As Unqualified As You Can Get

After seeing Aaron's post, I was shocked who got nominated for the NDP in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. Liam McHugh-Russell had to be the worst student official I have ever come into contact with. In his role as the University of Waterloo VP Education, his goal was to keep tuition low, which is fine enough, but he wanted to keep tuition low regardless of quality of education. While I never had a smear campaign against me like Aaron did, I will recount one anecdote.

In my 2nd year of university, while Liam was VP Education, Liam decided to speak at a Mathematics Society council meeting. At this meeting he wanted to address the problem of Wilfrid Laurier University's proposed BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) tuition deregulation. The reason this mattered to the UW students was that there is a joint double degree program where you can get a BBA from WLU and a BMath from UW in 5 years. I am a student of this program, so this is why Liam's comments came to my attention. At the meeting he said (paraphrasing), "I want to hear about how if your program was deregulated, you would not have chosen to come here. I want to hear about how if your program was deregulated, how you would not be able to afford to come here. I just want to hear feedback. Even if you want to send emails that say 'I hate Laurier' that's fine." He wasn't interested in any type of feedback so he can see how to best represent the students, he just wanted to get negative comments from double degree students so he can use us as quotes as evidence to his conclusion that he came to before talking to anyone. So I sent him a fairly lengthy reply to this saying that I was completely in favour of deregulation, and that I expect him to apologize for insulting WLU in his official capacity when there are a number of joint students that he represents. I never got a response to my e-mail. At the time I wasn't involved with any conservative campus club or political party, so he didn't ignore me for any reason other than I disagreed with his conclusion that double degree students were against deregulation (and for the record, every double degree student I talked to was either in favour or indifferent to deregulation).

This has to be one of the only ridings where I would actually prefer the Liberal candidate to the NDP due to Liam's extreme lack of qualifications. Plus him running pisses me off since there is a weak dipper candidate so the center-left votes may go to the grits. I'm hoping that John Capobianco can clean house here.