Opinion: We ran for AMS President as joke candidates. Here’s why

Tony Kulenovic (he/him) is a fourth-year student majoring in computer engineering. Eve Sankar is a fourth-year student majoring in electrical engineering, and minoring in earth and ocean sciences. Quyen Schroeder (they/she) is a third-year student majoring in computer science and English language. They ran as "Nobody," "u/sasamats" and "Barry 'Bee' Buzzword" in the 2025 AMS presidential election, respectively.

A bee, a Redditor and nobody walk into a bar. What will they be having? A green morph suit, 200 grams of honey, a wall of party noise makers, a ring pop proposal and an existential crisis.

If you came out to either of the AMS presidential debates this year, you’d have experienced an absolute mess of a signal-to-noise ratio, with the serious candidates outnumbered three to two. This begs the question: what is the purpose of joke candidates? Is it just to get some chuckles at the expense of discussing serious policy positions?

The AMS has a long history of joke candidates, some more serious than the others. This year, there were three: Barry “Bee” Buzzword, Nobody and /u/sasamats. For the rest of this article, we’ll drop the bits and give you a chance to meet the people behind this year’s joke candidates and learn our motivations for running. You’ll be getting three different perspectives coming from people with varying knowledge of the AMS, interest in governance and commitment to the bit.

Quyen Schroeder (Barry “Bee” Buzzword)

Unlike my fellow joke candidates, I took the Barry “Bee” Buzzword campaign in an intentionally satirical direction. My goal was to use humour to criticize the AMS’s actions, workplace culture and interactions with students and student groups. That’s not to say there were no fun jokes — my Ring Pop proposal to /u/sasamats, having ubussy.ca as my campaign website and regularly calling The Ubyssey “kissable” chief among them — but the true motivation for my campaign was criticism of the AMS.

I attended my very first AMS Council meeting in February 2023 — where Queer and trans students pleaded for their health care not to be considered separate from general health care as defined by the AMS's Health & Dental Plan.

My partner and I watched as a councillor pulled up a spreadsheet on their computer. While the students they represented gave statements to Council, voices quivering and tears welling in their eyes, this councillor shamelessly designed what appeared to be a drinking game.

Others in the room that day observed councillors texting and scrolling social media. I realized our student union, which has enough constituents to be the 20th largest city in BC, was a deeply unprofessional organization.

Since then, I have attended nearly every AMS Council meeting, observing the AMS under the leadership of five different presidents. The Barry “Bee” Buzzword campaign was my critique of the persistent toxic culture and mindset of the AMS that I have observed over the past 25 months.

During the Great Debate, I told the audience I would eat a spoon of honey any time the serious presidential candidates ”took shots” at each other.

I ate nearly 200 grams of honey that evening.

I did not decide to do this simply because I thought it would be funny (though I suspected it would be). Rather, I had observed that in previous years, the establishment candidate would spend the debate tearing their opponents down as opposed to sharing their own vision for the AMS.

I think a political campaign based on attacking opponents rather than sharing hopes for the future does a disservice to voters and pushes political discourse towards polarization and toxicity. I did not want this to go unnoticed.

Whenever the now-President-elect Riley Huntley spoke, audience members would laugh and gesture to me, reminding me to eat my spoonful of honey. Now, they were noticing something they hadn’t been before. That’s the value of satire.

Strategies like this, intended to reveal a truth about the AMS, underlied my entire campaign. Many statements on my website are accompanied by a hyperlink to a source describing the joke’s origin. As such, I’ve received numerous messages from people who thought I was constructing a fictitious scenario only to realize that my jokes were firmly based in reality. Many of these messages referenced my repeated jokes about how over the past 3 years, 46 per cent of AMS executives have left office.

I said I would throw pens at my vice-presidents until they resigned so they could be replaced with my friend’s partner. As ridiculous as it sounds, both (probably) happened. I said my goal was to bring the executive turnover rate above 50 per cent, but I think I’d be less successful at bullying out executives than the current administration has been, even if I had all the pen launchers in the world.

No serious institution should struggle to retain its executives for a one-year term, especially not an institution with an operating budget of $30 million a year. And yet, any description of the last three years makes our AMS sound like a joke.

My main takeaway from my two and a half years attending AMS Council is this: there exists a persistent annoyance at students who attempt to make their voices heard. In my platform, I promised to invite guards and robot dogs with guns to ensure students don’t become too engaged in the AMS. Clearly a ridiculous proposal. Yet in response to students showing up at Council to give feedback on the AMS’s revised sexualized violence policy and to oppose the removal of student-lead referendum items from the ballot, the AMS brought security guards.

Our student politicians will campaign on transparency, then hold needlessly private in-camera meetings that keep students from engaging and allow them to escape accountability for their actions. Candidates who discuss the importance of student engagement and listening to students, then invite guards to threaten students who show up at Council meetings. This creates an oppositional culture within the AMS and should not be the way our student union continues to operate.

