Opinion

Valentina de la Borbolla, Opinion Editor

As I go through my last few days as a McGill undergrad, I cannot help but look back at my time in university with a sense of incredulity and nostalgia. I am still taken aback when walking by the infamous Leacock 132 lecture hall, struggling to remember any useful piece of information from POLI 200 three years ago. What strikes me most is how normal walking through campus feels, when just a few years ago, this place was so deeply unfamiliar. It took me longer than expected to adapt to university life. The cold, the large classrooms, and the dorms destabilized me. I was used to perfect Mexican weather, classrooms full of friends, and a quiet life with my mom and my dog. Suddenly, I was surrounded by screaming frat boys and empty bottles of Black Flys.

I cruised through the discomfort of my first semester in a half-awake state, and when I had to return home for lockdown, I almost forgot I had left at all. Every post-lockdown semester at McGill felt eerily similar to the first one, but in retrospect, the changes I have gone through are undeniable. I am surrounded by friends, a partner I love, a yapping dachshund, professors that challenge me, and coworkers I admire. All the things I was hoping for when I first got my acceptance letter ended up coming true—though maybe a couple of years later than expected. Before my semester, and my degree, officially end, I am slowing down a little bit and appreciating my growth. These past few years may not have been the best of my life, but they were certainly the most transformative, and that is something to be grateful for.

Snapchat introduced its “Memories” feature in 2016. (The New York Times) Chloé Kichenane, Staff Writer

“On this day, two years ago.”

It’s 8 a.m., and my body is sinking back into slumber. Yet, the notification shakes me and I need to know. Who was I two years ago?

As I scroll through the hundreds of pictures flooding my Snapchat memories, an odd feeling hits me. Some people would describe it as looking into a mirror and seeing a past version of yourself looking back. But to me, it feels more like looking into a stranger’s window, into a parallel dimension where I am someone entirely different.

Sometimes, I find myself thinking about home, about who I was before coming here. I think about the people I used to know. I wonder where they are now and where they’re going. As I let my thoughts wander, I realize this past life doesn’t feel real anymore, almost like a very long dream of which I only recall a few glimpses.

Maybe it’s simply the struggle of every university student who leaves home, but being away transformed me—and I get a reminder of it every time I step into my old bedroom, a place that doesn’t feel like mine anymore. It seems like everything from the pictures on the walls to the books on the shelves belonged to someone else. What was once the centrepiece of my life now seems like a still picture, as if I had never actually lived there. So I wondered: Where is ‘home’ if not the very room I grew up in?

For all those for whom going back has caused an existential crisis, here’s a reminder: ‘Home’ is an idea in constant flux. Moving away, I realized that home could be anywhere. It is the wooden staircase of my high school, the cafés my friends and I stayed in for hours, even the street by the train tracks where I’d walk my dog. But home is also 5,000 kilometres away as I sit right here in Montreal, scrolling through pictures from a different time.

Keith Baybayon, Contributor

I moved to Canada from the Philippines over 10 years ago, not knowing English or anyone outside of my immediate family. Coming from a small town, it was challenging to live in a big city such as Toronto. Yet here I am today, living independently in Montreal, learning French, and making new friends. I became someone I would never have imagined.

Transformation is constantly happening around us. The transition from autumn to winter is a prime example. Changes like this can sometimes come fast, like the flipping of a switch that brings light to a room. Some changes, however, can take months or even years.

As someone who is learning French, it takes time to indulge in French culture and speak the language naturally. Moving to Montreal encouraged me to pursue learning French so that I could communicate with my peers and find a job. It takes dedication and ambition to achieve growth like this.

Some may not have seen snow until having moved to Montreal, officially transforming into either a snowlover or snow-hater. Maybe some took a bird course to achieve a good grade and ended up loving the content and pursuing similar studies; that is a transformation in and of itself. Some people may not notice in the moment, but everyday decisions lay the groundwork for becoming someone new and better.

Uncontrolled events can prompt change, but whether that change is pursued is what matters. I took a big step in my decision to attend McGill as I was the only person from my graduating class to move to Montreal. Each day I spend in this city is another opportunity to figure out who I want to be.

