The Tribune Vol. 42 Issue 25

T

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL BOARD

Editor-in-Chief Madison McLauchlan editor@mcgilltribune.com

Creative Director Anoushka Oke aoke@mcgilltribune.com

Managing Editors Matthew Molinaro mmolinaro@mcgilltribune.com Madison Edward-Wright medwardwright@mcgilltribune.com

News Editors Lily Cason, Juliet Morrison & Ghazal Azizi news@mcgilltribune.com

Opinion Editors Kareem Abuali & Chloé Kichenane opinion@mcgilltribune.com

Science & Technology Editors Ella Paulin & Russel Ismael scitech@mcgilltribune.com

Student Life Editors Abby McCormick & Mahnoor Chaudhry studentlife@mcgilltribune.com

Features Editor Wendy Zhao features@mcgilltribune.com

Arts & Entertainment Editors Arian Kamel & Michelle Siegel arts@mcgilltribune.com

Sports Editors Tillie Burlock & Sarah Farnand sports@mcgilltribune.com

Design Editors Drea Garcia & Shireen Aamir design@mcgilltribune.com

Multimedia Editors Noor Saeed & Alyssa Razavi Mastali multimedia@mcgilltribune.com

Web Developers Jiajia Li & Oliver Warne webdev@mcgilltribune.com

Copy Editor Sarina Macleod copy@mcgilltribune.com

Social Media Editor Taneeshaa Pradhan socialmedia@mcgilltribune.com

Business Manager Joseph Abounohra business@mcgilltribune.com

TPS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Joseph Abounohra, Kareem Abuali, Ella Gomes, Shani Laskin, Kennedy McKee-Braide, Madison McLauchlan, Michelle Siegel, Sophie Smith

STAFF

Thank you,

As The McGill Tribune moves into a new era as The Tribune, we would like to thank every single person who has contributed their time, effort, writing, creativity, and passion to our paper. Without the dedication, curiosity, and fervour for learning that each writer and creative has brought to our community, The Tribune’s mission of holding truth to power would be impossible. To our readers—thank you for trusting us with your stories. Here’s to a bold and brilliant future.

Ali Baghirov, Margo Berthier, Ella Buckingham, Melissa Carter, Roberto Concepcion, Ella Deacon, Julie Ferreyra, Adeline Fisher, Suzanna Graham, Jasjot Grewal, Charlotte Hayes, Jasmine Jing, Monique Kasonga, Shani Laskin, Eliza Lee, Oscar Macquet, Zoé Mineret, Harry North, Simi Ogunsola, Atticus O’Rourke Rusin, Ella Paulin, Dana Prather, Maeve Reilly, Maia Salhofer, Sofia Stankovic, Caroline Sun, Harrison Yamada, Yash Zodgekar

CONTRIBUTORS

Sophia Micomonaco, Alex Sher, Owen Barnert, Charlotte Bawol, K. Coco Zhang, Theodore Yohalem Shouse, Kellie Elrick

TRIBUNE OFFICE

Shatner University Centre, 3480 McTavish, Suite 110

The Tribune is an editorially autonomous newspaper published by the Société de Publication de la Tribune, a student society of McGill University. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of The Tribune and the Société de Publication de la Tribune, and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University.

We’re changing our name. McGill should, too.

James McGill’s violent subordination of Indigenous children and Black people, such as Jack, Sarah, MarieLouise, and Marie Potamiane, and one enslaved person whose name has not been uncovered. McGill frames its founder as a philanthropist, but hardly acknowledges that the donated fortune, the gift that ensured he would be our namesake, was amassed through the exploitation of enslaved people in Canada, the Caribbean, and the slave trade more broadly. His legacy persists, and Black and Indigenous faculty and students are still dramatically underrepresented in number and in the curricula of most academic programs, which fail to reflect demographic, methodological, and epistemological diversity.

The Tribune Editorial Board

We are divorcing McGill from The McGill Tribune . And it’s about time our university changes its name, too.

As McGill entered its third century in 2021, it launched a $2 billion fundraising campaign celebrating its history and legacy as an institution. This campaign, however, illustrated the university’s continued indifference toward its violent, colonial, and racist origins. In June 2020, former McGill art history professor Charmaine Nelson, along with some of her students, released a 98-page research document entitled “Slavery and McGill University: Bicentenary Recommendations,” investigating James McGill’s history as a brutal enslaver and profiteer of the transatlantic slave trade. The document also issued recommendations for the university to begin confronting its violent origins and its ongoing systemic racism both at the student and faculty levels today.

As we have seen at Toronto Metropolitan University, which changed its name in response to widespread student activism urging the institution to stop celebrating colonial figures, it is possible for large universities to take steps to untangle themselves from their violent

histories. Yet, we also recognize that name changes are not the be-all and end-all of social justice and redress. For example, McGill’s varsity sports team renamed itself the ‘Redbirds’ in 2019, dropping a name that caricatured Indigenous people. But this did not stop the university from engaging in a legal battle with the Mohawk Mothers, a group that is demanding there be an investigation into potential unmarked graves under the New Vic site.

Name changes are one small step, necessary but not sufficient in and of themselves. The Tribune will accompany its name change by continuing to hold ourselves accountable through our own journalism, creating more avenues for community engagement and diverse perspectives, and engaging with more student groups on campus.

As a newspaper, we have editorialized countless times on McGill’s persistent failure to create a safe and welcoming environment for Black, Indigenous, and racialized students and faculty, both in the lecture halls and on campus. We must supplement the progress made on the Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism set forth by the Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic to rid McGill of its systemic racism. In its official land acknowledgement, the university fails to mention

The Tribune has in the past been guilty of institutional racism, and as we continue working towards redress and strive to eliminate all forms of institutionalized oppression, our Editorial Board feels it can no longer bear the name that so unapologetically upholds and honours these systems. Our Editorial Board’s hiring process had discriminatory barriers to entry that did not open doors to all, and our channels for ensuring equity and a safe working environment were not made adequately available. We have acknowledged The Tribune ’s history of exclusion toward Black

students, Indigenous students, and students of colour––voices needed for any paper to thrive. Since then, we have revised our Workplace Conduct Policy and application process, and aimed to remedy institutional underrepresentation across all levels. The work does not stop there, and only through continual steps toward redress can we call ourselves a newspaper of record.

Our mandate urges us to be vocal and critical about the systems of oppression persisting on our campus and around the world, centring our perspectives on the voices that journalism has silenced. In order to uplift these narratives, we must also recognize the privilege that allows us to comment at a distance, from a predominantly white and privileged anglophone university in North America. McGill, in its billiondollar marketing campaigns, may be primarily interested in upholding the prestigious veneer of its namesake on an international stage, but as an independent student-led publication, we choose to reject the social capital that associating with McGill and its legacies may yield. If we cannot reject this name, we cannot in good faith stand behind any of the changes we have advocated for. As journalists, we choose to keep speaking truth to power instead of fearing it.

The James McGill Society, aimed at fostering appreciation for the university’s history, ignores the dark legacy of its founder and describes him as a “wealthy Scottish merchant living in Montreal”, without once mentioning the origin of his fortune. (Uni24k)

Indigenous students have been asking for the university to change their varsity team’s name since the 1970s. It took almost 50 years for McGill to take action. (Claire Grenier)

space

Student body votes in favour of SSMU investment in community space

Oscar Macquet Staff Writer

In a plebiscite during the Winter 2023 Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) referendum, students voted overwhelmingly in favour of investing their student fees in Co-op Bar Milton-Parc—a community-led cooperative that aims to create a space for students and local groups to gather.

The café-pub, located at the corner of Parc and des Pins, will be a multifunctional co-working space and meeting place for community events and projects by day, with a lively community bar by night. Bar Milton-Parc has gradually begun opening to the public since July 2022 by hosting occasional events and launching “Co-work Wednesdays”, where the coworking space is open from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. for members. It hopes to fully open as early as Fall 2023.

The Société de Développement Communautaire Milton Parc (SDC)—a non-profit organization that owns multiple businesses and offices along Parc Avenue—purchased the former Bar des Pins in early 2021. The SDC extended a vote to the Milton Parc community to decide what should be done with the commercial space. The community decided on the creation of Bar Milton-Parc, which aims to become a hub for live events, speaker panels, and community forums. For a one-time fee of $20, members can buy into the cooperative, giving them access to the co-working space and reduced prices on food and beverages.

Malcolm McClintock, a leader of the Bar Milton-Parc project and former Engineering representative to SSMU, has several hopes for the future of the initiative.

“We want to make this a transformative space that is welcoming to all folks,” McClintock said in an interview with The Tribune. “Our main purpose is to provide a space for groups who are animating for the direct community around us.”

Central to the Bar Milton-Parc project is a solidarity meal program, through which the bar hopes to provide affordable meals to the Milton Parc community. The co-op will take a local approach to combat rising food insecurity in Montreal and offer relief to community members and students in need.

“In the near future, we want to be able to offer [a pay-what-you-can system] at least every day of the week for lunch,” McClintock said. “Unfortunately, the infrastructure to support something like that requires a lot of upfront money, something that we currently don’t have. We want to be a transformative space, but that requires renovations, and renovations cost money.”

SSMU vice-president (VP) Finance

Marco Pizarro says there is a possibility of investing five per cent of SSMU’s Capi-

tal Investment Fund into Bar Milton-Parc, but stressed that the recent vote was non-binding.

“Future funding for Bar Milton-Parc ultimately needs to be voted upon by the Board of Directors,” Pizarro wrote to The Tribune via email. “Following interest by the student body, there needs to be consultation with the SSMU finance committee, [the] community engagement committee, and the Legislative Council.”

Five per cent of SSMU’s Capital Investment Fund would represent approximately $150,000, which would greatly accelerate Bar Milton-Parc’s renovation plans and allow it to expand both its opening hours and its services.

“The Co-op Bar Milton-Parc is built on the history of the Milton Parc neighbourhood,” McClintock said. “It is only made possible by the longer standing history of the housing network of cooperatives that have come together with the desire to create a space where the community can gather, and meet the general needs that people have, both socially and physically.”

Delineated by University Street, Avenue des Pins, Saint-Laurent Boulevard, and Sherbrooke Street, the Milton Parc neighbourhood is considered one of Montreal’s historical residential areas. Over 600 buildings in the area, including Bar Milton-Parc, are owned by the Milton Parc Community (CMP), a community-led cooperative that offers affordable housing and various social provisions.

By 1968, Concordia Estates Ltd had bought 96 per cent of the properties in Milton Parc, and planned to demolish the neighbourhood to construct a massive real-estate development project. The residents of Milton Parc came together to oppose the urban renewal project and formed the Milton Parc Citizen’s Committee (CCMP/MPCC) in an effort to preserve the area’ architectural diversity and heritage. After nearly two decades of struggle, only the first phase of the project, the construction of the La Cité Complex, was completed.

Dimitri Roussopoulos, a founding member of the CCMP, recounted the community’s struggle to preserve the neighbourhood during an interview with The Tribune

“We undertook to save this whole six-block area from complete destruction by a company of speculators that wanted to build high-rises, condominiums, and apartment buildings,” Roussopoulos said. “It involved a lot of demonstrations, petitioning, and public information meetings. We created a city-wide coalition to support the struggle [...] and managed to convince the federal and provincial government to give us the money to buy the whole area and renovate it.”

With the aid of Héritage Montréal and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Cor-

poration (CMHC), the Milton Parc community repurchased the remaining properties between 1979 and 1982, creating the largest cooperative housing project in North America. At this point, the characteristic Victorian architecture of Milton Parc, which dates back to the 19th century, was falling into disrepair.

Phyllis Lambert, director and founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, played a pivotal role in the renovations and in securing CMHC’s approval of the project.

“You have to follow your dreams. When we started Heritage Montreal to save buildings from demolition, we had no idea how you could ever occupy these buildings again,” Lambert said. “But we didn’t worry about that. And then, as you work through what the possibilities are, you find solutions.”

In 1987, the National Assembly of Quebec passed a private bill to allow the co-ops and non-profit organizations of Milton Parc to jointly own the land under a syndicate: the Milton Parc Community. The CMP is governed by a panel of representatives from each of the 24 non-profit organizations and cooperatives that coown the land trust.

Unlike a regular land trust, which identifies a legal entity and the assets it has authority over, the CMP is characterized by its unique “Declaration of Co-ownership.” The Declaration includes socio-economic clauses which mandate signatory organizations to uphold social responsibilities and limit real estate speculation in order to maintain low rents in the area.

Milton Parc is home to many community initiatives, including a library on Parc Avenue, which the CCMP runs and that serves as a hub to promote events within the community. Every Friday, the CCMP works with the Saint John’s food bank and distributes 80 to 100 meals to Montrealers in need.

Since the 2000s, the community has actively fought to preserve green spaces in

the neighbourhood. Under Lucia Kowaluk’s leadership, the CCMP thwarted the construction of a high-rise in 2019 in favour of the construction of a park through a successful petition that amassed thousands of signatures. The park, located at the junction of Parc and des Pins, will be named in honour of the late Kowaluk.

Since 2010, McGill’s Office of the Dean of Students, SSMU, and the CCMP have coordinated their efforts through the Community Actions and Relations Endeavour in order to facilitate the coexistence of students and permanent residents of Milton Parc. Tensions have stemmed from the turbulent nightlife of student tenants, as well as the accumulation of trash in the streets during the months of May and June, when many are moving.

“We’re constantly interested in working towards better relations with the McGill faculty and the bigger student body. That’s our sincere hope. But it’s a work in progress,” Roussopoulos said.

SSMU’s endorsement of the Bar Milton-Parc project would not only expedite the bar’s opening, but also result in SSMU being eligible for support-member status at the bar, giving McGill students privileged booking opportunities to host events. SSMU’s investment in the bar rests on the conditions that McGill students be eligible for the co-op’s solidarity meal program and that student groups get priority booking.

Daniel Tamblyn-Watts, 4L, told The Tribune that he regularly frequents the bar because of its ties to Milton Parc and McGill.

“I love that it’s run by a very community-oriented crowd, they give off the vibe they aren’t just trying to turn a profit on you,” Tamblyn-Watts said. “It’s amazing, you can listen to different conversations where people are talking about really interesting things they’re doing in the community, and at the same time, it’s a really low-cost and friendly environment to have a beer with some friends.”