Eve Sankar (/u/sasamats)

For those of you who aren’t chronically online, the r/UBC subreddit is a very popular platform with multiple posts a day. Every year around this time, the most biting and objectively funny posts are put out about AMS Elections by the anonymous accounts that inhabit the subreddit. This year, multiple people heavily associated with the AMS decided to post about their involvement with the removed VP Academic and University Affairs, Drédyn Fontana, to a jeering, anonymous crowd.

Reddit's anonymity frees a person from the majority of their inhibitions. This can be good — people in repressive environments are free to be ‘themselves’ in cyberspace and ask questions that are pressing them — but it also means that people will be blunt. And cruel.

A Reddit account like the one I represented is the perfect microcosm of this.

On the /UBC subreddit, a (different) Reddit account asked an interesting question: why don’t normal people run for AMS? After running as a joke candidate, I think I can tell you why.

Normal people don’t run because normal people would never subject themselves to the abject scrutiny that is placed upon anyone running for office. The only type of people capable and willing to hold up despite this type of scrutiny have to have a strong intrinsic sense of self-worth that doesn’t come from what other people think.

Every election season I hear voters remark that “normal people” need to run for AMS office. But the way our system is set up ensures they don’t. The closest that we’ll ever get to ‘normal’ is people like Quyen and Tony — who run as joke candidates. The things I did for the sake of satire — bringing a marching band to the Great Debate, getting kidnapped by engineers — felt far less brave than what Fontana and Huntley did.

It’s easy to make a fool of yourself for electoral laughs when you have little shame and a job lined up far, far away. It’s much harder to take a stance, stamp your name on it and say, this is what I believe in. That should be rewarded, but our system doesn’t allow for it.

There’s a poster in the bookstore, past the keychains and water bottles, that lists everything you should do before you graduate. I think I’ve done all of them. In January of this year, I went from department president, club executive and student employee to AMS presidential joke candidate.

If you take a look at these qualifications, it would appear I am a person who could consider seriously running for the AMS. It doesn’t make sense for someone with my background in student politics to run as a joke candidate.

When I brought up the idea of a joke candidacy to a friend, they responded in a way that confirmed a serious campaign would not be something I could pursue:

“You’d be so good as AMS president; you should run as a real candidate! All the serious candidates are terrible people”.

Being an electoral candidate makes people think they know you. In public, people will heckle you, insult you to your face or speak badly behind your back. But gossiping about a bee, a Redditor or Nobody is far less interesting than being able to say, ’I know Riley/ Drédyn, and they…’

According to my friend’s logic: if I had sincerely run, I would’ve fallen into the serious candidate category and, therefore, the terrible person category. That same friend, the one who insisted I should’ve run seriously, was also the one who convinced me that doing so would be the wrong decision.

People run unironically all the time, and most of the time, serious candidates win. That’s when their troubles begin. How many times have you heard that Fontana, Huntley, current AMS President Christian 'CK' Kyle or former AMS President Eshana Bhangu — whoever — are secretly evil? What are the odds that every year, the student body elects people they believe in, only for those people to suddenly become terrible? Couldn’t it be more likely that, instead, institutional limits force them to overpromise and underdeliver?

Now to an extent, the people who I’ve mentioned knew what they were signing up for. Despite their positive or negative relationships with each other, what they all have in common is that outwardly, random peoples’ opinions of them don’t seem to matter to them. They all have very high intrinsic self-worth. But could you imagine if someone ran and didn’t know what was about to happen to their public and private persona?

Every year, someone is the villain. That ensures no normal person will ever seriously run. Because god forbid, it might be your turn to be the bad guy.

Next year, a new batch of students will campaign. Someone will win. In three to six months, people will decide they were a terrible person all along. The machine demands blood.

I can write this, and maybe for a month, people will be a little kinder. But nothing ever happens. My guess is that Huntley'll do his best to make things better. But how much can one person change in a year? In six months, people will hate him. Rinse and repeat.

And in a few years, when the dust from this season settles and a new head is on the chopping block, someone will screenshot a tiny section of this article to dunk on somebody else.

The obvious conclusion here is to be kinder to people running for student politics. Maybe that would encourage more ‘normal’ people to run. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. The risk of having your name dragged through the mud — online and in real life — is too great for even the majority of politically engaged students; much less those unengaged from the AMS.

This treatment that inevitably happens to anyone who seriously runs for candidacy, is why the only people who run are those with either an extremely low sense of shame (the joke candidates) or an extremely high opinion of themselves (the legitimate candidates). These are the only people who can withstand the scrutiny and bloodlust of an electoral body.

Tony Kulenovic (Nobody)

I was introduced to joke candidates in the AMS elections during my first year at UBC. “Remy the Rat” was running for president and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. Is that what inspired me to run as a joke candidate? Nope! I just thought I’d share.

The importance of voting, in any election, is something that the majority of people can’t seem to grasp. ‘But I don’t like any of the candidates!’ Guess what? You can still vote. Abstaining, spoiling your ballot or any form of protest voting is an incredibly crucial part of the electoral process and is still a way to make your voice heard.

Whether it’s because you can’t fully get behind any one candidate or because you just haven’t done enough research to support your decision, abstaining can be done for a variety of reasons. Nobody is perfect, true; but sometimes, nobody is good enough at all.