We’re all on a constant journey of improving ourselves. It is that transformation that allows people to reach their highest potential.

opinion@mcgilltribune.com | OPINION 9 The Wellness hub can’t solve McGill’s mental health crisis

The McGill Tribune Editorial Board

Content warning: Mentions of suicide

Funded by a $14 million donation, McGill opened its Student Wellness Hub in 2019. Since its inception, the centre has been understaffed and strained by unreasonably long wait times for students seeking help. At McGill, there is an urgent need for accessible mental health services and resources: Over eight per cent of McGill students identify as disabled and an astounding 56.3 per cent of students reported having mental health disorders. As of 2019, 16.4 per cent of Canadian university students had seriously considered suicide. While it is critical to address the Wellness Hub’s marked insufficiency, the university must address the systemic shortcomings that both enable and foster a toxic academic environment.

Students should not have to turn to their universities to receive emergency care, but McGill must recognize that Quebec’s health care system is extremely underfunded, short staffed, and overwhelmed. Furthermore, racialized people are significantly more likely to be undertreated and mistreated in Canadian healthcare institutions. As a result, many McGill students have few other options than the Wellness Hub for affordable care. Yet, the Wellness Hub itself is not even equipped to help students in crisis who require immediate attention. Wait times for psychiatry appointments at the centre can be as long as two weeks for cases deemed urgent, and up to 10 weeks for others. The university has consistently reiterated that the Wellness Hub is not supposed to serve as a primary care provider for its students, but rather as a supplemental service that they have graciously offered. This, however, does not absolve the university from its responsibility to take urgent action.

At McGill, there is an endemic culture of celebrating competitiveness and academic achievement at the expense of mental health, and the university actively contributes to this culture. For instance, U2 Architecture students were informed, after registration had already opened, that they would be required to either take 20 academic credits this fall or delay their graduation by an extra semester. The university’s punitive final exam policy similarly exemplifies its unforgiving attitude. Students that seek more than one exam deferral must provide documentation, as well as a written explanation for their request, unless the student has COVID-19. If it appears that a student has not made an adequate effort to address the challenges they have been facing, their deferral requests can be refused. The austere and cynical language employed in the exam policy, underscored by unnecessary assumptions of bad faith, subjects students already wavering under the stress of exams to additional barriers.

McGill’s mental health crisis must be examined at every level of the institution, starting with day-today interactions in the classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a psychological toll on university staff, as faculty workloads are increasing and general academic stress has been on the rise. The precarity of tenure-track professors’ occupational status creates a stressful working environment, in turn leading to unsympathetic and antagonistic interactions between faculty and students. Additionally, much like at most Canadian universities, Black and Indigenous faculty at McGill are systemically underrepresented, creating an isolating and discouraging climate for marginalized students on campus. Overwhelmed students of colour and queer students may feel less comfortable seeking academic accommodations from their professors than their straight, white, cisgender peers. Furthermore, rising tuition costs, food insecurity, and an ableist post-pandemic climate on campus have created a psychologically harmful environment.

Too much of the burden of accessing mental health services at McGill falls upon its students, and the networks that are supposed to accommodate students’ needs fail to do so. As such, the university must hire additional mental health professionals, while focusing on increasing capacity and expanding resources. The university’s refusal to acknowledge its role in the mental health crisis precludes any meaningful work necessary to combat the systemic dimensions of the problem. The Wellness Hub’s inadequacy is one urgent problem that has relatively straightforward solutions; however, the McGill administration and faculty must work to untangle its systemic web of toxic competitiveness, ableism, academic stress, and structural racism in order to make any headway in solving its mental health crisis.

OFF THE BOARD

Anna Chudakov

Multimedia Editor

As a kid, I remember driving back from the Moscow airport with my family, preparing for another summer in Russia, and refamiliarizing myself with the city after being away for a year. Looking out the window, my childish, curious gaze was often confused by the differences between architectural styles across the city. While the fringes of Moscow were speckled by the same muted concrete apartment buildings, only distinguishable by the wear they’ve endured over the years, the city centre was marked by the grandeur of Stalinist buildings that competed for my attention. In my naivete, I always felt a sense of disdain for those grey apartments (even though I spent most of my summers around them) and questioned why more of Moscow hadn’t been granted what I thought was architectural beauty.