Basha, Marché Lobo, and Café St-Barth as well as other businesses along Parc Avenue are all owned and managed by the SDC. (Maeve Reilly / The Tribune)

Café-pub-working

Bar Milton-Parc gradually opens to public

Principal and Vice-Chancellor H. Deep Saini begins five-year term at McGill Saini addresses legacy at Dalhousie, vows to strengthen community relations in new role

Shani Laskin and Jasjot Grewal Staff Writers

McGill’s eighteenth Principal and Vice-Chancellor H. Deep Saini began his five-year term on April 1. Saini hosted a round-table discussion with McGill student media outlets on April 5, during which he answered questions about his plans to work alongside students, Indigenous groups such as the Mohawk Mothers, and unions to strengthen community ties. Saini also outlined his strategies for creating accessible channels for student communication and touched on concerns students may have about his previous tenure at Dalhousie University.

In response to reporters’ questions regarding McGill’s relationships with Indigenous communities, Saini acknowledged that McGill sits on Indigenous lands and vowed to go beyond simple words when it comes to justice for Indigenous communities.

“Respect [towards Indigenous groups] is not simply paid in terms of words, it is paid through actions,” Saini said. “I think we start by building a culture where [inclusion is a] part of the natural ethos of the university rather than part of just simply our policies and legislations.”

He said that while he is aware of the Mohawk Mothers’ legal case against McGill, he has yet to inform himself enough to offer his own opinion.

Saini shared that during his term at Dalhousie, which is located on Mi’kmaq territory, he launched the Indigenous Student Access Pathway (ISAP). The program helps Indigenous students who would not otherwise be eligible for admissions under Dalhousie’s high school prerequisites transition to the university.

When asked about his previous term at Dalhousie, during which the Dalhousie Gazette reported that tuition fees for international students increased substantially, Saini responded that he has no intention of raising McGill’s tuition. He stated that the Dalhousie tuition fee increase stemmed from the university having the lowest fees of all Nova Scotian universities, with some Dalhousie programs charging 50 per cent less than competing institutions. According to Saini, Dalhousie raised tuition in a way that did not impact existing students’ fees whilst simultaneously maintaining a high quality of education.

“I see absolutely no reason to do anything like that because McGill’s tuition is very much in line with the tuition in comparable universities,” Saini said. “I’m not a tuitionincrease happy principal or president. That’s not what drives me.”

In a written statement to The Tribune, Law Senator Josh Werber stressed that while student senators are aware of the tuition hikes

at Dalhousie, as well as Saini’s reputation of tense relations with unions, students should not dismiss creating a working relationship with Saini.

“Undeniably, reports of union opposition and tuition hikes are concerning,” Werber wrote. “The Principal at times has limited direct influence on such decisions, so I hesitate to assign responsibility to him personally without more information. Instead, [the Students’ Society of McGill University] will focus on working constructively with Mr. Saini going forward.”

Saini says that working with unions begins with a good-faith relationship between employees and university officials. To further improve the student experience and union relationships with the administration, Saini feels that he needs to understand the campus atmosphere, which he intends to do by introducing new communication channels so that students feel comfortable approaching McGill administrators.

“Nobody should be intimidated about approaching anybody in the university,” Saini said. “We should have open dialogue for everything. That doesn’t mean we’ll always agree, that doesn’t mean we will always find solutions to everything, but that means that we will talk openly and frankly.”

Tribune Explains: The Tribune

Charting the publication throughout the years

Adeline Fisher Staff Writer

About to begin a new chapter of its history under a new name, The Tribune delves into the paper’s history and explains the inner workings of the writing, editing, and publishing process.

What is The Tribune?

The Tribune was founded in 1981 as a student-run newspaper that became editorially independent in 2011, when the Société de Publication de la Tribune (SPT) was formed, separating the publication from the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU). It has seven written sections—News, Opinion, Arts and Entertainment, Features, Student Life, Sports, and Science and Technology— and publishes roughly 25 articles per week. The Tribune currently has 29 paid employees, including Section Editors, Design Editors, a Copy Editor, a Social Media Editor, a Creative Director, Managing Editors, and the Editorin-Chief (EIC). Each semester, The Tribune also hires Staff Writers and Creatives, which are unpaid volunteer positions.

The Board of Directors (BoD) governs

the SPT and is responsible for hiring the EIC, approving the annual budget, and convening Annual General Meetings in the winter semester, among other things. Excluding those in the School of Continuing Studies and those at Macdonald campus, all undergraduate students are automatically members of the SPT and may attend any open BoD meetings.

Editions of the paper are distributed in 65 locations across campus, the most popular being the front entrance of the McLennan Library.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, The Tribune distributed 5,000 physical copies on campus per week, while online readership boasted an average of 70,000 views. In 2023, circulation was lowered to 2,000, and its online readership dipped, with an average of 60,000 hits per week.

Twice a year at the end of each semester, The Tribune releases a special, themed issue. These are typically 24 pages—compared to the usual 16—and may include additional creative content, as well as a highlights section with shout-outs to some of the most significant pieces published throughout the semester.

What does a typical week look like for writers and editors?

The process begins on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, when editors, staff, and contributors meet in suite 110 of the SSMU University Centre or over Zoom to discuss and pitch ideas for the upcoming issue. By mid-week, editors submit photo, illustration, and multimedia requests to the design team, who is responsible for ensuring that pieces have accompanying photographs or illustrations.

The Editorial Board meets every Friday evening to discuss various pitches presented by the Opinion Editors. After voting on which topic to editorialize on, editors engage in an open discussion for about two hours, which Opinion Editors then use to write an editorial that is published on Tuesday in the upcoming issue.

Articles by Staff Writers and contributors are due Friday night and undergo three rounds of edits over the weekend. On Sunday night and Monday morning, two editors from outside sections review the articles, a process called “set one.” The Managing Editor of each section then addresses set one edits, before the piece gets to the Copy Editor and

SSMU vice-president University Affairs

Kerry Yang was on the selection committee to hire Saini. Though his own term is coming to an end, Yang looks forward to creating a strong and productive relationship between Saini and SSMU.

“What we learned this year was that a strong collaborative relationship between McGill administration and students has allowed us to move forward on many different projects at speeds much quicker than usual,” Yang wrote to the Tribune. “I hope to be able to work with Principal Saini in a collaborative and diplomatic manner built upon mutual understanding and the commitment towards bettering the educational experience for all students.”

EIC by mid-morning on Monday. By the end of the night, Managing Editors and the EIC have done a final read-through of all of the articles, articles are scheduled to publish on the website, and the design team has created the final layout for the physical newspaper. A PDF is then sent to the publisher, Hebdo Litho, to be printed and distributed to newsstands across campus on Tuesday morning.

Where does The Tribune get its funding?

The Tribune is funded entirely by student fees via the SSMU and Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS). Every semester, undergraduate students pay $4 in non-optoutable fees to support The Tribune, and this year, the sum paid by post-graduate students was increased from $0.87 to $1.50 per semester.

Today, the business team rarely receives requests for print advertisements in The Tribune In past decades, however, a substantial portion of the newspaper’s revenue was generated by ad placements. It was around 2010—when readership moved largely online—that ads began disappearing from the pages of the Tribune

Saini told reporters that he will be releasing his missions for McGill in the next four to six months. (Maeve Reilly / The Tribune )

McGill hit with class action lawsuit for alleged mind control, brainwashing experiments from 1943 to

1964

Survivors and family members recount physical and psychological torture at Allan Memorial Institute

Ghazal Azizi News Editor

Content Warning: Descriptions of medical abuse, physical abuse, andpsychological torture

Charles Tanny visited the Allan Memorial Institute, a research and psychiatric centre operated by McGill’s Royal Victoria Hospital, in August 1957. He was referred to the Allan after experiencing pain in his face, a condition his family doctor believed was psychosomatic—Charles suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, a neuropathic condition—rather than a psychological one.

Nearly seven decades later, Charles’s daughter, Julie Tanny, is now the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against McGill, the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Canadian government, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Tanny, along with hundreds of other plaintiffs, alleges that the Allan conducted psychological experimentation on unconsenting patients between 1943 and 1964.

From 1957 to 1964, the CIA funded 89 institutions that researched mind control and brainwashing techniques in a project known as MK ULTRA. Subproject 68, one of 144, took place at the Allan under the supervision of psychiatry professor Donald Ewen Cameron. Tanny’s lawsuit alleges that the experiments started in 1943 when McGill hired Cameron as the founding director of the Allan, years before the CIA’s involvement.

Cameron, whose research focused on the causes of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, believed that mentally ill patients could be “depatterned” through prolonged comas, large doses of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, and extreme electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). After “depatterning”—which resulted in memory erasure, acute confusion, and/or losing bladder and bowel control—Cameron be-

lieved patients could be re-taught healthy behaviour through “psychic driving,” a process during which patients were sedated and subjected to tape recordings of a single sentence on repeat. Tanny, who obtained her father’s medical records in 1977, says her dad was put into an insulin coma and kept asleep for 23 out of 24 hours every day, while a background audio recording played endlessly. The content of the recording was not disclosed in his medical records.

“After the first months, he asked to see my mother, so they wrote in his file that he still had connections to his former life [...] so they put him back into treatment for another month,” Tanny told The Tribune. “After the second month, they said that it looked like this was as far as they could take him.”

Charles, Tanny’s father, was also subject to extreme ECT shocks, allegedly administered two to three times per day at 20 to 40 times the normal voltage at the Allan. Tanny says that when Charles returned from the Allan after two and half months of experiments, he had no recollection of his three children.

“My father was a very devoted father [....] Every weekend, he took us to Belmont Park, we went fishing, he built us a skating rink, very attached. And after the experiments, there was zero relationship. He was extremely detached, and that never changed,” Tanny said. “There’s one common thread with a lot of people who were depatterned: They came home quite physically violent and angry. And in my father’s case, he went from a very loving and gentle man to someone who used to hit me regularly.”

Lana Jean Ponting spent a month at the Allan in April 1958. She was admitted because of a court order her parents received after running away from her house at 15 years old. Now 81, she remembers her time at the Allan vividly.

“When I got to the Allan, it was a scary-looking building,” Ponting said in an interview with The Tribune. “When I went in there, I noticed a strange chemical smell. Dr. Cameron assured my parents that he would take care of me. I remember going to sit in Dr. Cameron’s office, he took me to a room where I had one pillow, a mattress, and a blanket. He told me to stay in the room. The nurse came in with a pole and a bag with something in it. She told me to lie down and she put a needle in my arm. I felt funny. And so it began.”

Ponting, who has been on medication since the experiments to offset the side effects, suffers from flashbacks and never spoke of her time at the Allan with

anyone, not even her husband. She only recently uncovered that she was a victim of the experiments after her brother noticed an ad about the class action lawsuit in The Montreal Gazette

Since piecing together her memories of the Allan with her newfound knowledge of the experiments, Ponting has testified in the Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers)’s ongoing lawsuit against McGill. The Mothers suspect the university’s New Vic site, formerly the Royal Victoria Hospital, holds unmarked Indigenous graves. In an affidavit that was enclosed with a note from her doctor attesting that she is of sound mind and body, Ponting says she saw digging at night as a patient.

“I would sneak out of the Allan at night when I could. I actually saw people with shovels. I could see them because their lights were so bright. And I noticed that [the shovels] had red handles, I will never forget the red handles,” Ponting said.

While most of the plaintiffs are the relatives of victims, Ponting is one of the few living child survivors.

“I’m hoping this lawsuit can bring to the attention of the Canadian people what we suffered,” Ponting said. “I consider what all of us went through as a journey into madness [....] I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing this for all of the people that have suffered without knowing through the Allan.”

While the class action was filed in 2019, it has yet to be certified—the process through which a lawsuit is approved by a court before proceeding to trial. In March 2021, the United States Attorney General filed a motion to be dismissed as a defendant, claiming it had immunity from lawsuits in Canada at the time of the alleged experiments. The motion was heard and later won in 2022. The plaintiffs have since filed an appeal, which was heard at the Quebec Court of Appeals on March 30, 2023.

Jeff Orenstein, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the State Immunity Act, which determines how foreign states can be sued in Canada, is retrospective and can apply to cases before the Act was passed. Orenstein argues that when Canada drafted the Act, it took direction from similar documents in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. While the British and European documents clearly indicate that their immunity acts are

not retroactive, both the American and Canadian immunity acts do not establish whether they apply to instances prior to the policies’ adoptions. Orenstein sees the lack of a specific retrospectivity clause in the Act as an intentional choice.

“Anyone who was a Canadian who was injured on Canadian soil for personal injury has jurisdiction in Canada, without a doubt. And so, if the Act applies, there’s not much else to decide. Clearly, we have jurisdiction in Quebec,” Orenstein told the Tribune. “If Canada didn’t recopy [the retrospectivity clause], they obviously intended it to apply to things that happened in the past.”

As Tanny and Orenstein await an appeals decision from the judges, they are optimistic that they will win based on the questions the judges asked during the March 30 hearing.

“The judges seemed to be quite interested in the retrospectivity debate,” Orenstein said. “It is a serious question that I think will take them some time to work through [....] They’re going to want to take their time to really write a very serious, reasoned judgement, knowing that it might end up in front of nine judges in Ottawa [at the Supreme Court].”

After the U.S.’s status as a defendant is decided, the remaining defendants, including McGill, will have to present their defences for the class action to be certified, a process that Orenstein estimates could take years.

In a statement to Global News in 2019, the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), which was born from the merger of the Royal Victoria Hospital with four other hospitals in the city, recognized Cameron’s experiments but denied responsibility, claiming that Cameron acted independently and was not an official MUHC employee. The plaintiffs amended their application to list McGill as a defendant instead of the MUHC. The Tribune contacted McGill in light of its involvement in the lawsuit, but was referred to the MUHC, who declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of the suit.

The CIA created a research foundation called the Human Ecology Fund as a front to conceal its funding of Project MK ULTRA. (cac.mcgill.ca)

In the 1990s, the Canadian federal government gave $100,000 to living victims who had received “full or substantial depatterning” between 1950 and 1965 in ex gratia payments, which are compensation without the admission of guilt. (cac.mcgill.ca)

Ilia Shareghi

Maia Salhofer

Maia Salhofer

Maia Salhofer

Madison Edward-Wright

Maeve Reilly

LAUGHING MATTERS

Owen Barnert Contributor

McGill is known for its efforts to ensure accessibility, but one key component, and arguably the most important, is being overlooked: Car accessibility on campus. While being in the heart of Montreal might not be conducive to such an intricate road system, it’s positively too much to ask students to walk all the way from Otto Maass to Leacock.

Budapest, Paris, and Munich, while beautiful, lack one important thing: Motorways everywhere. For this exact reason, McGill should follow the likes of Kansas City and Dallas in their emphasis on motorways per capita. McGill must create more roadways on campus for faster access to buildings and increased efficiency—students would be able to get their work done much faster if they didn’t have to walk everywhere.

