Last updated Friday Feb. 16, 11:40 p.m.
Nick Pfeifle, presidential candidate of Renew, has won the 2024-2025 WUSA presidency.
Pfeifle won with 3,720 votes, 1,677 ahead of the runner-up Arya Razmjoo, presidential candidate of the United party. Rafaeel Rehman, who ran independently, received 1,410 votes. The results were announced Thursday afternoon, Feb. 15.
“It will be a challenging year and it’s not a great time to be dealing with the organization of the university dealing with student issues but I have emotionally prepared myself for negative news that will be coming out of my office,” Pfeifle stated. He expressed how he does care about the problems students are facing. Pfeifle mentioned how he is looking forward to hiring an ombudsperson, a senior member of staff whose job will focus on championing student issues.
This year’s election saw a voter turnout rate of 25.17 per cent, over six times the turnout of last year’s record low of 3.2 per cent. The voting period opened online from Feb. 12 to Feb. 14. In total, 8876 students voted out of 35,325 eligible voters, the highest turnout in WUSA history.
When asked about his thoughts regarding the high voter turnout, Pfeifle stated, “I want to believe it happened because students cared about having choice in this election but my gut tells it’s because people like to get a little reward at the end of the day.” He mentioned that if students took the time to look at their options, there would be a strong support for stronger positions for students in the future.
He also said that this bump in voter turnout will not last. “I think this bump is a result of the events of the last three years and it’s something that while we have the student interest we should make sure we are building it to what students want to see out of their society.”
In 2024, the voter turnout for Western University was 22 per cent, which was a 13 per cent drop from last year. In 2023, Western had the highest voter turnout compared to the top 15 schools in Canada. University of British Columbia was second with a 23 per cent voter turnout. Queen’s University had a 17 per cent voter turnout, while University of Toronto had a 11 per cent turnout.
Two Renew party members, Theresa Nguyen and Emma Lee, will also sit on the board as directors.
Others who won the Board of Directors position (out of 26 candidates) include:
- Manohar, Merochini
- Zhu, Jeff (Waterloo United)
- Wang, Daniel
- Jeon, Chevin
- Ahmed, Sarah
- Lan, Jay (KMWG)
- Awan, Fatima
- Athanasopoulos, Matthew
- Chaban, Alex (Waterloo United)
Notably, former WUSA officers Rory Norris and Katie Traynor, president and vice president respectively, were not re-elected to sit as directors. Current directors Matthew Athanasopoulos, Alex Chaban, Jay Lan, and Jeff Zhu will continue to sit on the board.
Results for the student senators can be found here. Election results will be ratified at the board meeting on March 27.
With files from Humreet Sandhu.
A previous version of this article stated that this year’s voter turnout was 7569 students and that last year’s voter turnout was 3.8 per cent of the student body. These have been corrected to 8876 students and 3.2 per cent, respectively. Imprint regrets these errors.
