Nomination period opens for 2025 KSA general elections, students to navigate new electoral rules

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The nomination period for the Kwantlen Student Association’s 2025 general elections is open until Feb. 25 at noon.

There are 25 seats Kwantlen Polytechnic University students can run for. Elected council members will have the power to advocate for student initiatives.

“This [student representative] role empowers you to identify areas for improvement within the institution and work collaboratively to implement effective solutions,” the KSA’s website reads. “By engaging in governance, you contribute to creating a more inclusive and responsive campus environment.”

Elections timeline

The nomination pre-check deadline is Feb. 18 at noon, allowing students running to have their nomination package verified so they can correct any errors or omissions. The official nomination deadline is Feb. 25 at noon. 

Contesting students will then take part in an all-candidates meeting on Feb. 26 at noon, which they can join either online or in person. By 1:00 pm that same day, the KSA will open its campaign period for candidates, which ends on March 11 at 6:30 pm.

Candidates will have until March 1 at noon to submit their candidate statement and photo to the KSA. 

Voting will take place for KPU students from March 10 to 11, with polling stations open daily from 10:00 am to 6:30 pm. However, the student union’s bylaws state that the general elections should be held during the month of February.

Candidates’ expense declarations are due by March 13 at 6:30 pm. They have until March 18 at 6:30 pm to remove their campaign material.

Available positions and rules

Following changes the KSA council made to its regulations last year, students running in the elections will now risk disqualification if they participate in interviews with the media, which includes The Runner, about their campaign or if they are published in a news article.

Contesting students are also subject to a new rule that prohibits them from engaging in defamation or making derogatory remarks against the KSA and other candidates in any method, such as written or verbal statements, social media posts, and on-campus protests. Doing so can result in disqualification.

The regulations define defamation as “any false or misleading statement” that is intended to damage the KSA’s, chief returning officer’s (CRO), or another candidate’s reputation or standing and is communicated to another party.

Derogatory remarks are defined as including “hateful, discriminatory or offensive remarks, whether or not intended to damage the reputation or standing” of the student union, CRO, or another candidate, and regardless of whether they are communicated to another party or to the KSA directly.

There are seven constituency positions: a students of colour representative, queer students representative, mature students representative, international students representative, women’s representative, Indigenous students representative, and students with disabilities representative.

Starting this year, those running for the students with disabilities representative position will have to provide proof to the KSA that shows they are registered with KPU’s accessibility services.

During a Dec. 20 council meeting, Advocacy Coordinator John O’Brian said the director of KPU’s accessibility services told him the department cannot provide that information under its procedures and would also “consider it unethical to do so.”

“She pointed out … more than 20 per cent of students probably have some kind of disability, but only about eight per cent are registered with accessibility services,” O’Brian said during the meeting.

A mature students representative must be 25 years of age by the day they take office if elected, and an international students representative must be a current international student, according to the KSA’s regulations.

All other contingency representative candidates must also self-identify as a member of the contingency they are running for, and the CRO, Gurinder Singh Gaddu, may request more information to help determine their self-identification.

There are also 13 faculty representative seats to fill: three arts representatives, two science and horticulture representatives, one design representative, one health representative, one trades and technology representative, and five business representatives.

Also new this year is a regulation change that prioritizes third or later-year students for two of the business representative seats to “promote inclusion.”

All candidates for the faculty representative positions must be registered in the faculty they intend to represent.

There are five campus representative seats available for each KPU campus: Surrey, Richmond, Langley, Cloverdale, and Civic Plaza. Campus representative candidates must live in the city that houses the campus they want to represent or take at least one course on that campus, either currently or during the previous semester.

Candidates nominated for more than one position can only run for one position during the elections and are not allowed to run in slates, meaning two or more people cannot run in a coordinated fashion to gain a mutual advantage.

Interested students must submit their nomination packages in person at the KSA’s main office on the Surrey campus and are not allowed to communicate with the CRO using their KPU student email, which are new procedures the KSA council implemented last year. 

Council also voted in December to increase the number of signatures required for nomination forms from 25 to 75, which must be signed with “wet ink,” meaning no pencil, facsimile, and other non-wet ink signatures.

The association does not allow students to campaign in campus libraries, classrooms, and on KPU electronic academic platforms like Moodle.

If a contesting student wants to file a complaint or appeal to the CRO, they must pay $75, a fee that was initially $20 before the KSA council bumped it to $45 and then to its current amount late last year. Associate President Ishant Goyal said during a Dec. 20 council meeting that the fee increase is to funnel out “mischievous complaints” and the deposits will be refundable.

For more information, visit www.kusa.ca/elections.