Montreal is known for not being car-friendly, whether that be because the roads are, to say the least, subpar, or because of

OFF THE BOARD

Ella Paulin Science & Technology Editor

McGill needs fewer pedestrians and more cars

the interconnected nature of the city. Yet, a car not only gives you more personal space than public transportation, but it is also much quicker than walking from place to place, especially during peak hours. Everyone should have the ability to drive through the cobblestone streets of Old Port as opposed to walking through it. There’s no need to admire the picturesque buildings of the surrounding area or to window-shop and peruse their merchandise. Instead, you need to focus on getting to your destination as quickly as possible.

Parking garages are beautiful. Anyone who opposes them simply cannot appreciate the brutalist architectural style. The Old Port is without a doubt a nice part of Montreal, but a five-story parking garage would only bring a modern flair to such an outdated area. Any opportunity for a garage would increase tourism—bringing much-needed traffic to the streets and creating a festive atmosphere.

Why, then, should McGill adopt roadways? Simply for increased maneuverability across campus. The Redpath Museum

might be architecturally aesthetic, but it feels incomplete without a parking lot. Traditionalists will ask where the parking lot will go. My response? It should be built on Lower Field. All that space is not being used optimally, especially when taken up with an ice rink during the winter. But a parking lot could finally put all that green space to use and considerably boost the attractiveness of the university, in turn increasing McGill’s revenue.Instead of a skating rink, the McGill community could rejoice in slipping and sliding across a parking lot and avoiding near death.

Oftentimes, students have back-to-back classes, requiring quick transportation in a gas-guzzling machine. Having a roadway cutting directly through campus would remedy this. Purists will point to the inconvenience of having to wait to cross a street in the middle of campus, but this would, in fact, help students reflect on the simple moments in life and appreciate the time they have at their drivable university.

McTavish, in particular,

should be open to vehicular transportation. McGill students are tired of walking up the hill from Sherbrooke to Stewart Bio, and allowing vehicles would ultimately make students more productive, and boost their GPAs. And to ensure that no student is hit by a car, pedestrians would obviously be forbidden from McTavish. If this causes an unjustified uproar among conservative students, establishing one crosswalk on McTavish to cross at their own risk should suffice.

It’s time for Montreal and

Life in a patterned shirt isn’t so bad

I don’t know how it started. I have often wondered to what extent my gravitation toward men’s clothing was simply a case of internalized misogyny. I must have seen the bright pink colour my parents had naively painted my childhood bedroom, soaked in the gender narratives my grandparents, my cartoons, and my toys produced. I took one look and said “nope.”

You can see the shift in my family photos: Sitting peacefully in a white dress in a mall-photo-studio seashell at age two transformed to shorts and a polo at age three, tuxedo and Converse at age five.

At some level, there were a couple of happy years spent in that tux, where I didn’t worry about my body or my hair, about the complexities of gender expression in modern America, or what people must have thought of me when I wore that clip-on necktie to kindergarten.

front: For the rest of the year, I could play Minecraft and try not to think about it too deeply, but on shopping days, I confronted the gendered adult world head-on. And so I chose the most nondescript pants I could find. I shopped in the school uniform section of the store, going plain and simple and sticking to the default—of course, meaning male.

Gradually, patterned clothes disappeared from my closet, swimsuits were off the table, and by middle school, only the black pants and button-downs remained.

Somehow, I had transformed my gender confusion into a presentation of stubbornness and rigidity. Classmates, teachers, and friends asked me how I could cope with the tedium of wearing the same thing every day. I said that it just worked for me. I did not tell them that it was too stressful to imagine doing anything else.

McGill to stop reinforcing archaic notions of tradition such as pedestrians and public transit. The age of progress is here, and we must allow cars to have immediate access everywhere. If McGill doesn’t sanction this modernization, then students are likely to tire themselves out before they even get to lectures, and this will lead UofT to finally dominate the rankings. When Montreal starts banning pedestrians in areas such as Old Port, McGill could follow and look less like a university and more like a highway.

At the beginning of the fall semester, I went thrifting. Alone.

I spent a couple of hours walking through aisles, paging through shirts and sweaters before deciding on three button-down shirts: One plaid, one polka-dot, one gingham. They were the first patterned shirts that I’ve owned since the first grade.

But as I got older, instances of gendered expectation began to intrude into my childhood mind. The pink underwear. The American flag bikini offered to me one Fourth of July. Even the suggestion of a heart-shaped sticker on the cover of my English notebook.

Shopping was always the moment which brought this conflict to the fore-

Gym class began to unravel this precarious system of dressing. While the clothing policy was flexibly enforced, I quickly discovered that you got 20 per cent off of your grade for wearing a button-down during volleyball. I sheepishly approached my mom after school: We needed to go to the store and buy a T-shirt.

So, standing there, last pick for the

dodgeball team, I showed my arms in public for the very first time.

And yet, after my 45 minutes of dodgeball were over, I realized I had stumbled upon an opportunity. I left my button-down unbuttoned on top of that gym T-shirt on my way to geometry class. I didn’t die. I felt ashamed of how small a step this was, and how big of a step it felt like.

I began to push the boundaries in ways that felt too feeble to admit to people at the time. The next summer, I bought a pair of jeans. This year, a patterned shirt.

I realize now that the problem was not that I was stubborn, or inflexible, or any of the things I thought I was during that gym class. It was that I was unhappy. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a place where I feel comfortable enough to wear a dress, but I don’t know if I care, either.

What I do know is that walking around in my polka-dotted shirt, a pair of Converse, and the occasional hoodie, I feel more at peace than I did as that kid in that uniform.

I still put off shopping for as long as I can. But I did go thrifting again last Saturday, and I added a pink sweater to the rotation.

Montreal has the second highest levels of traffic across all Canadian cities, in terms of hours lost. (iHeartRadio)

Campus Conversations: Archives

Community, commemoration, and the collective archive

Matthew Molinaro

Managing Editor

Last semester, I started working in the Black Students’ Network (BSN) archive as part of my elected responsibilities in our political portfolio. In our small office nestled in the University Centre, I sat in front of hundreds of books, an aging MacBook on my lap, going through each page one by one. With the sweetness of future critical consciousness hanging over my brain, my tongue tickled with the words we must find. Immersed in this library, lingering with the tender notes, the writings bristling with weapons, the pulses and rhythms of the collective my predecessors remembered to keep close would be the only way forward.

The dust speckled off of a collection of Alice Walker’s poetry dedicated to her mentor Muriel Rukeyser. To be at Sarah Lawrence with them. How do we make legible our collaboration? The spines of Dudley Randall and Henry Dumas’ collected works winced under my categorizing caress. We never speak of the informal methods of canonization. I read lines from each aloud, militancy and beauty rustle together in this melody. Archival weight hangs on the Black writer–– we will forget you ––as the Black reader wanders for recuperation, crouching below legacies that loom, tangled at the roots to be rhizomatic.

My work goes abroad. Countless tomes, past and present, devoted to the ruthless destruction of apartheid in South Africa, sociological excavations, multilingual prose-poems for freedom, memoirs that documented the violence, stared back at me as I parsed through them. Eyes that bite. The hairs on the back of my neck stand as moments of both being and radical remembering haunt this government building—freeze the air. Sitting in the cold nothingness of quiet, I ask myself: Who do I institutionalize? What forms can liberation take for us all?

The list grows on a desultory Google Sheet. Stories turn into numbers, columns make containers for our meaning-making. After a few days’ work, I read back the riches. The ledger, the possessions, the objects at my disposal. Black life, Black livelihood, Black livingness rendered into a familiarly brutal mathematics whose hold grips the nimble, wayward poetics of new creative and collective worlds. I struggle to speak the language of this archival practice. This translation transforms an ethics. The lives we save can’t reproduce, the technologies that justified the lives we’ve lost. But, in being in the archive, extraction seen for its exploitative guise, we can propel libraries for us, writing fruitfully the future we must work toward together.

Asking the digital archive who I am

Madison McLauchlan Editor-in-Chief

At the age of 11, a Facebook account became the portal into the rest of my young life. Somewhere between the mourning cries of MySpace and the over-filtered Instagram era, I uploaded my first photo and thus began my personal, digital archive. A profile, a full name (naïvely), some likes, and a network: A person, created.

No digital trace of me exists before this age—I was coddled, grandfathered in by a generation so attached to physical mementos. VHS tapes, CDROMs, polaroids faded into obsolescence. Looking back now, I can’t pinpoint when the prospect of an online presence stopped being the riveting unknown and morphed into an extension of myself. High school dances, memes, birthday posts, acne and awkwardness, a political consciousness, all preserved on a timeline scroll, under the deceptive, out of a “Delete” button.

The insidiousness of the digital archive reveals itself as we age. At a certain point, you decide to lean in or lean out. I ask the perennial question: When does surveillance stop being a privilege? When employers crawl Instagram tagged photos to find a drop of liquor? Or when the government rejects a passport application because of a reposted political statement? In the metaverse, digital borders are just as violent.

Of course, a digital archive holds so much good, too: The kind that our tired, melting brains cannot recall. People we loved, pets we adored, songs we had on repeat, and articles we authored combine to form the breadcrumb trail of a life. But it’s a double-edged sword: Playlists become elegies, laughter becomes screenshots, and frozen, photographed smiles haunt you forever. Some things you can never take back.

If we have children someday, their archive will begin in the womb. How do we reject cyborg motherhood from within the matrix? I’ll put the ultrasound on my close friends story, but not on my main. Or nowhere at all. Life’s accomplishments deserve to be recorded, but the question of where has serious ramifications. Like it or not, digital archives are digital legacies—pixellated and permanent.

The more of ourselves we stamp into the digital ether, the clearer the truth becomes: Originality still exists, but privacy is dead.

Open your eyes to the archives around you

Theodore Yohalem Shouse Contributor

My new favourite study spot is the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). It’s nice to get off campus and be immersed in the city. Spending time at BAnQ has made me think, as we reach the end of the semester, that it’s worth looking back on the year and considering how we’d like to spend the next one.

Our brief time at McGill is precious: It’s a time of learning, development, and the creation of our character. The people we meet and the things we do here will have a significant impact on our lives to come. All the choices we make here—to study biology, to learn a new language, to live with friends— will affect everything that comes after. These few university years are crucial; our memories of them will inform the rest of our lives.

This is why I fear that too many of us will finish our degrees simply as McGill students and not as Montrealers. There’s an entire city around us—a city of culture, beauty, and wonder—yet many of us remain in the McGill bubble because it’s socially convenient. It’s much easier to make friends with others in our classes and residences, but it is much more difficult to branch out into the unknown. And as busy students, we often reserve our non-studying hours for sleeping and partying, making it difficult to dedicate time to exploring Montreal. But if we want our few years here to expose us to new lives and opportunities, then we must step beyond Roddick Gates. Take the metro far away, strike up conversation at the farmers market, café, or bookstore. Make that extra scary step to meet someone new. What’s the worst that could happen?

This brings me back to BAnQ. The impressive library is found in the Quartier des Spectacles, near UQÀM. It’s worth a visit simply for its architecture: Sleek glass panels and wooden walls lend the interior a striking yet peaceful ambience. People study quietly, write, and read at desks flooded in light by the immense windows. From high up on the fourth floor balcony, there’s a view of the entire library. It’s an impressive space that puts McLennan and Redpath to shame.

So, here’s an easy way to step out of the McGill bubble: Spice up your routine, and make a short trip to the Grande Bibliothèque to study, not as a McGillian, but as a Montrealer. Maybe you’ll meet someone at the café on the ground floor of the library and make a new friend; maybe you’ll chat quietly with someone reading a favourite book of yours; maybe you’ll get the cute librarian’s number. It’s worth joining the larger Montreal community that McGill is only a small part of.

The discriminatory disarray of Quebec’s health-care system

Sophia Micomonaco Contributor

Over 800,000 Quebecers are currently looking for a new primary care physician in their area. Wait times to find one can extend to more than two years in Montreal, where the population faces one of the worst health-care accessibility crises in the country. This issue directly results from Quebec’s poor commitment to creating a safe, inclusive, and anti-oppressive workplace in the health sector. The province needs to address the institutional racism plaguing its healthcare sector and foster a space where health professionals can focus on their work without being exploited or oppressed.

Instead of dedicating themselves to mitigating high patient demand, doctors in Quebec are required to spend around 40 per cent of their time working shifts in short-staffed hospitals and nursing homes. The requirement was introduced in 1990 amid considerable nursing staff shortages in the public sector. Over the past 30 years, this staffing crisis has only

worsened and hit a fever pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the public sector saw roughly 4,000 nurses step away due to burnout and inadequate pay.

Beyond this, physicians spend between 15 and 20 per cent of their time on unnecessary paperwork to reconfirm the statuses of already injured or disabled patients. Cutting this number by any margin would dramatically increase the time doctors have to see patients.

The government must support nurses with better compensation and management. Without this essential step, dissatisfied physicians in the public sector will keep quitting and moving to private practices, a shift that the provincial and federal governments have implicitly and explicitly encouraged.

Past policy decisions in Quebec also played a part in fostering the current health-care crisis. Caps on medical school enrollment in the 1990s due to low population growth and cost-cutting efforts by former Premier Lucien Bouchard resulted in upwards of 500 doctors taking buyouts or retiring, many of whom would still be in practice

Airbnb’s free range has

Alex

Sher

Contributor

Originally conceived out of its founders’ struggles to pay their exorbitant San Francisco rent, Airbnb has become the very thing it had hoped to rectify. Driving rent increases and housing displacement, Airbnb exports risk, shirks responsibility, and generates massive profit.

On March 16, a fire in a historic building in Montreal’s Old Port claimed the lives of seven people. In the weeks following the fire, reports revealed that six out of the seven people who died

today.

The false austerity outlined above is only compounded by the institutional racism within the health-care sector. In 2022, a McGill University Health Centre study on racism found that both employees and patients of colour have been subject to shared experiences such as racist verbal harassment and microaggressions.

The first of its kind in Canada, the report also offered an empirical argument against Premier Legault’s false assertions that there is no systemic racism in Quebec.

Health care is not a safe space, especially for Black and Indigenous health-care workers and women of colour in particular. Black nurses in Quebec are regularly turned away by patients while also experiencing considerable difficulties finding employment in the first place. Racist and sexist discrimination is explicitly manifested, as evidenced by a 2021 job posting from the Saint-Eustache Hospital requesting that only white women apply.

The treatment of Indigenous patients also fosters a dangerous and oppressive environment,

Based on Public Health Data from 2000-2020, only 33 to 39 per cent of general practitioners in Quebec claim the bulk of their billings from family medicine. (Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press)

turning away any possible Indigenous nurses, especially those trained in traditional wellness and healing that the province does not consider scientifically sound. The story of Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman who livestreamed her nurses insulting and degrading her as she died, reflects how hateful cultures of exclusion in the health-care system determine who deserves to be “saved.” In response, the province announced in 2021 a $15 million plan to implement diversity training for employees. But the National Assembly has failed to advance motions toward equitable access to health care such as Joyce’s Principle, a document demanding

disastrous consequences

were staying in illegal Airbnbs.

