Acclaimed: Meet Your ASFA President

NewsChristopher Curtis — Published February 8, 2011

Acclaimed: Meet Your ASFA President

Without any candidates to debate or match wits with, Alex Gordon is running for president in this year’s ASFA general elections.

Although this might seem like the ideal scenario for a politician, Gordon said it actually forces him to work harder.

“If I was against someone else then maybe there would be a forum to debate and discuss what’s important to us,” said Gordon. “But right now it’s me against this big crowd. No one knows who I am.”

Last year, Gordon was elected to represent the Sociology and Anthropology Student Union on ASFA. He was also a part of the Fusion slate that swept into office during the Concordia Student Union’s 2010 general elections.

In the wake of former Concordia President Judith Woodsworth’s Dec. 22 dismissal, Gordon was one of the few CSU councillors that demanded mass resignations at the university’s Board of Governors.

“I was on council representing sociology students and they would have wanted me to [take a stand],” he said.
Coming into this year’s campaign, Gordon told The Link he wants to focus on community building to ensure that ASFA can reach out to the 17,000 students it represents.

“It starts with ASFA’s Member Associations and getting them involved,” said Gordon. “But then if you ask people what ASFA is, eight out of 10 will tell you they don’t know.”

If this year’s election is any indication of student participation in ASFA, Gordon will have his work cut out for him. Only three out of ASFA’s seven executive positions are being contested and no one is running for VP communications. In comparison, last year’s election saw candidates compete in a fiercely heated election, though the clash of rival factions vying for office often turned ugly.

As a result of the 2010 election, which was riddled with accusations of foul play and culminated in the removal from office of two candidates, ASFA council decided to do away with political parties. Now, every candidate is running alone, a practice that Gordon is cautiously optimistic about.

“There’s a positive part of the no party system, that you have to go out and do your own thing, you can’t bandwagon onto someone else’s abilities,” said Gordon. “The negative aspect of it is that you get to know the people you’re running with in a party. You can develop a platform and work as a team. [But] it’s too early to tell if the elimination of political parties isn’t a good thing.”

Gordon also told The Link he wanted to create an ASFA scholarship to be awarded to a deserving candidate from the faculty of Arts and Science.

-Christopher Curtis

This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 22, published February 8, 2011.