The Ubyssey strongly disendorses Alex Zheng and recommends students vote no in the VP External election.
Editor’s Note: The new Editorial Board is a pilot project launched for this year’s elections. From now on, that term refers to the group of journalists who write their views as a collective in the newspaper’s name, linking us with centuries of newspaper tradition.
Our pilot Editorial Board consisted of Features Editor Elena Massing, Politics Columnist Maya Tommasi and AMS Columnist Quyen Schroeder, who served as the board’s chair.
Over the past few weeks, they contacted every candidate, held interviews, attended debates and studied platforms before deliberating among themselves who The Ubyssey will endorse. Their deliberations were private and isolated from the rest of the newsroom, including from me, the Opinion Editor, until drafts had been filed. Like all of our journalists, they practised according to the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Ethics Guidelines.
— Spencer Izen, Deputy Managing Editor and Opinion Editor
Zheng is unprepared on all fronts — AMS politics, organizing, external politics. As someone who aims to advocate for students, Zheng demonstrated minimal knowledge of municipal politics, which is one of his main advocacy fronts. He said he would lobby municipal governments in Vancouver and Burnaby for a rent cap for UBC campus housing. Zheng seemed unaware that the municipalities of Vancouver or Burnaby have no jurisdiction over UBC’s housing policy and that the university and the province would both be more relevant bodies to lobby.
When asked what municipal political actors he would contact, he said he couldn’t give a “super exact breakdown” because the elections were later in the year. Crucially, incumbents are all very public, and at least in Vancouver, the party leadership and many politicians with significant momentum are easily identifiable. Further, there will be half a year between Zheng’s acclamation and the municipal elections: time that could be used to get students' priorities on candidates’ platforms.
While he had some connections with provincial and former Burnaby municipal politicians, it wasn't clear he was prepared to contact other politicians or conduct advocacy at any level of government.
Zheng was Pollyannaish when it came to political organizing. Despite proposing to use similar tactics as the current VP external Solomon Yi-Kieran, Zheng seemed completely unfamiliar with the realities of lobbying. He implied that by collecting information about interested students through a survey, he will have a group he might mobilize in order to improve faltering momentum in policy pushes like the SkyTrain to UBC. This is not how political mobilization works. Political energy cannot simply be frozen and set aside to be utilized in a more opportune moment. A competent VP external would be able to harness current political energy and build on current political momentum to organize a more formidable activist movement.
Politically, Zheng's priorities were unclear. He talked about lobbying the government for the SkyTrain to UBC and rent increase limit, but lacked any coherent policy on securing further education funding for the university. Something which might be needed, given immigration restrictions revealed our overreliance on international student tuition fees.
Zheng proved completely clueless about how AMS advocacy functions. One of Zheng’s key proposals was running surveys to gauge student engagement on key issues like the SkyTrain to UBC. He seemed unaware of how the SkyTrain to UBC was set as a core advocacy goal of the AMS at this year’s annual general meeting. This alone should pre-empt a need to run interest-gauging surveys about SkyTrain advocacy, yet Zheng proposed running multiple rounds of surveys before he’d start advocating. Zheng also seemed unaware of the oversaturation of surveys in the AMS. He said he wouldn’t start unless the surveys indicated there were at least a thousand students in favour. The yearly Academic Experience Survey (AES) only received 2,134 responses after being open from February 2025 to May 2025. When asked by the editorial board, Zheng admitted to not completing the AES or UBC’s Financial Experience Survey. He said he believed he’d completed the Student Engagement Survey — but seemed to confuse it for the end-of-term Student Evaluation of Instruction surveys. Given his track record, it’s unclear that Zheng would have filled out his own survey. He did, however, ask if we had recommendations on receiving survey responses.
Zheng was also unfamiliar with key parts of the AMS’s governance in relation to the VP external. When asked about his perspective on the External Briefs and Communication Committee, Zheng said that since the committee wasn’t public, he wouldn’t be able to answer questions about it. The committee’s minutes are publicly available on the AMS’s website.
We are certain that Zheng will be unable to execute the role of his office. If he is elected, we doubt he will make it through the year. The best result for students would be for Zheng to withdraw from the election, triggering a byelection later this year. In case he doesn’t, you should vote no to Alex Zheng for VP external.
Editorials are opinion essays, and while they represent the views of the Editorial Board, they may not speak for every person at our newspaper. They are subject, however, to the same standard of fact-checking as anything else in our report.