The owner of the building, Emile Benamor, told the CBC that the building was up to code. Yet, multiple reviews left on the nowdeleted Airbnb listings reference the absence of windows, amongst other safety concerns. Airbnb property owners don’t need to show proof that they have functioning smoke and carbon monoxide detectors for their listings to be approved by the host company. Unlike hotels, fire exits, smoke detectors, and sprinkler systems are not mandatory. Instead, Airbnb simply urges owners to install and maintain these safety necessities,

knowing some will cut corners— but is perfectly willing to accept that reality as it translates to more overall units and fewer funds dedicated to oversight. The human cost of unregulated Airbnbs is immeasurable.Quebecois photographer and filmmaker Camille Maheux was among those killed in the fire. She had lived in the apartment for over 30 years and survived multiple attempts at illegal eviction. Throughout her career, the 76-year-old photographed the women’s movement and LGBTQIA+ communities—but the archive of her life’s work perished alongside her. Friends from France, Spain, Italy, and Brazil are trying to reassemble the bits and pieces of Maheux’s work the fire didn’t claim. Google her photographs now—they prove quite difficult to find.

In Montreal, over 90 per cent of Airbnbs are unauthorized, rendering fire regulations a nuisance rather than a necessity for landlords. Current Montreal laws stipulate that Airbnb and other short-term rentals (STRs) can

only be located on selected strips of the city and must register with the provincial government. However, regulation and enforcement of these policies have been both absent and ineffectual.

An Airbnb spokesperson said that the company will launch a registration field requiring all new listings to provide a permit number. Yet, the lives lost in the Old Port fire illustrate that this introduction of laws is too little, too late. And this has been a staple of Airbnb regulation, which only banned open-invite party listings after a fatal shooting in Pittsburgh. This reactive response to known risks has allowed Airbnb to profit and only address safety concerns after a tragedy forces them to.

While the impact of Airbnb and other short-term rentals has been felt globally, Montreal has experienced particularly devastating effects on its housing market, where the search for affordable housing has become increasingly difficult. Airbnb and other STRs can be far more profitable than long-term rentals, which, in the absence of regulation, creates an economic incentive for

that Indigenous people gain access to all health-care and social services free of discrimination.

By listening to nurses on the ground such as Yvonne Sam, the province must sanction the racist barriers of access to health care and invest in anti-oppressive medical school education. In order to address the systemic racism that pervades Quebec’s health-care system, the government must first recognize it. If the government cannot offer solutions to a health-care system as racist, overworked, and fundamentally flawed as Quebec’s, the road to care and recovery for workers and patients alike will be paved with peril.

landlords to turn units into STRs. Oftentimes, this transition leads to harassment at the hands of landlords and the forcing out of long-term tenants, as was the case with Benamor.

A study conducted in 2017 estimated that 14,000 additional homes would be available for long-term residence across Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver if they weren’t currently rented as Airbnbs. STRs raise the price of the long-term units that do stay on the market, as people are increasingly willing to buy properties with the intention of renting them out at a profit. Those not personally interested in renting a part of their home are in direct competition with those who are. The existence of a robust STR industry thus takes houses off the market and raises the price of those houses that remain.

It’s time for Airbnb to put the safety and life of its tenants before profits. The Old Port tragedy is a lesson for both the company and the city of Montreal, which must immediately increase and enforce the regulations for short-term rentals.

The family of Old Port fire victim Nathan Sears has applied for a class-action lawsuit against Airbnb, the property owner, and the building operator. (Sofia Ajram)

At the precipice of discovery And at the nadir that is academia

Russel Ismael, Science & Technology Editor

ABSTRACT

Scientific publishing has become a ruthless game. The infamous aphorism of “publish or perish” describes the pressure academics feel to publish their research extensively and stay relevant within their field. This problem manifests and is tied to a host of other disparities of accessibility within the science research field. Because of this culture, academics may be inspired to cut corners in their research to keep up with the increasing demand of being a scientist. So how can science be restructured from the decades of problems that plague it so that it can achieve equity and address systemic issues? How can one enter the system when it is stricken with socioeconomic barriers and structural racism? Scientists today are saying that science has become too unwieldy, and yet despite seeing the treacherous track of this road, many academics can do nothing but traipse along the same path.

PUBLISHOR PERISH: THE QUIET DEATHOF SCIENTIFICINQUIRY

The term philosophy can be linked back to Ancient Greece as the combination of the words philein and sophia, meaning “lover of knowledge.” Instead of the Lyceum, however, the lovers of knowledge of today now instead present their findings to a myriad of journals, like Nature or PLOS

Like ancient philosophers, I have also fallen in love with knowledge and the process of building upon my predecessors’ works. But conducting research as an undergraduate student can come with its own costs. Undergraduate student researchers hold a special place inside a lab. Compared to their graduate counterparts, undergraduates are rarely doing this work to further their own research inquiries. More often, they are seeking to become a competitive applicant for graduate school or to obtain a recommendation letter from the lab’s principal investigator (PI).

Q*, U2 Science and student researcher, says that undergraduates’ position in a lab can make them susceptible to exploitation from lead researchers. “So a lot of students, just to gain some level of experience, start to reach out to labs and are desperate for any kind of experience in lab work at all,” Q told me. “And that allows for some very exploitable undergraduates because they are not looking for pay [...] they’re just looking for some level of experience.”

Q believes that “publish or perish” culture can distill students’ passion for scientific research early on. The lack of research opportunities available for undergraduates pushes them to get involved not out of genuine interest, but to become more marketable to future recruiters.

“Many undergrads are just forced into these situations where they are working on a project that they have no interest in, where their only goal is to get a publication [...] before they can apply for grad school, ” Q said. The pressure to publish makes it difficult for academics to balance their personal life with their work. For Q, this endless chase of achievement often feels pointless.

“It’s not even like having a publication really guarantees you anything given how competitive academia is and how much importance is placed on grades [...] even if you’re an excellent researcher, you might get cut off for having a lower GPA,” Q said. “In this context, why research a subject that you want [or] is useful if there’s no return on your time investment?”

REPRODUCIBILITY CRISIS: BUILDINGSCIENTIFICKNOWLEDGE UPONSAND

“Publish or perish” favours not only quantity, but novelty. Journals’ biases toward new and exciting findings has contributed to the decades-long “reproducibility crisis” that looms over many branches of scientific research. The crisis was first brought into the limelight in 2005, when John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, published a paper arguing that most published research findings are false.

Eduardo Franco, a McGill professor in the Departments of Oncology and Epidemiology & Biostatistics, introduced me to Ioannidis’ findings and explained that there is a severe dearth of corroboration for old scientific findings—there is no “second place” in scientific discovery, after all. But if there is no one to check previous research, then science is founded on unsteady ground.

“So, let’s say I’m the editor of a journal and that someone submits a ‘me too’ kind of paper—a ‘me too’ kind of paper in the sense that they’re just replicating something that’s not particularly novel,” Franco said. “It’s a minor gain in knowledge, just a confirmation of something that has already been published. As an editor, sorry, I’m more interested in publishing things that are major gains in knowledge—big, new discoveries.”

Franco explained that the public can act as whistleblowers to keep academics accountable. Pubpeer, for instance, is a website that allows users to fact-check and highlight shortcomings in scientific publications. But peer reviewers ultimately bear the most responsibility for keeping papers accurate.

“Who’s the best judge of what I do? Someone like me, who’s sitting in a different institution, who doesn’t have a conflict of interest, and who’s an expert in the things that I do,” Franco said. “The peer reviewer, who understands what I do and would judge my work, sends anonymous feedback to me via a journal, and then I’ll be able [to say], ‘Hey, that’s right, I missed that thing. I should do that better.’”

Since the peer review process can feel never-ending, some scientists are tempted to take shortcuts to claim their first-place prize. Preprint archives, which are scientific manuscripts posted on a public server prior to formal peer review, allow academics to speed up the “publication” process. Franco explained that this is how many scientific discoveries regarding COVID-19 came about. Circumventing the traditional publishing system accelerated mRNA vaccine research, but when scientific findings are not subject to peer revision, it can also lead to disastrous consequences.

“All those [anti-vaccine people] out there who have a bone to pick about vaccines, they start [falsifying data] and putting them in preprints,” Franco told me. “Archives of preprints are a great idea because they prevent the distortion that the world of science was doing with journals, but at the same time, they open up an outlet for people who have a crazy thing to say about anything.”

Though the reproducibility crisis is alarming, Shashika Bandara, a PhD student in global health policy at McGill, warned against simplifying this complex topic into a dichotomy where publishing a lot is framed as bad and publishing less as good. From another perspective, a high annual rate of publications is a sign of increasing innovative scientific discovery. It only becomes an issue when scientists forsake the rigour that should be involved in the research process to publish for publication’s sake.

Russel Ismael, Wendy Zhao, Lily Cason, Juliet Morrison, Madison Edward-Wright

“I don’t think the fact that we are publishing more is a problem because I think science, as we go on, we need to do more research—we need to generate knowledge, and that knowledge may not be used right away,” Bandara said. “A paper that you wrote about something, even a model of equity or even how a protein works in the cells, can be used years later to develop a vaccine, perhaps, so there is use to doing research.”

STRUCTURAL ISSUES: WHENSCIENTIFICADVANCEMENT MEETS SYSTEMIC BARRIERS

The systemic issues plaguing scientific advancement took root long before “publish or perish” was conceived. Bandara told me that the plague of science’s colonial roots still persists.

“[Scientific research] used to focus on what diseases are in the colonized countries that would affect the colonizer,” Bandara explained. “And to an extent, it’s still moving forward and a lot of the medical research is being built on a colonial model.”

The knowledge that is considered important and funded by academia is dictated by the agendas and priorities of high-income countries, symptomatic of the “foreign gaze” that dominates academic settings: Authors from high-income countries form the principal authority on the problems of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

“So, we have neglected tropical diseases. We have to ask the question, who is neglecting these tropical diseases? Why are these tropical diseases neglected? Why is there so little research that we have to call them ‘neglected,’ right?” Bandara asked. “All of the time, these neglected diseases exist in [LMICs], and they do not affect high-income countries [....] If you take COVID-19, there is a push to find vaccines, there’s a push to do more research. There’s an influx of funding and publishing and so on and so forth.”

The disparity between these countries manifests in the nascent stages of the research process. LMICs have limited academic resources, resulting in delayed experiments and prolonged research periods, which impacts the quality of their research output. For instance, a reagent that can be delivered within a couple of days in Canada could take weeks to arrive at a lab in Bangladesh.

“The institutions, the universities do not have the funding, like McGill does, to subscribe to all these journals for everybody to access. So we don’t have this institutional access to journals that are mostly behind paywalls,” Bandara explained. “So a lot of the time, especially young researchers and even more advanced researchers, do not have the capacity or the ability to access these journals—the journal papers about their own country, even.”

To address access issues, Bandara suggested that journals should introduce open-access publishing to circumvent article processing charges (APCs), which are fees charged to authors for the publication of their work.

“So on the one hand, [LMIC] researchers cannot access journals because they don’t have the capacity [...] to pay these journals exorbitant amounts of money,” Bandara said. “On the other hand, they also don’t have the money to publish their pieces in these journals.”

But open-access publishing is not an antidote to LMICs funding limitations—only an anodyne. The “foreign gaze” extends to Nature’s open-access publishing, as they will charge researchers nearly $11,400 USD to read the academic papers they have for free, which can be greater than an LMIC researcher’s yearly salary. This is not unique to Nature, as many high-impact journals like The Lancet also require thousands of dollars just to access their articles for “free” under an open-access model. Because of this, LMIC scholars still often rely on resources such as SciHub, which provides free, unrestricted access to scientific works, to conduct their research. But even these platforms have their limitations—science’s colonial structures also mean that its institutions primarily operate in English, barring non-English speaking scientists from many scientific discussions.

To overcome these structural issues of access in academia, Bandara believes that those involved in scientific research must confront the colonial

system behind it.

“So some of these things providing waivers, also the open access articles, it’s going the right way, although it’s not the complete solution,” Bandara said. “It’s important to recognize the problem first, and then recognize how the foundation of science research and publishing in the first place is built on this model that sort of benefits high-income countries.”

The class barrier to involvement in academic research is apparent in our own university. Q told me that undergraduate researchers without access to financial support are denied many opportunities.

“[Student research] kind of raises this problem of equality because the only students that are actually able to do this kind of volunteer work are those that are rather well-off and who don’t really have to sacrifice some aspect of studies, or personal life, or financial security, and whatnot,” Q said. Of course, this lack of available funding opportunities disproportionately affects those of lower socioeconomic status, especially Black, Indigenous, and students of colour (BIPOC). If a student has to prioritize a second job or family care over research, they are already at a disadvantage compared to other students.

For Q, McGill’s BIPOC research awards are an example of how the lack of sufficient research funding in academia can adversely affect marginalized students. Although the award is intended to embolden racialized groups to go into research with a $7000+ summer stipend, Q argues otherwise.

“[The BIPOC award] does the exact opposite of what it’s trying to do, which is to encourage people of colour to do research,” Q explained.

“Yeah, well, it does encourage them, except we know full well that because people are always fighting for more awards and more money, a lot of the time, these people of colour are relegated to the BIPOC award, even though they are perfectly good to receive the NSERC or the SURA award.” Q believes that inequitable hiring decisions happen when PIs use BIPOC students to strategically optimize their finances. When faced with scholarship prospects, Q felt that he was sidelined compared to some of his peers. “Faculty members talk to one another, and they want to maximize the amount of funding they receive,” Q said. “So they say, ‘Well, this is a person of colour applying to the BIPOC award. Well, guess what? We’re going to give them the BIPOC award and reserve the NSERC for a white student that might not be as strong, but who at least has a chance of getting [an award], but has no chance of getting the BIPOC Award.’ So, that basically doubles the amount of money that they’re getting.”

CONCLUSION& FURTHER EXTENSIONS

Passion for scientific discovery is often cultivated when one’s eye is staring down a microscope or telescope, but perhaps our tools of observation should also scrutinize the problems within academia itself.

Scientific academia’s culture has become increasingly toxic, requiring contributors, especially young, low-income, and BIPOC researchers, to sacrifice a crucial part of themselves—the magic of science that drew them into the field in the first place. Scientific discovery has become a race, pushing many contestants to forgo key principles of accuracy and integrity. The utopian vision of science as an objective agent of the world has shown its foibles.

