With the poorly attended provincial elections concluded and federal parliament resumed, encroachment on the campus bubble by political issues will likely be minimal for quite some time. There are definitely groups working on social, environmental, and economic justice issues on campus and within Engineering, fighting for bulletin board space with a new FedS restaurant or a tech start-up. However it’s safe to say that peer discussions about the realities experienced by the majority of people in the world are largely marginalized, let alone actually touched on through our curriculum.
A very negative portrayal of students would be self-absorbed, apathetic, privileged people who don’t bother to vote. Yes, we all have a lot of class and extra-curricular activities to worry about and certainly anyone lucky enough to be at Waterloo is incredibly privileged, no matter how hard they and their families have worked to get here, but we are working with a system that doesn’t favour our involvement.
The provincial election hit a record low turnout of 49.2 %. This result is impressively high considering that we aren’t told the issues and we aren’t given a real voice in the political system. There are many reasons contributing to this situation; the incredibly short attention span of popular media (what, there’s still a famine in east Africa?), selective and biased reporting (ever heard the TED talk “A radical experiment in empathy”?), consumer disconnection from production (what, my electronics are full of conflict minerals? my fruit was picked by an indentured labourer?), the inherent weakness of first-past-the-post (what, the popular vote doesn’t matter?), and the difficulty of accessing and becoming involved in government projects (what, I can’t see this document without submitting a Freedom of Information request and waiting 12 months for it to process?). No matter what reason is stopping us from getting more involved, the cause is there is no incentive for involving students (or the rest of the public). Governments and private-sector organizations have a very easy job doing whatever they want when no one knows about them or has a way to participate; it makes no sense to invest in improving public awareness and decision-making power.
We are being set up to walk into a future with a lot of challenges. Issues like global warming may be past the point of reversal in a short number of years, and political and economic destabilization in the face of resource scarcity can only promise more unnecessary wars (and less overt violence). As students at Waterloo we are members of an economic and intellectual elite with the resources and ingenuity to make a big difference in the way our society progresses. Last week, after telling a group of students that a political discussion group was about to start in the room I had booked in E5, I overheard one of them complaining “Why is there a political discussion in Engineering?” If engineers do rule the world, then we’d be silly not to be discussing it, and I think we could probably find some time in our schedules to think about problems outside of our course load, take action where we can, and make the old people in power care about what we think.
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