![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Mitchell-4.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cFor a regular election, 10 percent is a great turnout,\u201d says Turcotte. \u201cGoing by historical norms, often this election would have only had a few hundred voters. I would almost entirely attribute this to the online voting. Every student who has an email registered with the college received an email inviting them to vote. I think that\u2019s the main cause.\u201d<\/p>\n
Katelynne Herchak was voted in as the new First Nations director, and Shauna Nedelec is the new off campus director. Joel Satre and Jordan Johnson are now Lansdowne directors, and Margarita Saldana, Abhishek Gupta, and Dylan Bystedt are Interurban directors. Saldana is also the Interurban Education Council student representative; Mitchell Auger-Langejan is the Lansdowne Camosun College Board of Governors student representative.<\/p>\n
Auger-Langejan was also elected as the CCSS external executive. The external executive represents students at provincial and national meetings to talk about and vote on policies that impact post-secondary students.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be advocating for open-access textbooks, because I think that many textbooks for many courses could be provided at a much cheaper cost, or free,\u201d says Auger-Langejan. \u201cThat will be my main goal. I also do want to try to advocate for the control of tuition rate hikes. My intent is to make school as affordable and accessible to as many people as possible, considering that in many ways it is a necessity to get access to a job market that is very competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auger-Langejan says that he was excited to find out that he won, and that he put a lot of work into his platform going into the election.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I put a lot of effort into figuring out what exactly what I wanted to do with my platform, and I think I made a clear one,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I was really happy with the results. I\u2019m really proud of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s important for students to vote in these elections, says Auger-Langejan, so they can decide who is making decisions on their behalf.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they don\u2019t vote, they don\u2019t get the choice that they should have deciding who represents them when they go to those meetings and who votes on decisions for them,\u201d he says. \u201cI think they\u2019d want to vote if they want to have the right person\u2014 in their opinion\u2014for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auger-Langejan says that 960 out of 9,431 students voting is not a number that \u201cis fully pleasing\u201d to him; he\u2019d like to see at least 50 percent of students voting.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudent politics does affect students,\u201d he says. \u201cI think many students don\u2019t realize that it is actually a fairly big deal to them and that the student politics that take place across the country and the people who run for those positions do affect their experience at the school. Taking the opportunity to vote for the candidates that help do that allows them to have a say in their education.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turcotte met many of the candidates and says that they \u201call seemed to be great, passionate individuals.\u201d He says the race for the position of external executive, which had three students running in it, was a particularly interesting one to watch.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at the first round of that process, they were all very close,\u201d he says. \u201cI think any of those three candidates would have made a wonderful external for the Camosun College Student Society, and I invite the two candidates that were not successful to try to get one of the vacancies that we\u2019re going to be appointing probably at the first meeting in November.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turcotte says that because students are the ones who get to decide who is voted onto the student society board, they should participate in the democratic process of voting. He says that because the student society has an influence over things that go on at the college, and how student money is spent, it\u2019s important for students to get involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe student society funds a lot of things,\u201d says Turcotte. \u201cIt organizes events for students and needs to be in touch with students, and therefore students should pay attention to what\u2019s going on and participate in those democratic processes. But, more than that, the Camosun College Student Society has influence on the college and how the college does things. So, by participating in the democratic process that the student society has, students can have greater influence in what goes on around them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) held its fall elections from October 23 to October 25. This was the second round of elections where voting was conducted online, and it resulted in another voter turnout larger than the CCSS usually gets in its elections. Of 9,431 eligible student voters, 960 voted; during its last elections, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-november-1-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14895"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14898,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14895\/revisions\/14898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}