By the time I was a teenager, I recognized that my attitude toward those concrete buildings as a kid was simplistic, and thankfully, I grew mature enough to understand and appreciate the history those buildings held. I learned that they were called Khrushchyovkas and were built as a cheap and fast solution to the 1960s housing crisis in the Soviet Union. Standing through the fall of the USSR and into the 21st century, those apartment buildings continued to exist as a place for me to grow as I fostered friendships in the playgrounds that many Khrushchyovkas were huddled around. The buildings would nudge me outside onto the playground when I felt lonely in my temporary home and allowed me to make friends who I’d spend the summer days with, year after year.

As the COVID-19 pandemic challenged international travel and college started taking over my time, my visits to Russia were put on pause, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this past February forced me to rethink my relationship with the country. In the early days of the war, every Skype call with my family was shadowed by what we could and couldn’t say, as we tried to discern the differences in information we were receiving across the world. Through these phone calls alone, I could feel the polarizing difference between life in Canada and Russia and how restricted life was over there. I now look back at myself as a kid, watching the Russian news if it ever caught my eye, completely unaware that it was state-controlled television, and feel so disconnected from the innocence I lived in back then. Amidst this internal turmoil, I found myself feeling nostalgic for those summer days on the playground near the Khrushchyovkas.

With the war continuing to unfold, I was relieved to discover that some of my family were among the thousands of Russians leaving for Armenia. Their relocation was also an opportunity for me to visit them after so many years apart, but I had to remind myself that this visit would be nothing like my childhood summers. Nonetheless, when I arrived in Yerevan, I found glimpses of the architecture that I recognized from Moscow wedged into the cityscape. If I looked carefully, I could find the same Khrushchyovkas I remembered from my childhood, but this time, softened by the pink hue of the volcanic stone that is characteristic of the city.

That soft tint that altered the Khrushchyovka-like buildings that were otherwise so familiar marked the distance that had arisen between my childhood self and who I am now. While the Yerevan landscape settles some of my nostalgia and permits my reminiscences, the pink hue distinguishes this place from my childhood. This difference, however, presents me with the space to grapple with the complexities of the world as I understand it now. I will never experience my quiet childhood summers again or see Russia the way I once did. But in exploring Armenia, I have located where comfort and growth can coincide.

When memories lie in Soviet apartment blocks

Letter to the Editor: If you can’t start on time, then don’t do it in person

In a Nov. 22 article by The McGill Tribune about the Post-Graduate Student Society (PGSS) Fall General Meeting, they highlighted the meeting’s enormous delay as the “Moment of the Meeting”. The meeting was scheduled to start at 7:15 p.m., but as reported by the Tribune, did not start until 8:06 p.m.—a delay of almost one hour! Indeed, I can attest that it was a moment. Thus, let me share my utmost disappointment with what happened.

Before this meeting, PGSS sent out invitations to its constituencies to attend because, according to them, “your voice matters.” They provided two options: To attend in person or via Zoom. My friend and I, both graduate students, decided to attend in person at Thomson House. We saw this as an opportunity to better understand what is happening within the PGSS and contribute to its decisionmaking process. We also wanted to show our solidarity with the PGSS and further empower the collectively beneficial outcomes that could arise from the meeting. Optimistic as we were, we arrived at Thomson House at 6:45 p.m. We went up to the Ballroom Hall at 7:05 to get settled but were told that there was still an ongoing PGSS Council Meeting. We decided to return at 7:15 and were told that the council meeting had been extended for 15 more minutes. My friend and I thought this was okay, but when we went back 15 minutes later, we were again told that the council had just voted to extend their meeting by another 20 minutes, without assurance that the General Meeting would begin after. My friend and I decided to leave.