But that does not mean scientists should resign themselves to this fate. Four hundred years ago, everyone believed the Sun revolved around the Earth. There are still years ahead of us that will allow us to make scientific knowledge and research more accessible. Only then can scientific discovery truly flourish. Already, many within the field are critically examining its inequitable structures, such as the Decolonizing Global Health movement

Since the time of Isaac Newton and René Descartes, many scientists have said that science is too unwieldy. But the lovers of knowledge centuries, decades, and years ago, along with the ones reading this now, had and still have a hold on it.

*Name changed to preserve their anonymity.

Archives that evade

Notes on informal collections, quotidian practice, and self-determination

Matthew Molinaro Managing Editor

In 1974, the first Black woman Random House editor gathered photographs, sheet music, advertisements, obituaries, patent applications, materials, art, and ephemera in a collection entitled The Black Book. These archives, anthologies, collages, and scrapbooks celebrated, bore witness to, and captured the spectacular and the quotidian of Black life in all its forms since the so-called United States founding, all in one. Of, by, and for us––two scripts run parallel, knowing their touch, their fraught point of intersection is tender, causing blood and ink to spill. How could this publishing house make legible histories, performances, and comings-into-being of Blackness without minstrelizing, over-disclosing, running foul of the secrets we’ve kept for ourselves across generations––shared in the quiet moments of collective grace?

I (once again) heard about Toni Morrison’s editorial pursuits in this endeavour in the Leacock Building, for a public talk. As one of few Black attendants, other than the speaker, my walk to the building passed the Arts Building’s steps. A gateway to the humanities that stands in front of the violent memorial to our namesake who slumbers peacefully, with no regard for his enslavement of Indigenous children and Black people. The haunt of our ancestors hangs in his wake, Black life, labour, aliveness, solidarity, at the place where margin erupts into the centre; for to be advertised is to be remembered. By work all things increase and grow.

How do we commemorate lives and ourselves outside of the popular modes of redress, commissions, public

declarations; the plans, lists, records, books, numbers, and names made available? The Tribune sat down to articulate practices of counter-archives, archives that feel, that glint with golden futurity, that hold the muck and mess of the past and acknowledge the inaccessible dimensions of what we consider to be the standard archive.

Forging the ephemeral

When we think of archives, or extracting from archives, the image we construct are thick stacks, sign-up sheets manned by an agent with extraordinary discretionary power, silence, clubs that not all of us can join (they scattered the ashes and went). What would it be to say the informal archive might be loud, clamoured by voices chanting, singing, screaming, guiding, fostering, choking, or not always tied to the institution? Your memories matter because you studied at an international institution, shielded from the fall, and actively manufactured death.

Think about the amorous, nebulous glance from a potential lover, the nod from a comrade, the modes of social organizing and policing that attempt to strip Black and Indigenous people, women and queer and trans people of colour from spreading the unspeakable for revolution, the contact points that touch softly in times of peace and war. The photos, the laughs, the stillness of wandering in a time outside of the clock.

The art of losing’s not too hard to master. Write it! Scribble on the peripheries. Avoid the malconstructed public demands that impede your privacy. Our lives depend on the extraordinary within the ordinary practices of remembering, seeing, thinking, and living with each other differently.

McGill’s campus hot dog stand is losing its spark

A review of McGill’s infamous hot dogs

Harry North Staff Writer

Finding a meal simpler than a hot dog is a hard sell. It was The New York Times sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan who coined the term in the early 1900s. Now it’s a North American street food staple, with Nathan’s World Hot Dog Eating Contest taking place at Coney Island every July.

At McGill, the downtown hot dog stand is one of Montreal’s only street food vendors. The stand is also McGill’s unofficial weatherman.

Indeed, when temperatures rise above zero, and there’s no rain, a flimsy shade and fiery grill, accompanied by a wobbly table lined with dozens of ketchup and mustard

bottles, emerges at McGill’s Y-intersection— the telltale sign that summer is on the way. The middle-aged, lightly-stubbled, baseballcapped men running the stand are perhaps the most fair-weathered folks in Canada.

So, with the snow melting, the hot dog stand has returned, and last week, one of The Tribune’s Managing Editors, Mady, and I stopped by for lunch. The usual throngs of student droolers, thankfully, weren’t snaking the line—we went straight to the front.

Watching on, the stand felt like it had been taken from a 1980s postcard. The 40-something man under the shade ran a strict ship on the barbie, while the 60-something shorter man took payments. The idyllic simplicity twisted the arm of nostalgia and even made the tree-hugging hippies and the self-obsessed finance bros forget their identities.

Archiving with each other

The private is ripe with offerings to transform our public accounts of memory practice. Activist-author-organizer-researcher-librarian-abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us to move beyond carcerality and policing in the blooms only a library could gift us. We must navigate the violence that asks us to remember when our media circulates photographs of Black death and suffering, violence against refugees, Indigenous peoples, women, girls, and Two-Spirit people missing in the favour of white sentimental global uplift. No apologies without structural transformation should be accepted.

The question endures––what can the library, the more formal archive, build from this? Our communication, cryptic and coded, must work to a critical consciousness. Radical library practice means opening up doors, placing value on the democratic need to sit, to recover, to evade the seemingly insuperable burdens of in the cracks of underfunded social institutions. Sharing what we have, the books, the zines, the newspapers of eras gone by, the films, the music, and the tapes, in and outside national, provincial, and local libraries fuels what a better world could be. What it must start with, however, is reimagining the archive and its exclusive practices informally and otherwise.

Menu

Original - $5.50

Vegan - $5.50

Polish - $8.00

McGill’s hot dog cart has been around since 2012 and enjoys a lack of nearby competition, with Montreal’s strict rules restricting the number of street vendors to near nilch and McGill’s Food and Dining Services’ uninspiring mantra ruling with an iron fist.

The stand had three hot dog options, sufficient for a hot dog stand—this isn’t some European sausage delicacy house. They normally serve soft drinks, but on this occasion, they didn’t have any, and this included—to my utter apoplectic, incandescent rage—Diet Coke.

Tell me the ingredients, or use the specific name for it, and if it’s tempeh, I’ll stay well, well clear.

Anyway, this ‘vegan’ hot dog looked like it was sulking. Mind you, if I were a vegan hot dog, I’d be miffed, too.

Taking the first bite, the yellow-stained dry texture inside resembled a chemical experiment. The taste was better than the appearance. A little doughy, as the dog was smaller, with the weakest zip of spice that was interesting for about a half-second.

The hot dog stand has lured students and decorated McGill’s Y-intersection since 2012. (Lea Bourget / The Tribune)

Just before I ordered, an angry screech came from the man behind the grill, aimed at the older man. He said something along the lines of “Quand je dit arrête, ça veut dire arrête, et tu m’écoutes!” Which, for my English friends, translates to “When I say stop, that means stop, and you listen to me”—referring to an issue with the cash. The bellowing man also said no to us taking a picture of the stand.

We started with the original hot dog, made of beef. We dolloped some ketchup and mustard, and it was beaming, almost smugly. The dog’s size was sufficient, not that size matters, but it starts to when there’s a $5.50 price tag. Flavour-wise, it had a juicy, borderline watery, but simple taste bolstered by the ketchup and mustard.

The vegan hot dog came next, and I have to say, I hate the labelling. Calling it vegan is stupid and backward. It makes ordering a black-and-white decision: Meat or non-meat. Vague or vaguer. How dull.

The Polish hot dog, which typically contains more garlic, was named more appropriately, but I doubt the Poles would have been chuffed with it. It tasted raw. Perhaps I took too long to eat it, so it cooled down, or perhaps the man behind the barbie should focus on cooking them properly instead of screeching orders to an old man like a querulous high school sports coach.

Score: 2 / 5

What does the score mean? Scores are out of five stars.

Five stars: Your Aussie friend’s barbie extravaganza.

Four Stars: Family friend’s BBQ.

Three Stars: Five Guys.

Two Stars: Costco.

One Star: McGill Cafeteria hot dog night.

During her time at Random House, Toni Morrison edited writers such as Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Toni Cade Bambara. (Black Women Radicals)

Spotlight on McGill’s Union for Gender Empowerment Exploring the history of the oldest-running feminist organization on campus

Charlotte Bawol & Mahnoor Chaudhry Contributor & Student Life Editor

Founded in 1912 as the McGill Women’s Union, the Union for Gender Empowerment (UGE) was established as the university’s only female social club. It provided a space for women to gather since the Alma Mater Society, the precursor to the Student’s Society of McGill University, was a men’s-only club until 1931. In 2004, the Women’s Union was rebirthed as the UGE, with the aim of promoting a wider, more inclusive struggle against all types of gendered oppression. This made the collective open to all, regardless of gender identity. Today, the organization functions nonhierarchically—a legacy of the 1970s club members.

The UGE’s activities have changed a lot over its more than 100 years of activity, in line with the shifting realities of the century. When going through the archives of the collective, one of the members of the UGE, Keith BellecWarrick, a master’s student in the Faculty of Education, found a pamphlet created by the Women’s Union that explained to women how to fake a psychotic episode in order to obtain the three doctors’ approval required to receive an abortion. In 2023, the UGE focuses its resources on anti-oppressive, transpositive, and anti-racist feminist activism and education.

The UGE office is home to the largest queer anglophone library in all of Quebec, which it runs in collaboration with Queer McGill. The library is composed of films, books, research archives, zines, booklets, and more, many of which are hard to find elsewhere. For instance, the library boasts a substantial collection of self-published 1970s feminist poetry that was purchased and donated by former members of the McGill Women’s Union.

Archival Crossword

“The library is in the office, it has an online catalogue that you can consult which is the queer library and the UGE library,” Bellec-Warrick told The Tribune. “All you need to do is come to the office and a staffer will help you create an account and you [can check out a book], we don’t ask for any proof of ID or anything like that.”

Also in line with its educational mandate, the group hosts weekly discussions and readings that are open to all on Wednesdays, known as their Feminist Café. “[The Feminist Café] is pretty simple—you show up on Wednesday night, we print out a reading, read it together, and discuss over coffee and snacks,” Bellec-Warrick explained.

In February, the Feminist Café embarked on a fourweek series exploring Black feminist texts, which featured a selection of Black feminist and womanist writers, including Assata Shakur, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis.

It’s clear to any attendee that UGE is dedicated to accessible event-planning, like offering transit tickets and allergen-free snacks to attendees who may need them.

To expand access to critical resources, the UGE operates a co-op that provides menstrual health and gender-affirming products to the McGill and Montreal community on a paywhat-you-can basis.

“Along with our menstrual products, we also keep basic makeup, specialized underwear for trans women, bras on order (even specialized bras), and anything people need for nursing on order as well,” said Bellec-Warrick. “And of course, we take requests, so if someone is like we need something, we order it, no questions asked.”

They are currently well stocked with menstrual products and binders, which can be ordered using a Google form on the group’s website.

The UGE intends to ask for a fee levy next fall in order to increase its operating budget and meet rising costs amid inflation. Bellec-Warrick explained that 300 pairs of menstrual underwear, which UGE stocks in its co-op, cost around $10,000—a third of the yearly budget—even at bulk price.

The UGE office is open to all and located in room 413 of the University Centre––It’s what Margaret Hopkins, a master’s student in music technology and UGE member, would call a “safe space to hang out and find someone to talk.”

To keep in touch with the UGE and up to date on their activities, sign up to their Listserv and check out their Linktree. Follow them on social media on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

The UGE library is one of the largest collections of feminist and LGBTQ+ literature in English in Quebec that is openly accessible to the public. (Charlotte Bawol / The Tribune)

SanazToossi’splayexploresidentitythroughaTOEFLpreparationclassinIran

Kellie Elrick Contributor

“HELLO. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR?”

The militant aggression of Elham’s (Ghazal Azarbad) tone sends laughter rippling through the audience. She wants to go to Australia for medical research with a renowned professor studying gastrointestinal diseases. She has a fantastic MCAT score. She wants to help people.

She’s failed the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) multiple times.

Elham is one of four students in an English class in 2009 in Karaj, Iran. They all want to learn English for different reasons but stand together under the dark cloud of English linguistic hegemony.

English, written by Sanaz Toossi and co-directed by Anahita Dehbonehie and Guillermo Verdecchia, explores language, identity, family, and otherness through the ensuing classroom shenanigans. The play ran at the Segal Centre this past month.

Ghazal Partou gives a compelling performance as the encouraging yet austere teacher Marjan, who had previously lived in London for almost a decade. There, she went by Mary. She encourages her students to speak in ENGLISH ONLY, sparking a combination of malapropisms, frustrations, and major questions about what language really means.

We see people learning a new language at different stages of their lives, for a variety of reasons. The winsome, overall-clad Goli (Aylin Oyan Salahshoor) is 18. She believes the world will open up to her once she learns English. Roya (Banafsheh Taherian) wants to live with her son’s family in Canada, but her son wants his daughter fully immersed in English

and doesn’t want Roya to confuse her by speaking Farsi. And then there’s the enigmatic Omid (Sepehr Reybod), who comes into the class speaking English suspiciously well.

The production was intentional in casting all Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) actors. An especially important choice as the Asian American Performers Action Coalition found in their 2018-2019 Visibility Report that across the board, only 1.3 per cent of hired actors and 1.5 hired writers claim MENA descent, despite accounting for 3 per cent of the American population.

English takes a creative approach to storytelling in both English and Farsi to a primarily anglophone audience. When the characters speak English, the actors speak with a Farsi accent. When the characters speak Farsi, the actors speak with American-English accents, vocally flipping the script.

A key tension within the play is whether or not learning a new language means becoming a new person. The audience is left to ponder how much we lose in translation, and how much good in the world is sacrificed in the name of assimilation. If learning a new language means assuming a new identity, does that mean Roya’s granddaughter will never really know her?

Though the debates around language are political, the creative team doesn’t overtly centre English around politics. The play’s lighthearted humour is crucial to its message. Notably, the audience and characters rarely laugh together.

For instance, when Omid encourages the timid Goli to ignore the reactions of those around her, to “screw everyone, fuck everyone!”, Goli replies by enthusiastically proclaiming, “OKAY, I WILL FUCK EVERYONE!”

The funniest lines were those that resulted from miscommunications. When the laughter ceases, the atmosphere in the theatre transforms completely, and the audience is left to ponder what exactly they were laughing at.

The Tribune’s definitive list of guilty pleasures

Simi Ogunsola, Ella Buckingham, Suzanna Graham & Yash Zodgekar Staff Writers

Perfect Match

There are no two ways to say it: I love reality TV. I’ve watched the American and British Love Island editions and all three versions of the Selling franchise (Selling Sunset, Selling Tampa, Selling the OC). I’ve seen love in every form: Blind, on an island, or at the end of an ultimatum.

