Canadians turned out to the polls last Monday in the highest numbers since 1993, and voted in a Liberal majority government. Newly elected Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau said in his acceptance speech that Canadians had sent the message, “It’s time for change, real change.”

SFU set the stage for multiple political events throughout the campaign as candidates battled it out for the newly formed riding of Burnaby North-Seymour. With 36.2 per cent of votes, SFU adjunct professor Terry Beech of the Liberal Party came out on top; The Green Party’s candidate, SFU professor Lynne Quarmby, placed fourth with 5.2 per cent.

The Peak sat down with SFU Political Science and Women’s Studies professor Marjorie Griffin Cohen soon afterwards to see if the political science department was as surprised as the rest of us at the results of the election.

“We had a little betting pool [in the department], and these are professionals,” Cohen said. “Nobody got it right.”

The election was followed by a social media storm of some Canadians celebrating the departure of a Conservative government, with others bemoaning the newly elected Prime Minister’s lack of experience and his party’s history of failing to keep promises.

Cohen acknowledged that in the past the Liberal Party has campaigned from the political left, but governed from the political right. However, things may be different this time around.

“I think he knows people are onto the Liberals about that,” Cohen said, “He’s got to prove himself.”

A Liberal campaign promise particularly relevant to SFU is the pledge to revamp the National Energy Board (NEB)’s approval process for pipelines. In late 2014, Burnaby Mountain became the focus of national media attention when protesters blocked the surveying work in preparation for the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. The NEB had given Trans Mountain access to the surveying site, which is an environmentally protected area.

The Liberal party has taken a case-by-case stance on pipelines, so even with a reformed NEB, the Trans Mountain Pipeline may still be built. Cohen spoke to that possibility, saying “it would be very disappointing. I don’t think you’ll get a Liberal elected again in BC.” She added that due to the fact that the bitumen transported by the pipeline would not be refined in province, “there’s only disadvantages for BC.”

Uncertainty about campaign promises aside, there are signs that politics in Canada and the rest of the world have changed in the past decades.

Cohen said that the world is “teeming with people with more progressive ideas both in the UK and the US [that have] some kind of following now,” while in the past, they would have been in the margins.

However, Cohen warned that bringing those changes to bear isn’t for the faint of heart. “If somebody really does want to make a change, they have to be bold and they have to have courage.”

SFU Vancouver opened its doors to the public at Harbour Centre last Wednesday as part of SFU’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Nearly 800 people attended the event, which featured over 37 exhibitors representing various departments, programs, and offices from all five buildings that comprise the Vancouver campus.

The opening ceremony featured an address by President Andrew Petter, performances by the Woodward’s Community Singers, SFU Pipe Band, and William Lindsay from the Office for Aboriginal Peoples, the latter of which recently opened a First Peoples gathering space at the campus.

Event coordinator Kamilah Charters-Gabanek noted the performances were one of the highlights of the night. “The Woodward’s Community singers is a group out of Woodward’s that is open to anyone in the public, to come into the university space, [. . .] feel welcome into the institution, and make connections here to the community.

“[SFU Vancouver] is a pretty unique place concentrated in several blocks of the downtown core that has so many different groups of people,” Charters-Gabanek continued. “All of the programs that participated and everyone who came out and helped make the Open House a success did a great job of showcasing the types of community engagement that we offer here.”   

Attendees were also able to join a guided tour of the Harbour Centre campus, as well as participate in over ten free workshops that were offered throughout the evening. The tours included a visit to a brand new 24,000-square-foot incubator space for the VentureLabs business accelerator on the 12th floor.

The workshops are normally offered with a fee; however, Charters-Gabanek explained that “because of our community engagement mandate, we wanted to offer them to everyone at no cost.

“We had workshops from Career and Volunteer Services on the relationship between a degree and a career,” said Charters-Gabanek. “We also had two of our Beedie professors from the downtown Segal Graduate School of Business, David Hannah and Ian McCarthy, host two workshops. One was on the fundamentals of effective negotiation, and the other was on learning from creative consumers.”

The rest of the workshops were hosted by SFU Continuing Studies, which was the original group of programs based in Vancouver when the campus opened 25 years ago. Altogether, Charters-Gabanek explained, the workshops gave people a sense of the variety of programs and courses offered at the Vancouver campus.

Laurie Anderson, Executive Director of SFU Vancouver, commented, “By any measure, the SFU Vancouver Open House was a successful evening: positive vibe, lots of interest at the program information tables, good attendance at the workshops and many people mingling until close.”

Said Charters-Gabanek, “I think we did a really good job of showcasing the variety of not only what we offer at our campus, but how we offer it, too — that people can come into the university in so many different capacities, whether they’re an undergraduate student, a graduate student, a lifelong learner, a mid-career professional, or honestly just anyone from the community, [they] could come in and connect.”

Five SFU students who joined Tech Entrepreneurship@SFU are making waves with their new fish tank monitor.

Leonie Tharratt, Kyle Tharratt, Spencer Arbour, Kevin Cruz, and Ivan Shchukin joined the program that helped them get their product started.

“This program was invaluable in enabling us to develop our own idea by providing support and funding to us and allowing us to maintain ownership of the idea,” Tharratt said in an email interview with The Peak.

At this phase in development, the device will be able to monitor temperature, ammonia levels, and water temperature. The team plans to develop it to monitor pH, nitrite, and TDS (total dissolved solids).

Tharratt added, “From there we can use an algorithm on the back-end to determine GH & KH trends. All this information is sent to the user’s app and will provide alerts when they exceed the specified acceptable ranges for each parameter.”

The team of students saw a need for this type of monitoring system both from first-hand experience with their own fish and from the experiences of others. Tharratt mentioned a situation in which an aquarium fish appeared healthy, but there was a problem with the water in the tank.

Said Tharratt, “I went to buy a few fish from someone and it turned out that he had none for sale because when he was on vacation his heater malfunctioned and killed everything in the tank. [That] cost him about $1000 in juvenile fish that he was planning to sell.”

Although the team is still in the prototyping and development phase of their project, they are expecting the cost of making their technology a reality to be between $300 and $400. Funding is their last hurdle towards selling their device on the wider market.