When I found out through a Tribune News article that the meeting was delayed by almost an hour, I knew we had made the right decision not to stay. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt the same disdain if I had participated online and instead waited in a Zoom waiting room. But the PGSS making its invitees wait upwards of an hour is completely disrespectful, rude, and insensitive, especially to those who decided to come in person. When they asked us to come, we came. However, it felt like our voices did not matter. It felt like we were thirdclass PGSS members whose attendance is only needed to reach quorum.

In my email to the PGSS—to which I have yet to receive a response—I asked them to reflect: Was there no other way that they could have started on time or at least minimized the time they asked for registrants to wait? Why was there no formal notice about the potential delays? Why invite in-person attendees just to ask them to wait around for an hour?

It’s tempting to roll my eyes when learning from the Tribune that the meeting did not even reach quorum, or one per cent of its membership. Cases like this, trivial as it may sound, damage my trust in the PGSS.

Maybe I should just sing out my disappointment at one of their Karaoke nights?

Elson Galang, PhD Candidate

Systemic neglect continues as Montreal’s houselessness crisis worsens

Chloé Kichenane

Staff Writer

More than 3,000 people remain without a home this winter despite years of tireless advocacy from community organizations around Montreal. Almost half of Montreal’s unhoused population is Inuit, reflecting Quebec’s ongoing settler-colonial project.

The city’s attempts at resolving the crisis remain inadequate and ineffective. In 2021, the city provided 1,550 emergency beds, created 10 new warming stations in different boroughs, and launched a program giving housing access to 200 people. Despite these efforts, houseless people in Montreal continue to tragically freeze to death. The city’s solutions seem to be nothing more than a ‘one step forward, two steps back’ plan, as the 14 shelters opened during the pandemic were reduced to three in the past year, compounding the shortage of emergency measures when there are no long-term ones in place. Although the provincial government has launched a $280 million investment plan for the next five years, this is not nearly an urgent enough measure to resolve Montreal’s long-lasting houselessness problem and shows that the city does not prioritize remedying it.

A deeper dive into Montreal’s fiscal policy indicates that houselessness is not the city’s top priority. Mayor Plante’s $125,000,000 investment to build “the biggest park in Canada” as part of her “green deal” is not nearly as pressing as the houselessness issue, and it would take less than a quarter of that amount to provide permanent housing for those on the streets. Beyond this, the major increase of the Montreal police department’s budget to a total $787 million for 2023 ($63 million more than in 2022) is an absurdly unnecessary and ignorant allocation of taxpayer money. These funds, reserved for hiring more police officers, represent roughly 14 times more than what is invested in the city’s five-year plan to fight houselessness.

The city still engages in the brutal practice of evictions, such as the one planned for Nov. 10 near the VilleMarie Expressway. The eviction was eventually delayed after dozens of protestors marched in solidarity, but the project is still ongoing and will displace an entire camp with nowhere else to go, to supposedly offer them better alternatives.

Though there are initiatives that offer short-term essentials for people in need, they cannot provide solutions for long-term structural problems. Mobilizing For Milton-Parc, a studentrun organization that provides essential food and supplies, and the “Leave a coat” project in the Rosemont borough, are both examples of positive communitybased approaches. Although these are important initiatives, they work to address the consequences of houselessness but cannot address the root causes of housing insecurity. The municipal government is failing at long-term initiatives and instead relies on band-aid measures. Meanwhile, community-based shelters, such as Resilience Montreal, stand alone by offering unfaltering life-saving services without sufficient government support.

To bring the crisis to an end, the city must implement long-term programs such as affordable or transitional housing and harm reduction which will keep people in precarious situations safe this winter. If the municipal government truly cared about people experiencing houselessness, then they would divert funding to the social programs necessary to combat the systems that leave the city’s most vulnerable behind.

The provincial and municipal governments must stop making excuses and finally take thoughtful action for its unhoused population, instead of subjecting them to violence. The burden of solving this crisis cannot continue to fall on the shoulders of community organizers and rather should fall on those of a provincial government that has more than enough resources to execute viable solutions. Unhoused populations need effective long-term support from the provincial and municipal leadership because coats may keep people warm for now, but they won’t provide the structural change necessary to save lives.