In 1991, the Radical Beer Faction (RBF) stormed onto the AMS student elections scene, promising to enliven campus politics with “a silly revolution.” The new group’s aim, its website said, was “to deal with student politics the way it should be dealt with. Drunk.”
At the time, students could run for AMS leadership in parties or slates, a system that science student Erik Jensen found absurd and polarizing. He rallied friends to form the RBF as a spoof slate. With tongues firmly in cheek, RBF candidates promised to throw “one big ugly mother of a free keg party” if they earned 10 per cent of the student vote.
In their glory days, the RBF actually earned much more, sweeping up to 31 per cent of the popular vote. Even if they didn’t win, their electoral antics were a staple, keeping campus laughing (and drinking) year after year. Hailed as an “electoral institution” by The Ubyssey, the RBF ran a motley assortment of AMS candidates through the 1990s and early 2000s, both human and non-human (think fish and traffic cones). By the time the slate system ended in 2004, the anti-slate RBF had become, ironically, UBC’s longest-standing slate.
With slates banned, the RBF restructured as a club. “It’s never the end of the Radical Beer Faction,” Lana Rupp, RBF presidential candidate, told The Ubyssey in 2004. The next generations of RBF members rallied against what they called “the war on fun,” protesting crackdowns on student parties and clamouring for a return to the golden age of campus beer gardens.
The slate’s connection to student elections was not completely severed either; one former RBF candidate continued to run independently in no fewer than three UBC Board of Governor elections for student representative during the early 2000s. That candidate was a fire hydrant. Why, you ask? At this point in the story, it’s best to suspend the need for logic.
The man behind the Hydrant, physics PhD student Darren Peets, told The Ubyssey, “I had a pet fire hydrant.” Running it for office was “the sensible thing to do.” It was also sensible to campaign largely in puns, with the Hydrant boasting, “My ability to put out fires is legendary and I’m nearly immovable once I take a position.” (Former elections administrator Chris Anderson groaned to a campus reporter, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many puns in an election campaign in my life.”)
Peets eventually ran on his own, sans Hydrant, and won. By all accounts, he was a surprisingly rigorous official, with a knack for reading dusty bylaws and changing obscure but problematic rules. But even before the revelation of Peets as a legislative sage, the Hydrant itself performed astonishingly well in the polls, once coming just six votes shy of election to the Board of Governors. “This sent a rather strong message,” Peets wrote on his blog. “I’m not sure what that message was or to whom it was sent, but it was unmistakably strong.”
