Victoria Silman | News Editor
Featured Image: Voting was haltered Tuesday due to the cancellation of classes with extreme inclement weather, while student turnout to a debate last Wednesday was abysmal. | Fatema Ali
With the third major storm that has cancelled classes in three weeks, the voting period, which was scheduled to begin this week, has been postponed.
Yesterday, the day voting was set to commence, brought in a significant Colorado low that saw York cancel operations for 5:30 a.m. Vision’s campaign manager, Priyank D’Sa, confirmed the cancellation of voting early that same morning, with concerns that voting will be pushed ahead into reading week.
“Voting is cancelled for today; however, next week is reading week and Monday is Family Day,” he says. Referring to the Vision campaign platform, he adds: “If only we had online voting.”
The cancellation comes less than a week after a scheduled campaign debate, which saw a low student and incumbent turnout.The debate was set for February 6, between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m., though little advertising was provided to students who wished to attend.
Emile Wickham, a York alumni, says the turnout was low, and by the time he arrived at 10:30 a.m., the debate was already concluding.
“I arrived on campus at 10 a.m. When I couldn’t find postering on the location of the debate I decided to visit the YFS office, and found out it was in the New Student Centre (NSC). I arrived to the event at 10:30 a.m., and the YFS staff were just about to walk out of the room,” he says.
According to Fatima Babikar, the candidate running for president under UniteYU, the UniteYU candidates were the only ones to show up, resulting in the debate ending early, though the candidates had been informing students of the debate during their campaign.
“The debate ended early because we were the only candidates that showed up. All of our candidates were actively informing students about the debates while speaking about their platform during campaign week,” she says.
D’Sa says Vision candidates didn’t attend the debate for several reasons, the most prominent being the way it is organized. “It’s basically just a trap to get demerit points as anything said during the debate can be considered slander, and people have gotten disqualified before,” he says.
“It’s at 10 a.m with maybe 15 people in attendance and recording the debate is not allowed, including for reporters at Excalibur,” he adds.
Wickham says this isn’t new to YFS elections. “The advertising for the debate online was nonexistent. I checked the union’s web page, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I saw a couple posters advertising the debate in the NSC, but none outside of that.
“The lack of election promotion has been a core part of the YFS election rollout for a number of years, so this year was no surprise,” he says.
He adds: “Although I am no longer a student at York, I took the time to come to debate as I saw the news coverage of protests to Doug Ford’s decision to make student union fees optional. I was hoping that there would be a concerted effort to get students more involved in electing their representatives because of the recent developments but it seems that is not the case.
“The debate was not accessible because of the lack of advertisement, and for a commuter, a live stream of the event should be made available.”
Regarding how the voting period would be accommodated with the cancellation, the CRO could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.
