By Charlie Buckley
Ousted former-members of the Ryerson Students’ Union aren’t even cold in the ground beneath Lake Devo, and Ryerson’s student political parties have already begun plans for next year. In a sudden and unexpected barrage of recyclables, Rye’s Kerr hall was blanketed once again this Monday by a cascade of campaign posters and banners.
Faces of hopefuls for the 2019 elections stretched as far as the eye can see; low-res jpegs with half-baked campaign promises scrawled across them in dry-erase marker.
Thus far, injures have been mild. One engineering student lost his balance on an unidentified party’s innovative new Get-Out-and-Vote Caltrop Welcome Mat, sending him and his cell phone sprawling onto the paper-littered floor. Vice-president Operations candidate Jimmy Caracas, who happened to be nearby at the time, stopped to comment.
“The GOaVCWM is working exactly as planned,” said a triumphant Caracas as the ill-fated engineer snapped the battery back into his phone. “This year, we’re angling to have our constituents ‘stumble upon’ their student government. Not enough people get out to the polls, and we at the RSU have long since accepted that we’ll never get the well-informed vote. That’s why we’re targeting the unawares. Walk-and-texters, students with hangovers, the elderly; people like that.”
But not everyone is so excited. Maggie Fanshelle, a third-year computer science major, expressed her discontent in an open letter to the parties on Facebook this Wednesday.
“We are not drones to be marketed to,” Fanshelle wrote in the impassioned call-out. “This is the last straw. We can handle millions of wasted dollars, embezzlement, flippant attitudes to free speech and deliberate stonewalling of opposing viewpoints; but colourful posters? Here is where we make our stand.”
The letter is, of course, referring to the significant environmental and financial impact of 2018’s campaign, which reportedly bulldozed a total of 37 acres of Amazon rainforest. Considering that the rainforest is now only 500 feet across in its entirety, the efforts were met with no small amount of controversy.
With just 50 weeks left until the elections, Elevate, Unify, Rhino and the rest are showing no signs of slowing down. The industrial-revolution-era poster mills, staffed by street urchins and other underaged undesirables, are reportedly running day and night. Stay tuned for more weekly coverage, every week, forever.
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