As somewhat of a connoisseur, I went into Netflix’s Perfect Match not expecting to be wowed. The show invites former Netflix reality-show stars (ft. Francesca Farago, Nick Ulenhuth, Anne-Sophie Petit) to a tropical villa to battle through challenges and drama to hopefully find their “perfect match.”

It was a masterpiece.

Something about contestants battling not just for a partner, but for a PrettyLittleThing contract renewal made the

shouting fights more intense. Somehow, the jaw-dropping, omg-why-did-he-pick-her moments hit harder, knowing that these are people with egos, followers, and a knack for mind games.

Suffice it to say, Perfect Match has earned a spot in my personal reality TV hall of fame.

Strong Woman Do Bong Soon

What better way to out myself as a K-drama enthusiast than to review arguably the best one? Its plot is heartwarming, the side characters are loveable—though slightly ridiculous— and the love triangle is typical, but cute. No matter how technically bad it may be, I will defend Strong Woman Do Bong Soon (SWDBS) to the end.

The plot centres around Do Bong Soon (Park Bo-young), an ordinary woman with extraordinary strength who uses her superpower to help stop a city-wide kidnapping spree. The main highlight is the relationship between Bong Soon and Ahn Min Hyuk (Park Hyung-sik), a CEO who helps Bong Soon out while trying to solve his own mystery. Alternate casting would have downgraded this show from life-changing to mid real fast, but Park and Park have the strongest chemistry of any on-screen couple ever. It’s basically a fact. Stream SWDBS on Rakuten Viki to see how this 2017-adorableness captured my heart.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Despite Buffy’s gothic theme, lead actress Sarah Michelle Giller apparently had a paralyzing fear of cemeteries. (lithub.com)

In my unbiased opinion, television began when Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) showed up at Sunnydale High in 1997 with a wooden stake and some kickass oneliners. Think back to all the questionable decisions you made in high school: All the rotted relationships, sneaking out late,

The purpose of language is often considered to be functionality, but communication and connection go far beyond grammar and vocabulary. Humour is often overlooked in language politics, but it is a key feature that links us together as humans. Perhaps Marjan captures this complexity best when she tells Omid, “[y]ou go years without making anyone laugh.” The audience fell silent.

Montreal provides a unique setting for a play about language, especially one entitled English. When you walk out of the theatre, the play doesn’t really end—its messages are reflected in Quebec’s language divide, protests against Bill 96 and Bill 21, and the Woman Life Freedom movement following the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. The set design also features a window looking out onto Karaj, visually linking the classroom to the outside world.

Both inside and outside the theatre, the audience is left to question the purpose of language: Ultimately, should it assimilate or communicate?

‘English’ ran from March 19 to April 2 at the Segal Centre.

trying out Wicca…the good ol’ days! Now imagine all those things happening in a town on a Hellmouth.

With a monster-of-the-week format and a healthy mix of teen drama, Buffy is pure entertainment. Granted, at this point, we’ve seen almost every imaginable rendition of the high-schoolers-defeat-evil TV show trope. But Buffy did it first. If you look past (or even embrace) the 90s-quality special effects and some questionable story arcs (feel free to clock the “my teacher is secretly a sexy praying mantis” plotline), you have hours of campy demons, teens trying their best, and the girlboss of all girlbosses.

Foals—Mountain At My Gates

A certain model of the indie band came to dominate Britain in the late 2000s. Their name was nondescript, only faintly pretending to allude to some deeper meaning— ‘Klaxons’ anyone? They modelled themselves on their more pioneering early-2000s peers, sporting skinny jeans, overgrown haircuts, and silly vintage jackets. Camden Town was their London headquarters, an epicentre of sweatilyperformed guitar riffs, earning derision from bored critics who termed the phenomenon “landfill indie.”

Foals are all of this and more. Catching the landfill indie scene’s comedown, Foals soldiered into the present with an admirable, if also baffling, seriousness. They embody the sounds of sleepovers as a 13-year-old, gorging yourself on M&Ms and fizzy drinks in a friend’s basement while the indie exhilaration of Mountain at My Gates reverberates off the soundtrack of an engrossing FIFA 16 game. Melding jangly guitars with a charming lyrical metaphor of…well, mountain climbing, Foals show us there’s a great deal of fun in harking back to bygone times, however trite they may have been.

Cringey? Yes. Marathon-stream? Also yes. All the shows and music we can’t help but love

‘English’ was Sanaz Toossi’s Tisch MFA thesis project. (Dahlia Katz)

‘English’ asks provocative questions about the meaning of lang uage

Montreal’s magnificent murals: How public art sustains the city’s cultural spirit

Dana Prather Staff Writer

Public art is a hot-button topic of discussion, be it in political debates or around the dining room table. While some denounce it as a frivolous waste of tax-payer dollars, others applaud the cultural, economic, and societal advantages of investing in public art: Its presence can accentuate a neighbourhood’s unique character, highlight important social issues, and render the fine arts more accessible.

Montreal is no stranger to these benefits as home to over 1,000 officially sanctioned public artworks. Public art even ornaments McGill’s downtown campus, where you can find eyecatching sculptures such as Jonathan Borofsky’s Human Structures (2010), which features three tiers of brightlycoloured figures outside of Burnside Hall, and Barbara Hepworth’s Square Forms and Circles (1963), a highly abstract, geometric structure located steps away from the Milton Gates.

Montreal is home to an impressive collection of public art, but the crème de la crème is undoubtedly its murals. These eye-catching artworks can be found across the island, and they range from small-scale murals to expansive portraits stretched across buildings. You would be hard-pressed to find a resident who hasn’t noticed the city’s abundance of colourful murals, which attract attention from Montrealers and tourists alike. A quick Google search reveals several tours of Montréal’s urban street art, guiding interested individuals on foot, or providing detailed lists of must-see murals for self-guided adventures.

For those who prefer creating to observing, Montreal is also home to MURAL Festival, a yearly public art show that turns Saint-Laurent Boulevard into an open-air museum. Local, national, and international artists are invited to use the street’s building sides as their canvasses, producing creative new works that the public can view for free, furthering the festival’s mission of democratizing art. Set to take place from June 8 to 18, this year’s MURAL Festival will welcome celebrated street artists like OSGEMEOS, a Brazilian artistic duo composed of twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, and Projet TXYNA, a local mural and digital art collective made up of five creatives. The Projet TXYNA team will undertake the task of reinventing one of Montréal’s iconic murals, the “Graffiti Granny” which overlooks the intersection of SaintLaurent and Avenue des Pins.

While MURAL Festival effectively drums up support and viewership of public art during its 11 days of festivities, groups like MU, a charitable organization for unique mural art rooted in Montreal’s history and culture, hope to foster an appreciation for public art all year long. ElizabethAnn Doyle, MU’s artistic director and co-founder, maintains that public art is essential to preserving Montreal’s identity as a cultural metropolis.

“Montreal is a creative city. We should, as Montrealers, feel that in everyday life,” Doyle said in an interview with The Tribune. “Public art is the best central access to free art.”

Inspiration for MU’s inception struck while Doyle was visiting Philadelphia alongside co-founder Emmanuelle Hébert for their work with Cirque du Soleil. Stirred by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program and the economic and social benefits it brought to the city, the pair vowed to establish a similar program back home. The result? MU, which has produced more than 300 murals since 2007 in an effort to help Montrealers get their daily dose of art.

The organization prioritizes artwork that pays tribute to the city’s creatives. Since 2010, MU has produced two to three murals per year that acknowledge Montreal’s trailblazing artists.

“We wanted to give a voice and honour artists as opposed to traditional public art, which [pays] tribute to military men or politicians,” Doyle said. “Quebec’s history is important. Recognition of its storytellers is important.”

MU’s “Montreal’s Great Artists” series has yielded some of the city’s most recognizable murals. These include 2017’s Tower of Songs by El Mac and Gene Pendon, a largescale portrait on Crescent Street of acclaimed singer-songwriter and Westmount native Leonard Cohen, as well as Magnetic Art (2022) by Marc Séguin, a piece in the heart of Milton Parc dedicated to visual artist JeanPaul Riopelle.

Another mural in the MUproduced series, Hommage À Alanis Obomsawin (2018) by artist Meky Ottawa, demonstrates how the medium can serve to highlight Indigenous artists and their cultures in a primarily settler-colonial setting. As a portrait of celebrated Abenaki Canadian-American filmmaker and activist Alanis Obomsawin, the mural paints the artist from the chest upwards, setting her against an azure sky dotted with constellations. The

artwork is situated at the corner of Atwater and Lincoln in the Ville-Marie borough and serves as an important reminder of how Indigenous creators and their artistic contributions have shaped Canada’s artistic landscape.

In an email to the Tribune, Gloria Bell, an assistant professor of art history at McGill, emphasized the capacity of public art especially murals in highlighting Indigenous experiences and contributions.

“Public art such as murals are more accessible than finding artworks in traditional white cube galleries and museums,” Bell wrote. “The large scale of the work is powerful in its visibility and acknowledgement of Indigenous artists.”

In the case of Hommage, the mural pulls double-duty to further Indigenous representation: Not only does the artwork itself depict an Indigenous creative, but it also platforms Ottawa, an emerging, multi-disciplinary Atikamekw artist whose work incorporates traditional Indigenous techniques.

“[Obomsawin] seems to be crowned by traditional Abenaki floral motifs, a fitting crown for the queen of Indigenous media,” Bell wrote.

In addition to creating space for Indigenous artists and artworks, the murals of Montreal help spark important conversations about social issues. For instance, the mural Finding Home Again (William Daniel Buller, 2022), commissioned by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in association with MU, explores the topic of forced migration. Depicting a woman carrying a sleeping child in her arms and a home strapped to her back, the mural stretches across the wall of a four-story apartment complex. Lines

from the poem “immigrant” by Rupi Kaur complete the work, stretching across the bottom-right corner in both French and English:

“they have no idea what it’s like / to lose home at the risk of / never finding home again / to have your entire life / split between two lands and / become the bridge between two countries.

The artwork is a stark and poignant reminder of the struggle of more than 100 million people worldwide who have been forced to uproot their lives to find refuge elsewhere. Located in the neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges (CDN), one of Canada’s most ethnically diverse communities, this mural reflects the forced displacement many of the neighbourhood’s residents have experienced.

“We feel that art is for everybody, and it should be grassrooted,” Doyle explained. “It talks to communities, so it has to talk about subjects that echo in those areas.”

The mural was unveiled on Oct. 24, 2022. Doyle emphasized the importance of its placement, which is situated prominently on the border of CDN and the Town of Mont-Royal. By displaying the mural in such a highly trafficked area, it serves as an organic catalyst for conversations about forced migrations for anyone who passes by.

Public art, and murals especially, plays a foundational role in sculpting Montreal as a cultural milieu. To Doyle, the question of whether public art is a luxury is a resounding no.

“Art is essential to life,” she said. “If [Montreal is] really a cultural city, that means not only having lots of programming. It goes beyond shows. It has to be lived by everybody, everywhere.”

The city’s favoured public art medium brings poignancy to everyone, everywhere

Finding Home Again (2022) reflects the courage of those who have been forcibly displaced in the face of a perilous journey to find a new home. (mumtl.org)

The infinite potential of untangling quantum numbers

McGill’s quantum experts weigh in on the new frontiers of computing technologies

Harrison Yamada Staff Writer

Over the last decade, thanks to developments in hardware and software technologies, computers can now tackle problems previously thought impossible. Computer chips are faster (in accordance with Moore’s Law) and developing fields like deep learning—a class of algorithms that use brain-inspired neural networks to process data—allow computers to more efficiently organize and generate data, further propelling artificial intelligence forward.

Quantum technology is another developing field with revolutionary potential that has gained traction in recent years. The technology relies on quantum mechanics, which is a theory in physics that describes high-momentum objects on the smallest scales, like individual atoms and subatomic particles.

According to quantum mechanics, particles can exhibit random and counter-intuitive behaviours like superposition—the principle that a particle’s location is not actually a single location, but instead occupies several locations at once. But, as soon as the particle is observed, it randomly “chooses” one of those locations via a process called decoherence. It’s like Shrödinger’s cat. We only know the cat is dead once we open the box—until then, anything is possible.

Besides location, particles have other properties that exhibit this same behaviour, like momentum and spin. As long as the particle is not directly observed, these precarious quantum behaviours are present.

Quantum computing is one exciting application of this principle. By confining and isolating particles, scientists and engineers try to leverage quantum behaviours to create computers that process information differently than your laptop would. While a classical computer uses bits—digits of 0 or 1—to encode information, a quantum computer uses qubits—digits that can be in a superposition of both 0 and 1 by harnessing particles with quantum properties. This affords extra flexibility when doing certain arithmetic computations, theoretically allowing quantum computers to exponentially outperform classical computers.

“If we want to build such a computer, it has some minimal requirements,” says Bill Coish, an associate physics professor at McGill who researches physical systems that are applied in quantum computers. “That we can prepare quantum states arbitrarily in this physical system, that we can evolve them in time in a way that preserves quantum information, and that we can measure them in the end.”

Currently, scientists can construct quantum computers that meet these requirements, but not at the scales necessary to perform useful computing tasks.

“If you want to do something practical,

current estimates suggest that you probably need millions of these qubits. And you need them to operate extremely well,” Coish said. “People have demonstrated qubits that operate extremely well for up to a few hundred [qubits in a quantum computer].”

Due to the instability of quantum particles, handling quantum states without disrupting the information they contain is a major challenge to building practical quantum computers. In an attempt to circumvent this issue, physicists and computer engineers are trying to integrate an error correction protocol into quantum computers.

Error correction is the process of mitigating the unwanted decoherence of delicate quantum states that hold information. The particles used to make qubits are prone to unwanted interactions with their environments that collapse the quantum superpositions that make them special. Often, error correction requires adding extra qubits to the quantum computer to create redundant backups of data so that if one quantum state collapses, its information is not lost.

“When you want to introduce a quantum error correction protocol, you need redundancy, and that’s why people estimate you need millions of quantum bits,” Coish explained.

Many algorithms for quantum computers have already been designed and are now awaiting machines to run on. If scientists can successfully construct quantum computers that contain millions of qubits, they could accomplish tasks that would irrevocably change many of the technologies we depend on.

A working quantum computer could produce more powerful simulations of chemical and physical systems, which would support the development of robust, sustainable materials and medicines. It would also provide much faster solutions to optimization problems used in machine learning and solve the impossible-by-design puzzles that are the backbone of current cybersecurity systems. If we woke up tomorrow with fully-fledged quantum computers, there could be an economic catastrophe within days.

Luckily, the timeline of quantum computing is thought to be slow enough to give us a chance to prepare for these problems before they arise.