In past AMS elections, I have never found a candidate that I could fully agree with because, if I’m being honest, most students just don’t care enough about the AMS elections to do any amount of research. From what I’ve seen, most of the people who vote in them — which is already a small percentage of the total number of students — are not actively engaged in the AMS and just vote for whichever candidate they think is the funniest joke. We don’t do the research to see who is best fit to run the student body, so we resort to voting for memes, when in reality, it would be best to abstain.

I originally wanted to run as “Abstain,” but the AMS Elections Administrator didn’t let me since “Abstain” is already a choice on the ballot. Yes, my goal was to trick people into voting for me, but I also wanted to make a statement on why casting your ballot is important whether you actually vote for a candidate or not. By running as “Nobody,” I was highlighting the idea that voting for nobody is an option and that there is no excuse for those who make the choice to not have their voices heard. If you don’t like any candidate, make it clear that some change needs to be made, because if you don’t, the consequences will affect a whole lot of people.

Unlike Quyen and Eve, I didn’t have a platform or a plan when joining the presidential race. In fact, I didn’t know a single thing about the AMS. Safe to say, I learned a lot as things progressed, especially when it came to ‘the drama.’ When I found out that we get $750 to spend on campaigning, I was overjoyed and already thinking about all of the hilarious “Nobody” slogans I could make: “Nobody cares!” “Nobody supports students!” “Nobody loves you and you will die alone in a cold, dark room!” Those thoughts quickly went away when I found out that those $750 come from student fees.

UBC students, especially international students, are going bankrupt paying their tuition and fees to UBC, and the AMS is spending that on… a guy in a green morphsuit? I understand everyone needs to be given an equal opportunity to campaign in the election, but it just felt wrong to be using the money that students are paying on a joke campaign. I didn’t even want to win. I literally could not accept the position if I won since I’m already in an eight-month-long co-op job. So, in the true spirit of “Nobody,” I didn’t campaign at all as if I didn’t even exist.

While Eve and Quyen both campaigned, they also both put a lot of effort into their platforms. Sure, their platforms were wildly random and highly satirical, respectively, but I know for a fact that if either one of them became president, they would do a hell of a good job at it. The way in which both of them knew exactly what was wrong with the AMS and voiced it through humour and wit is a clear indicator, to me, that they spoke for students.

While Huntley and Fontana both were serious candidates, I couldn’t quite tell if they truly knew what students wanted. Most of Huntley's debate time was spent telling us why his opponent shouldn’t be elected rather than why he should. Quyen and Eve, on the other hand, used comedy to make light of what was wrong with the AMS and UBC as a whole.

Huntley and Fontana both seem like decent people outside of their feud, but when the joke candidates outnumber the real ones in an election, one must wonder what is so wrong with the system that people would rather make fun of it than actually take part in it.

Eve said in her section of this piece that ‘normal’ people don’t run in elections because someone will always be turned into the villain. That’s valid, but I also believe that a part of it is because our generation seems to be less and less interested in becoming involved in institutionally organized politics of any sort. Politicians have become known for lying, hate-mongering, being greedy and not actually being ‘for the people,’ so who would want to be associated with that?

This is why people run as joke candidates. Until the public image of politics as a whole is fixed, there are always going to be those who come to make a mockery of it. And that’s us!

Last words

If any of this got you interested in student politics — we’re sorry — but you can follow along with AMS Council in The Ubyssey’s news section. For bonus points, you can actually attend Council meetings to help hold your representatives accountable. Perhaps even make a statement as a student-at-large! Council meetings are every other Wednesday at 6 p.m. on the fourth floor of the Nest, and there is free food.

On the other hand, if any of this got you interested in running as a joke candidate… you’re welcome! Here’s a brief list of advice and considerations for you:

• Start a group chat with all the candidates, especially if they hate each other.
• You can’t try to make everyone laugh. Try to make yourself laugh.
• Make jokes with compassion, not malice. Everyone else in the race is a person, too.
• Hire an actor to pretend to be you in the Great Debate if you suck at improv.
  • Be warned, this is a campaign violation. If you care. I (Nobody) did not.
• Commit to the bit.

Get out there and have fun, whether you’re here for genuine satire or just for laughs. You’re as valuable to our little campus democracy as anyone else.

In the coming year, we would like to see an AMS that engages in good faith with and accepts criticism from students. For that to happen, there must be students willing to engage with the AMS. The AMS is a small centralized body and though it makes decisions for thousands of people, any individual student’s actions can matter. Elections can come down to a handful of votes.

You do not have to start spending every Wednesday evening at AMS Council, but we’d encourage you to keep an ear out. Eventually, you will encounter something you care about — whether that’s health care, AMS events, divestment or unionization. We hope once you find something you care about, you won’t have to make a joke of yourself (like the three of us did) just for your concerns to be heard.

It’s been an honour to play the fool for all of you these past few weeks. We hope we have given you a chance to think a little bit more about the systems of power and governance on campus, even if in a humorous way.

Share this article copied!

First online March 18, 2025, 6:15 p.m.

Submit a complaint Report a correction