of resources or, quite frankly, a budgetary strategy. Coordination of their budgets only occurred in the last four days of the election.

And, finally, there was no electoral plan. They did not know who they were targeting, who they were contacting, or who they were trying to get to vote for them. They formed no coalitions, didn’t contact any clubs, and didn’t orchestrate cross-student group cooperation.

With a race that drew almost 4,000 votes for just for Arts Faculty Representative (my position) out of a little under 8,000 students, well, that’s bad politics. While it’s great to have a policy (which they didn’t have) it doesn’t matter at all if you cannot communicate it to as many people as possible. SAF failed at that, and it doomed them before they even started.

The reason I didn’t run on that slate (I was propositioned by twelve different people about seven or eight times) was because of this gargantuan problem of vision, structure, and lack of strategy. I saw this, almost instantly, from the start, and it instantly pushed me away from joining up with their slate.