“It will be 20 to 50 years, I believe, before we have a full-scale quantum computer. But for us cryptographers, it’s good news,” said Claude Crépeau, a McGill computer science professor and quantum cryptographer, in an interview with The Tribune

As quantum technologies change the landscape of cryptography, quantum cryptographers look to implement new security protocols in a timely manner.

“From this point on, it’s going to be the industry’s responsibility to change their systems,” Crépeau said. “The budgets to get these changes done are being voted on and govern-

ments push [the] industry to do these things. I think this change will happen.”

Outside of pure quantum computing, there is an active scene of quantum technology that could see great advancements in the next couple of years, including light sensors and novel communication methods.

McGill assistant physics professor Kai Wang, who researches meta-optic materials that manipulate light and harness its quantum properties, is optimistic about the development of these technologies.

“No matter if the goal [of building quantum computers] gets achieved, I think there could be many other things related to this goal that also get developed,” Wang said.

Wang hopes that by applying quantum physics principles, light sensors with lower margins of error and less error overall could be developed. One possible application of such sensors is in lidar technology.

“Lidar is like the light version of radar. There’s an interest in developing this technology for automatic driving,” Wang said. “It scans the 3D environment, then light gets scattered back and there’s some sensor collecting the information.”

Crépeau’s field of quantum cryptography is another rapidly developing area. He researches how quantum effects send information more secretly and securely than classical cryptographic methods, leveraging the same decoherence that haunts quantum computing to provide information on whether a message has been tapped.

Though slower than classical communication, these methods have already been used to stream video from a Chinese satellite back to Earth.

Another developing area is noisy intermediate-scale quantum systems (NISQ).

NISQ systems use classical computers and small, noise-prone quantum computers we currently have in tandem to solve optimization problems or perform difficult mathematical computations.

“These problems might be really interesting in the next year or two years. It’s not some far, future, abstract idea,” Coish said. “The best way forward in that area, in my opinion, is to have some really good intuition about what problems you should try, and just go and run them.”

The private sector plays a significant role in these developments, but contact between academics and private industry is an important part of driving the field forward.

“Everyone who works [in the private sphere] comes at some point from academia [....] They started their lives as scientists where they would publish their information as much as possible, and so I think they still have that attitude,” Coish said.

The private quantum space is more collaborative than other technology industries, where trade secrets are more confidential. For Wang, the backgrounds of quantum computer developers have made a difference in the developments achieved in the field.

“I do see a lot of emerging startup companies and people trying to push quantum computing into real-world applications,” Wang said. “This is probably one of the biggest changes that I have observed, but on the other hand, the research community is working closely with the industrial partners.”

As more companies enter the space to tackle specific applications of quantum science, we must prepare for rapid development in the next few years, with frontrunners like IBM and Google working towards building large quantum computers in the long term.

Although Einstein is most known for his work in gravity and cosmology, his only Nobel Prize was actually awarded for his work in quantum mechanics. (Physics Today)

Planting a SEED: McGill sustainability project moves forward in UN competition

McGill students aim to open up sustainability education with community project

Atticus O’Rourke Rusin Staff Writer

Two years ago, roughly half of high school-aged Canadians did not believe that climate change could be stopped. Some of this hopelessness stems from climate education, which still revolves around causes and effects, rather than solutions.

But, can climate change be stopped without spurring the next generation to action? That is exactly what the founders of Student Education for Environmental Development (SEED) asked themselves.

The four founders of SEED, Oliver Abrams, U0 Management, Hugo Paulat, U1 Biochemistry, Cameron Kluger, U1 Environmental Science, and Felix Harpe, U1 Finance, came together out of a shared love for the environment. The SEED founders were inspired by the World Federation of United Nations Association (WFUNA) Under the Starry Sky project competition, where participants have to come up with a sustainability initiative. In an interview with The Tribune, the group described their project, which involves setting up sustainable education programs in classrooms around Montreal.

“Through our curriculum, making it hands-on, interactive, and fun, we really think that with something that seems so simple we can actually make a difference,” Abrams said.

The Under the Starry Sky program received thousands of project proposals covering a wide range of the UN’s sustainable development goals, like no poverty or zero hunger. Of these applications, only 15, including SEED, were selected for future instruction and guidance in achieving their goals.

“We get their supervision for six months, until eventually we go to Norway in September [.…] In this period, we’ll be able to do our whole implementation,” Kluger said. “Along the way, we’ll have check-ins with WFUNA every week or two weeks and we’ll just be able to continuously receive their supervision and their advice and they’ll help us along the process.”

SEED aims to educate elementary to middle school-aged students on sustainability and climate change. Currently, the program is trying to integrate itself into Montreal schools, focusing particularly on lower-income areas of the city.

“The research that we found was that those who are equipped with these tools or given these resources or educated about these

ideas at a young age are more likely to be involved in sustainability when they’re older, more likely to pursue a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] career when they’re older, more likely to create change in this sustainability field,” Abrams said.

Although Montreal is a relatively sustainable city—it has one of the best public transit systems in the world and is highly energy efficient—the team believes that sustainable education needs to be expanded in order to take advantage of this infrastructure. Although they plan to broaden their programs, SEED is beginning with a simple workshop on reducing food waste and the importance of composting.

“Even if there were these robust systems in the city such as composting [...] a lot of people don’t know how to use them, or aren’t prepared to correctly compost their food because they don’t have the education to use these tools, ” Kluger said.

SEED is also working to establish an online component for the program to let students keep

learning after they complete workshops.

The team may expand their membership in the near future, but for the time being are focusing on solidifying their project’s goals of bringing sustainability to underserved classrooms. As a final perk of the WFUNA program, the finalists are invited on a historic Norwegian boat, set to sail in September, stopping at several cities around the country along the way. Once they return, SEED will have even more knowledge in its repertoire to better educate students in Montreal classrooms.

SEED is planning on implementing workshops in four schools before the end of this academic year. (WFUNA)

Health misinformation: A hidden obstacle to better patient outcomes

McGill researchers reveal a lack of high-quality online resources for cancer patients

K. Coco Zhang Contributor

The internet has become a widely used source of health information by the public, including cancer patients. However, the quality and reliability of online information vary greatly, leading to misunderstandings of treatments and, ultimately, reduced quality of care for those living with cancer.

In a recent paper, Marrah Nicolas-Joseph, U3 at McGill’s Ingram School of Nursing, and colleagues evaluated the quality of online information on cancer treatment and proposed a template for high-quality resources for cancer patients receiving immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy, an increasingly common type of cancer treatment, works to boost the immune system to target cancer cells. This type of therapy can train the immune system to remember cancer cells, effectively preventing cancer from recurring in the long term.

Despite the clinical benefits of immunotherapy, it often causes severe side effects, such as fatigue, diarrhea, liver injuries, and lung inflammation. The onset of these symptoms often causes patients to interrupt their treatment. Therefore, managing these unpleasant side effects is a priority in improving patients’ quality of life.

To support patients dealing with the side effects of immunotherapy, high-quality, online resources must be a priority. In their paper, Nicolas-Joseph and her team, under the supervision of associate professor Sylvie D. Lambert, identified publicly available resources, including webpages, pamphlets, and booklets, through various search engines. Each resource included was scored based on its quality.

“High-quality resources are those that comprehensively address immunotherapy’s side effects,” Nico-

las-Joseph wrote in an email to The Tribune “These resources may significantly optimize patient health literacy and promote patients’ involvement in decision-making.”

They found that many of the online resources were written at an inappropriate literacy level. The average reading grade level was equivalent to a post-secondary reading level, meaning that the resources were relatively difficult for the general public to understand.

Nicolas-Joseph’s team also determined that the resources lacked depth and comprehensiveness. While the online resources addressed areas such as how each treatment works and explained the benefits of treatment well, other important information, such as the risks, the chances of not receiving medical care, and the effects of medicine on the overall quality of life, were poorly explained. Similarly, resources did not adequately address strategies for patients to self-manage immunotherapy’s side effects, especially loss of balance, bloating, and slowed thinking.

The researchers also found that the method of delivery could affect the average quality of the resources.

“Pamphlets and booklets were [of higher quality], as they usually included more graphics and illustrations than webpages, which enhance patients’ learning,” Nicolas-Joseph wrote.

Overall, the findings suggest that there

is a lack of high-quality resources to teach patients who are receiving immunotherapy how to self-manage the side effects.

“As immunotherapy is a relatively new cancer treatment, we expected few educational resources for patients online. Indeed, most of the resources found on the internet during the search were addressed to the scientific community,” Nicolas-Joseph wrote. “Moreover, it seems like there is a lack of guidelines for developing information resources.”

So, the team developed a template for patient education material based on publicly available high-quality resources.

“We decided to create a template for patient educational resources based on the suitability, readability, and quality criteria used to evaluate the included resources in the research to make the manuscript more useful to readers,” Nicolas-Joseph wrote.

The template includes several sections addressing why after-treatment symptoms arise, how the symptoms can affect a patient’s quality of life, when to get help for the symptoms, and how to self-manage the symptoms. The template also provides detailed guidance on what information to include under each section.

On a larger scale, this paper points to the importance of developing high-quality resources for patients to self-manage a range of other illnesses, such as diabetes.

The use of immunotherapy has shown a tenfold increase over the past decade. (Kent Dayton/ harvard.edu)

Walking the academic tightrope

McGill professors left to dangle between teaching and research under crushing demands

Atticus O’Rourke Rusin Staff Writer

Canadians have been calling for reform in higher education for years because many feel that such institutions fail to effectively prepare students for the workforce. This isn’t the only issue on students’ minds though—the university’s priorities are, too. From recycled class lectures, rotating professors, and the struggles with contacting lecturers, students feel the very real effects of McGill’s duelling priorities: Teaching and research.

Students may prefer to blame professors for this imbalance rather than the systems that create them. Out of 101 responses received on a recent poll posted to The Tribune Instagram asking McGill students whether they felt prioritized by their professors, over half responded that they did not. However, conflating professors’ priorities with McGill’s would be misleading given faculty are often just as frustrated with the system as students.

When a professor is hired at McGill, the university has a number of expectations for them, such as teaching, research, and departmental service work. Balancing these tasks can be a momentous undertaking for professors, especially when maintaining a life outside of academia. In an interview with The Tribune, professor Nikolas Provatas, from McGill’s Department of Physics, shared his experience managing these responsibilities.

“I put a lot of time into my teaching. I put hundreds of hours into making animated slides, ordering them, rewording them, continuously, so that explanations are refined and perfected. So that takes up a huge amount of my year,” Provatas said.

Provatas was also clear that his teaching and research goals are not separate. First, he has several graduate students, each of which he devotes several hours a week to. The graduate students, in turn, help him research and write papers that contribute to Provatas’ ability to meet research responsibilities.

“I spend at least two full days a week, top to bottom […] where I just sit with my research group,” Provatas said. “They’re still trying to learn, but it’s in a different format. And that’s my ‘research.’”

According to Provatas, this is how the “big six” research universities in Canada work. Together, professors and graduate students form the base of knowledge diffusion and discovery at McGill and other research institutions. For Provatas, teaching and research are well-integrated but, at the same time,

balancing these responsibilities can prove to be a tricky test of patience.

“My wife’s not happy that on Thursday-Fridays, I don’t get home till 10:00 [p.m.]. I’m eating supper at 11,” Provatas said. “I’m clearly not always there for my family.”

This isn’t necessarily abnormal, either: The average workweek for professors is about 48 hours, with 14 per cent reporting working over 60 hours a week compared to the average Canadian’s (25 and up) 40 hours a week.

“It’s exhausting some days. I feel like quitting. I feel like it’s too much […] Some days, I just feel like saying, you know, ‘who can I call?’” Provatas said.

Provatas believes that, although the intense research and administrative

tenure-track and tenured professors, albeit to varying degrees. However, Provatas stated McGill prioritizes research in this review.

A 2018 survey of nearly 3,000 professors throughout Canada found that only 17 per cent preferred research to teaching. So, if professors do not heavily favour research, why do students often feel like they are playing second fiddle to professors’ research projects?

“There’s one other thing we have to do: Write government grants to get funding to pay for those graduate students [.…] And that’s a very stressful and time-consuming task,” Provatas said. “So professors are heavily on the hook, and if they don’t succeed at meeting certain production metrics in their re-

professors. This is particularly prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses at McGill, with large undergraduate courses rotating through four or five professors. For example, BIOL 200, a large, primarily second-year course, has five instructors listed for the Fall semester. Transitioning in rapid succession from one lecturer to another, many of which have different ways of lecturing, organizing notes, and availability, can make it hard to keep up.

Professor Christopher Buddle, Associate Provost of Teaching and Academic Programs, told The Tribune that “the course may be subdivided into thematic areas for which different instructors have responsibility and relevant expertise.”

This does seem to link research and teaching more effectively, but it can feel disorienting, as Zufferli explained in a follow-up email to The Tribune

“I do like the idea of having specific professors teach the subject they know best, but I do find the switch a bit jarring as the two profs have different teaching styles,” Zufferli wrote. “The nice part of it is having profs who are more interested in the subject.”

By maintaining the focus on integrating research and teaching, McGill’s administration often forgoes quality, leaving students to fend for themselves during transitions happening at almost breakneck speeds. At times, some students don’t even realize their professors have other responsibilities outside of teaching.

tasks required of many professors may make their job difficult, professors have a genuine desire to teach.

“I think, in physics, people really enjoy [teaching] their craft. Because I think it really is entertaining and inspiring,” Provatas said.

Not all students are satisfied, though. In an interview with the The Tribune, Cypress Zufferli, U0 Arts and Science, explained that in his experience, it feels like there is a wide gap between student engagement in Arts classes versus Science courses at McGill.

“I think I prefer the Arts side in terms of teaching,” Zufferli said. “Even if they’re only just a couple hundred [people] smaller, I feel like it’s noticeable because the professors just seem to care more about the subject.”

For the professors who may not have as much dedication to their teaching, Provatas has an explanation. McGill’s tenure review requirements necessitate work in three categories, namely research, teaching, and service, which Provatas calls administration. These obligations are required of both

search, they won’t get funded anymore. Then the university will punish them doubly by viewing them as underperformers.”

According to Provatas, many of the larger research universities in Canada, including McGill, also punish professors for poor student performance or negative feedback. This especially affects women and instructors of colour, whose feedback is often tainted by sexist and racist bias.

Compounding poor teaching performances is poor research—however, for tenure-track professors, weak research comes with even higher stakes.

“If you’re up for tenure, you will be ranked based on teaching or research, but the research often has a huge impact if you screw up at it, because you can’t get any future grants, and so the university also suffers because you’re not bringing money in,” Provatas said. “If you don’t get grants to publish impactful papers in the first five years [of tenure-track], your career is essentially over.”

