With the one-year tenures of WUSA president Damian Mikhail and vice president (VP) Remington Zhi drawing to a close in May 2026, Imprint spoke with the departing student leaders to reflect on their accomplishments and future plans. Despite the year being marked by several crises affecting students across Ontario, WUSA was able to implement multiple key initiatives aimed at improving the campus experience at UW.
Before WUSA, Mikhail was best known for his work advocating for the reinstatement of the Grand River Transit’s late night bus loop and stoppage of the ION cuts. Zhi has history with MathSoc but has been passionate about advocacy since childhood. “I’ve been showing up at protests since I was in elementary school. I’ve been organizing protests since middle school,” they reminisced.
The two met through their involvement in transit advocacy and decided to run for presidency and vice presidency together, both under the Horizon party. They said WUSA’s lack of ambition and initiative helped fuel their motivation to run.
“I think there was a frustration where it felt like the problems that students were facing every day were not the ones that they were hearing WUSA talk about,” Mikhail said. Zhi concurred, “WUSA [is] a platform that should be very useful for getting things done that hasn’t been leveraged in a long time.”
Students look to WUSA for an avenue to make their voices heard on issues that are important to them. “We’ve seen that in the past, sometimes it feels like it’s up to a couple of students to come up with how to do things and then beg WUSA for support,” Zhi said. For instance, the push for night bus transit was organized entirely by students, who received no support from their student association.
At the start of their terms, both were caught off guard by the intensity of the job and the breadth of their responsibilities. Mikhail joked about the whiplash of constantly switching hats and Zhi recalled a nugget of wisdom passed on by an outgoing officer: “You’re going to be the best at your job on your last day.”
Highlights of Mikhail and Zhi’s election campaign include restructuring the governance system, developing a more effective financing model for clubs, working with local governments to address hate crimes, and advocating against program cuts amidst UW’s financial deficit.
Recognizing that WUSA officers were stretched thin, Mikhail prioritized governance reform early in his term. The initiative has been very successful, to the credit of WUSA Director and Governance Committee Chair Muhammad Kanji and his team. The creation of the new VP of Student Experience position and Advocacy Committee is expected to ease the workload for future boards, enabling executives to focus more deeply on their core responsibilities.
Campus culture has made a comeback this year thanks to two key social initiatives. Club funding was increased to $200 per term, up from the $75 per term clubs have received for over a decade. In response to this change, WUSA noticed a surge in new club applications and more active clubs.
In addition, the former Bombshelter Pub reopened its doors in August 2025, six years after being shut down. Now called the Bomber, the space has been fitted with a new sound system, lighting, and bar. Plans to begin serving alcoholic beverages are close to finalization.
Another initiative, the Pay-What-You-Can program, runs out of the Bomber and serves students nourishing meals while allowing them to pay full, partial, or no fee. Mikhail received positive feedback from students facing food insecurity, who credited the program with helping them “get through the next day” and “giving them a fighting chance.” A motion to increase WUSA membership fees by $1 per term to continue funding the program was passed at the latest Annual Members’ Meeting.
Relaunched as a pilot in March after being discontinued in 2008, the WalkSafe program allows students to request volunteers to escort them across campus. The idea was born out of WUSA’s 2024 Change Engine competition, proposed by Katie Traynor in response to the Hagey Hall attack and growing safety concerns voiced by students.
WUSA has also been hard at work establishing a comprehensive course and degree planning system. This is something other universities have had for years, but UW has yet to catch up. “It should not be up to students to create spreadsheets and try and get a degree in course management before they can graduate,” Mikhail said.
“Many programs at Waterloo pride themselves on being flexible, being customizable, allowing you space to do interdisciplinary studies and research,” Zhi added, noting that while the possibility is there, a lot of students don’t take advantage of it or try to and end up delaying their graduation. “You can’t just offer people the option without giving them the support to actually do it.”
