I just came back from Concordia’s Hall Building, the historical epicentre of student politics.

Or at least it was.

What used to be, only seconds after midnight two weeks before the election, a building covered from floor to ceiling in posters of all kinds in some sort of fire safety inspector’s nightmare, is now a shadow of its former self.

At the bottom of the escalator from the second to fourth floor stood a couple of campaigners in orange t-shirts handing out flyers supporting their team. I expected once I reached the top to find another campaign worker with a recycling bin to collect discarded flyers (this illusion of green-ness was first thought of five years ago and has been stolen ever since), but there was no one to be found.

As I got to the fifth floor, and paused to read some of the posters, a woman behind me said she was “insulted” that nobody warned her of an election. It was supposed to be a joke, and I took it as such. Perhaps less so later when I found her chatting with those same campaign workers on the 2nd floor.

For those of you bored enough to care, there appear to be three executive slates in this election: Go, Unity and Impact. No, those aren’t gay bars, that’s what they’re naming themselves. Less than 24 hours after the campaign began, some people are already blogging about it.

The referendum questions, usually the more interesting part of the elections, are the usual fare: a question or seven asking people’s opinions and having no real impact on anything, a question from The Concordian asking for more funding (so it can get a budget similar to The Link’s), and QPIRG trying to suck money out of students by mentioning the People’s Potato and Frigo Vert (without saying that those groups already get separate levies from students). The questions are awfully worded (I’ll try to get a quote once someone puts a question online), but rarely in CSU history has the chief election officer actually made use of his or her power to reject questions which so obviously are meant to prejudice the outcome of the vote.

On the way home I spoke with one of Concordia’s shuttle bus drivers. He let on a student with a cup of coffee despite a boss that’s really picky about the rules. I noted that the STM bus drivers don’t care about food but do care about fares, while the Concordia drivers care about food but don’t care about people showing their IDs before they get on.

Strange.