Devon Peters reelected as URSU president
Voter turnout peaked at 21 per cent this election
This year 3168 voted in the URSU election, over half voted for Devon Peters. / Arthur Ward
On Thursday March 19, the 2015 University of Regina Students’ Union (URSU) elections closed. The incumbent Devon Peters was re-elected as president by a margin of 1626 to 1177 votes over Daniella Zemlak, the current vice president external affairs.
Jason Gagnon was elected vice president student affairs with 859 votes or 39 per cent of the votes cast. Runner up Emily Barber received 765.
Matthew Mutschler was voted in with 1633 votes against no opposition. He will take up the position of vice-president operation and finance.
Lynn Barber won the vice president external race over Brooklyn Orban and Maria Aman.
Next year’s board of directors will consist of: Stephen Hodgson representing arts students, Emily Morris will represent Campion, Nicole Bear will represent differently-abled persons, Regina Prost will represent education students, Stevan Mikha was voted in for the engineering students, Danish Chowdry will represent graduate students, science students will be represented by Simon Fense, and social work students will be represented by Tressa Nielsen.
Umar Ahsan, Brad Lulik, Jason Gagnon, Devon Peters, Stevan Mikha, and Stephen Hodgson will populate the student senate.
University council seats will consist of Eric Holloway and Stevan Mikha. Executive of council will be Raheel Masood, Umar Ahsan, Brad Lulik, Leanne Heisler, Devon Peters, Stevan Mikha, Maria Aman, and Derek Smith.
How to fix URSU
“I feel invigorated. It was a long campaign but meeting thousands of students and having conversations with them one-on-one really reminded me why I wanted this job in the first place – to make the Students’ Union an organization that works for everyone … We’ve already started planning next year’s budget and board training. I can tell that we are miles ahead of where we were last year at this time,” said Peters.
Returning for his second year as president, Peters sees several areas of improvement.
“I’m feeling really confident that we’re going to continue to re-invent ourselves this year and that all students will start to see what this organization is really capable of … I think that we’ve got a really strong executive and it shows in the people who were elected,” said Peters.
Vice-president operations Matthew Mutschler is excited for the year, stating, “We have a ton of interesting things occurring in the next school year that I am ecstatic to be taking part in. Firstly, we will begin negotiations on the U-Pass with the City of Regina. I am really excited to see what our team can get for URSU’s members and how we can take steps to improving our transit system.”
Our continued coverage of URSU weekly meetings
Lynn Barber says she is “really energized by the feedback from students’ during campaigning and I am eager to get started on achieving the goals I set out in my campaign.”
Jason Gagnon stated, “I’m humbled by the fact students entrusted me to represent them and I’m ready to push myself to ensure I truly represent students the way in which they deserve to be represented. Each new executive has something great to bring to the organization. I look forward to getting to know them better and working with them to improve every student’s university experience.”
This election saw a 21.38 per cent voter turnout of the presidential vote with 3168 people voting out of an eligible 14,504 voters.