In addition to being changemakers this past year, the WUSA officers also described themselves as part-time firefighters for their frequent crisis management and response. “I’m very proud of the fact that this year, though we were thrown more fires than we could have possibly imagined, we didn’t let that stop us from pushing for the actual change that we promised,” Mikhail reflected.
Two of WUSA’s most pressing crises this year stemmed from the Ontario government. Zhi, who focuses on external advocacy as VP, commented, “It’s been a year where the provincial government has been showing that students are not a priority for them.”
In October 2025, the government proposed Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, which includes a section giving students the ability to opt out of certain ancillary fees, including those charged on behalf of student associations. WUSA argued that student fees are decided democratically and go toward supporting services students themselves consider essential.
WUSA formally opposed the bill, submitting feedback to relevant institutions, having conversations with local politicians, speaking at a press conference in Queen’s Park, and forming the Coalition to Protect Student Services with the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) and other post-secondary student unions. Despite these efforts, the bill was passed in November 2025.
Then in February 2026, the government proposed drastic cuts to OSAP funding. WUSA responded with a rally on March 4, voted on by an overwhelming majority of students. Over 1,000 students marched across campus to protest these changes.
“I heard stories from people across the province who were talking about the Waterloo rally,” Mikhail recalled. “That just goes to show that when students turn out and students show how serious they are about an issue, it does make an impact. It leaves an impact with students across the province and inspires them. It leaves an impact with the media and it leaves an impact with politicians who make these decisions.”
Zhi learned the importance of collaboration with other student groups through their work opposing Bill 33 and the OSAP changes. They remarked, “When the government threatens students, they’re threatening all of us, and they’re relying on those divisions in between us to make their fight easier.”
On the homefront, Mikhail detailed his successes and challenges dealing with the university on matters of internal advocacy. Despite getting along with many members of UW’s faculty and administration during his term, he admitted, “I’ve been struck by the fact that there were a lot of decisions that were on the verge of being made that would have ripped away students’ choice, student representation, and destroyed communities.”
One example is the university’s new Policy 70 draft which seeks to exclude students from petition committees. Without a representative who personally understands student struggles, the committee loses a critical perspective. WUSA is working alongside student societies and faculties to remove this section of the draft and ensure the final committee composition reflects this change.
Nevertheless, WUSA has been successful in getting buy-in on many of their initiatives. “I can speak with a lot of confidence that a lot of the people at the very top of this university are behind us,” Mikhail asserted. However, despite his hard work and the university’s enthusiasm, WUSA is “left with the slowest actor, which is the university, dictating [their] speed.”
As an example, The Bomber has already expanded its infrastructure to support serving alcoholic beverages, but contracts to do so remain stalled at the university level. “We are ready,” Mikhail emphasized. “But getting the university to finally make the decision and give us the space to improve the lives of students, that has been the biggest difficulty that we’ve faced.”
The WUSA president entered his role expecting UW’s leadership to be more decisive in its commitments. He reflected, “I was honestly a little bit stunned by the plague of indecisiveness in this university, which has slowed down things that students have called for for years.”
Now graduated, Mikhail hopes his legacy inspires his successors to continue pushing for change, reminding students that the “status quo [is] not a wall that you can’t get through.” He hopes for WUSA to become more independent from the university and calls on the university to “figure out who its own decision-makers are” and stop “deadlocking student progress every year.”
Zhi, who will be on WUSA’s board of directors and MathSoc council again next year, hopes to see the system change in a way that fosters progress without requiring individuals to sacrifice huge amounts of their time and energy. They also hope to improve students’ expectations for WUSA, which they describe as being “deeply low.”
Throughout their time in office, Mikhail and Zhi approached their roles with the mindset: “We’re working our asses off. And if we can’t come out of it on the other end… and feel that we [made] real change for students, then why are we doing this at all?” With their term nearly complete, they feel they have achieved the ambitious change they set out to deliver.