A number of courses also rotate

“With most of the research that my profs are doing, either they just don’t talk about it because it is out of our league, or when they do I’m like, ‘That’s really cool, but I understand nothing that you’ve said,’ so I can’t actually take anything away from the research that they’re doing,” Zufferli said. “I often actually forget that professors have to do research on the side.’”

Not only does this highlight the fact that research may not play as integral a role in student education as previously thought, but it also underlines the confusion around professors’ goals and responsibilities.

Research is a defining characteristic of a “research university,” but so is teaching, and it is getting the short shift. By recognizing that professors are, for the most part, on the students’ side, the frustration with professors’ seeming indifference can be shifted to the actual sources of students’ feelings of isolation: An administration that is not working hard enough to rectify the issues in student engagement and higher education.

The model of the modern research university stems from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s vision of an education centred around the humanities and sciences. (mcgill.ca)

Earl Zukerman: McGill Athletics’ living archive

After44yearswithMcGillAthletics,ZukermanhasearnedhisplaceinMcGillhistory

Sarah Farnand Sports Editor

Earl Zukerman is an icon. The Sports Information Officer has been a fixture in the McGill Athletics department for the past 44 years, spending much of his career working seven-day weeks, at times covering 30 to 40 events during the homecoming weekend.

Zukerman, or “Zukster” to his close friends, has lived in Montreal his whole life. While he did not initially grow up watching or playing sports—he described himself as more of a bookish child—Zukerman became fascinated with sports at the age of 10 when he started following the Montreal Canadiens, Expos, and Alouettes.

“You know, when parents put their kids in sports, I was never put into that,” Zukerman told The Tribune in an interview. “I only played [in] the street with friends [or] in the park. But once I got to around [the age of 10] [...] I started following pro sports from that time on. It has really been my main interest most of my life since then.”

After arriving at the university, Zukerman discovered a whole new world of sports.

“At McGill, we have 26 teams now. But going back a few years, we used to have up to 50 teams. So in the role that I’ve been in, you have to sort of be an expert in all sports.”

Zukerman, who oversees media relations for McGill Athletics and serves as the main communication point for all McGill varsity teams, started off his writing career as a journalist and Sports Editor for The McGill Daily. Game coverage soon turned into investigations of McGill’s rich sports history, yielding some interesting results.

“It’s pretty set that James Naismith, a McGill graduate, invented basketball pretty much overnight,” Zukerman said.

While McGill reports facing Harvard in the first-ever modern football game, and McGill is arguably the birthplace of hockey, Zukerman explained that defining the origins of these sports is a bit trickier.

“Their origins are a bit murky, because it depends on what form of the game you’re playing,” Zukerman said. “For example, if a bunch of kids are playing hockey in the street, is that hockey? So there’s a debate about how you define hockey and how you define football. And depending on how you define it, then the game could be invented in Canada [...] or it could be invented elsewhere.”

After coming to McGill in 1976 as an undergraduate student, Zukerman never left. He’s witnessed 10 of McGill’s 11 National Championships, just missing the 1972 swimming title. Many of his best memories are from McGill and the connections he has made in the sports world, such as his friendship with former Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock, BEd ‘86. He has even been granted several once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

“I got to drink out of the Stanley Cup three times [...] I am not a huge beer fan, but drinking a cold beer out of the Stanley Cup was just amazing. Truly amazing. I did that in 2008, with Detroit. And then I had the opportunity to celebrate Stanley Cups with Los Angeles in 2014 and Chicago in 2015,” Zukerman recounted.

“Another moment that comes to mind is, in 2001, I went to Beijing for the World University Games as a communications officer with the Canadian contingent and walked on the Great Wall of China. I didn’t really think much of it before

Know Your Admin: McGill Athletics

Meet the dynamic duo behind McGill Athletics’ social media

Zoé Mineret Staff Writer

If you’re a McGill student that cares even a little bit about McGill sports, odds are you follow @mcgillathletics on Instagram. With over 10,000 followers, the Instagram account connects athletes, students, fans, and alumni who root for the Martlets and the Redbirds. From schedule updates to analytics to live game coverage, the beautifully curated content leaves many followers wondering: Who is behind the account?

Matt Garies and Evelyn Silverson-Tokatlidis are the architects behind all of the McGill Athletics accounts on social media, including Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. Silverson-Tokatlidis is the Social Media Coordinator for McGill Athletics, while Garies is the Creative Lead. Silverson-Tokatlidis is a former student-athlete who played on the Martlets rugby team for five years and is also the former president of the McGill Varsity Council. Garies is the official sports photographer for McGill Athletics and

does a variety of freelance work for various brands, including the Montreal Canadiens and Sportsnet.

The duo brings a multifaceted perspective to social media management. Silverson-Tokatlidis’ experience as a student-athlete gives her a better understanding of athletes’ needs, while Garies’ experience as a sports photographer allows him to skillfully capture the essence of McGill sports.

“Our main goal is to have people follow along with our athletes and create that connection for an online audience,” Silverson-Tokatlidis told The Tribune. “[We hope] to share the voices of our athletes and showcase that student side of athletics at McGill.”

Central to fostering this connection is ensuring that students have quick and easy access to information about athletics. Whether it’s the latest scores or upcoming game schedules, providing followers with timely and engaging content is key to building a dynamic sports scene at McGill.

“We want to be constantly engaging as a focal point of content,”

Garies said. “We want people coming to our Instagram to get updates and information, and then we can use that as a quicker social point for easy access to links. Our goal was to sort of create a memory where people will be like, ‘Oh, I can check the Instagram; everything will be there.’”

However, running the McGill Athletics social media is not just getting to attend all the games for free and meet athletes––it’s a complex and demanding job that requires creativity, strategic thinking, and a deep understanding of social media trends.

“We definitely have to be up to date regarding trends,” Silverson-Tokatlidis said. “Even bridging the gap between our first-year athletes and sixth-year athletes [is a challenge] because there are a lot of differences in the way in which people communicate. It’s about trying to find that middle ground and find trends that appeal to everybody.”

Keeping up to date also requires research on how other teams’ social media management,

I got there, but when I got on the Wall, and you saw how far it was, and you saw how old it was, I found that really to be a moving moment.”

While he has had an amazing career filled with incredible highlights and more championship rings than he has fingers, Zukerman still has dreams for McGill’s future. For one, he would love to see improvements to the athletics facilities because many of them are quite old and run-down.

“If we go down to an NCAA school, most of the big schools, if you go into their gym, and their arenas and their facilities, it’s mind-blowing,” Zuckerman said. “Some of them are better than professional teams. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to that level. But I would certainly like to see improvements.”

While Zukerman has no plans to go anywhere in the next few years—he hopes to be the first person at any university to reach 50 years as a sports information officer—he is confident that sports will always be a part of his life.

professional and otherwise, run their accounts. However, they always make sure to maintain a personality fans can recognize.

“Our voice does shine through a little bit to make our brand a little bit unique,” Garies said. “We also know our athletes very well because we speak to them all the time, which gives us a pretty relatable way of communicating.”

Garies and Silverson-Tokatlidis go beyond just posting on Instagram to amplify the voices of McGill’s athletes. They also lead the production of the UNSCRIPTED Series on the McGill Athletics

YouTube channel, which features interviews with student-athletes specifically highlighting the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and 2SLGBTQIA+ athletes.

McGill Athletics’ social media presence has become central to the university’s sports culture. Silverson-Tokatlidis’ and Garies’ tireless efforts allow fans to feel connected to athletes by uplifting their stories Their work goes beyond just running social media accounts—it is a crucial part of building a strong and inclusive sports culture at McGill.

In addition to sports history, Zukerman is fascinated by the history of the Titanic. (Earl Zukerman)

@mcgillathletics gave each varsity team a disposable camera to capture moments from their season. (McGill Athletics)

Behind the bans on transgender women in sports

World Athletics bans trans women who have undergone male puberty from competition

Tillie Burlock Sports Editor

On March 25, World Athletics, the governing body that regulates track and field, cross country running, road running, race walking, mountain running, and ultra running competitions at the international level, voted to completely ban transgender women athletes who have gone through male puberty from competing at international events.

The decision follows a wave of “fair competition” policies that were put into place after Lia Thomas, a swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, became the first-known transgender woman to win a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) swimming championship. World Athletics joins World Aquatics and World Rugby as one of the several international organizations to ban transgender women athletes based on whether or not they have gone through male puberty, instead of blood testosterone levels.

The World Athletics’ decision reverses the previous policy that required transgender women to keep the amount of testosterone in their blood under the maximum of five nanomoles per litre, and stay under this threshold continuously for 12 months prior to competing in the female category. World Athletics claims that its “preferred option” was to continue to allow transgender women to compete in the female category while implementing more aggressive regulations for testosterone levels. But the proposition allegedly garnered “little support” from stakeholders, such as member federations, athletes, coaches, and the International Olympics Committee (IOC), as well as transgender and human rights groups.

World Athletics also elected to alter their policy for athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), a group of rare conditions involving genes, hormones, and reproductive organs resulting in different sex development trajectories, halving the maximum level of blood testosterone from five to 2.5 nanomoles per litre for women’s competition. Those with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), in whom excess testosterone is common and typically exceeds this new cutoff, may also be barred from competition.

Many organizations that have elected to ban transgender athletes cite a study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) that concludes there is an association between the use of gender-affirming hormones and changes in athletic performance. The BJSM study suggests that more than 12 months of gender-affirming hormone usage is “needed to ensure that transgender women do not have an unfair competitive advantage when participating in elite-level athletic competition.”

However, some experts are critical of the study’s conclusions due to sample size, narrow research questions, and misleading language.

“It feels like our sort of Cirque du Soleil contortionist style stretch to say that that’s enough evidence to sort of make that blanket statement,” Dr. Lindsay Duncan, an associate profes-

sor in McGill’s Kinesiology and Physical Education Department, told The Tribune. “They present the best evidence available [...] to address a pretty specific research question with sport performance defined in a pretty specific, narrowly conceived way [....] Sport performance involves so many other factors [....] There’s a lot more going into it than that one pretty specific study could address.”

Dr. Charlotte Usselman, an assistant professor in McGill’s Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education, is also concerned with the content of the research paper.

“Given that some people were only assessed once after starting hormone therapy (and most were only assessed twice), we have no idea how many people are included in the ‘2+ year’ time point,” Usselman wrote in an email to The Tribune

“[T]he authors interpret their findings to directly suggest that ‘governing bodies for sporting competition should require more than [one] year of testosterone suppression prior to competition’,” Usselman continued. “[T]hey did not present enough evidence to support this conclusion.”

The BJSM study, along with the International Federation of Sports Medicine (FIMS)’s 2021 Consensus Statement––a study that concludes serum testosterone concentrations are an objective biomarker to regulate the inclusion of transgender athletes––acknowledge the limitations of their respective research. Many of these limitations stem from the lack of sports performance data from athletes before, during, or after testosterone suppression, in addition to small sample sizes.

World Athletics claims the ban prioritizes “fairness” over inclusion, citing a potential competitive advantage for transgender women athletes competing in women’s categories. These concerns of a competitive disadvantage for cisgender women athletes arise from the BJSM and FIMS studies that conclude transgender women retain physical advantages such as larger wingspan, increased lung capacity, and greater muscle mass, despite reducing their testosterone levels and taking gender affirming hormones. However, with no transgender athletes currently competing at the international level, many question the true prerogatives of the ban.

“Bans on trans athletes are not primarily concerned with actual trans athletes, they are about stoking fear of trans women and presenting us as ‘invading women’s spaces,” a member of the Trans Patient Union (TPU) wrote to The Tribune “When trans people and transfeminine people in particular are banned from participating or stigmatized for participating in sports, the harm done is also about making it harder for us to participate in everyday life,” wrote TPU’s external affairs co-coordinator, who wished to stay anonymous. “Like bathroom bills, athletic bans don’t present trans people with a feasible new way to participate, it’s about pushing us out of everyday life altogether.”

The restrictive nature of binary gender categories also excludes both transgender people who do not medically transition and those who don’t fall into the category of male or female.

“If legitimate concerns about fair play do come up, rather than dealing with such concerns by banning a transfeminine and intersex athlete for participating, we should mitigate relevant unfair physical advantages in ways analogous to the weight and age classes already used to ensure fair play,” TPU’s external affairs co-coordinator wrote. “We should regulate relevant physical advantages, not gender identity.”

Beyond the intricate nature of gender, the concept of “fairness” is complicated by the fact that the very structures of sport are fraught with inequities.

“Most of our sports structures are not fair for trans and non binary people, forcing people into gender categories, forcing them into gendered spaces,” Duncan said. “Based on our data, if a trans athlete gets to the highest level of sport, from a character perspective, they’re a superhuman, because they’ve been through a tremendous amount of unfairness before they can even get there.”

Some argue that World Athletics should revert to its former testosterone policy approach, but even the use of testosterone levels as an indicator of competitive advantage is severely understudied.

“In some sports, testosterone levels might be a reasonable predictor of performance and could signal a competitive advantage [but] in other sports that’s not nearly enough,” Duncan explained. “I don’t think that overall testosterone levels is an effective way to measure a competitive advantage. In most sports, we don’t have any data that we could use to actually check that hypothesis.”

Will Huckins, a master’s student in McGill’s Department of Kinesiology, notes that dependence on testosterone runs contradictory to World Athletics’ own research.

“[The World Athletics’] head of health and science conducted research at the 2011 and 2013 World Championships which found that testosterone was only linked with improved performance in five of the 21 events they investigated (400metre, 400-metre hurdles, 800-metre, hammer throw, and pole vault).”

USPORTS, the governing body of most McGill varsity sports, currently has no restrictions for transgender athletes in competition. As for McGill Intramural sports, the open, mixed, and women’s categories are inclusive of two-spirit, transgender, and gender-nonconforming peoples, and the policy encourages athletes to participate in the category that best aligns with their gender identity. However, as head coach of the artistic swimming team at McGill, Duncan believes that more needs to be done to ensure that athletic spaces are truly accepting of transgender athletes.

“If we’re going to welcome trans athletes onto teams, I think we need to make sure that we’re prepared to offer a psychologically safe space,” Duncan said. “Change really comes from having discussions with other coaches, with other athletes, challenging the assumptions that we have and just raising questions.”

FOUR YEARS OF FARNAND: A LETTER FROM YOUR (FAVOURITE) EDITOR

Well, this is it. The last thing I will ever write for The Tribune. No pressure though, right?

I joined the Sports section all the way back in 2019 after I wrote an opinion piece about littering that never got published (thanks a lot, Opinion). Now, four years and over 75 articles later, I still do not un-

derstand the rules of rugby.

We’ve done a lot of great things over these four years. From forming the first all-woman sports editorial team at The Tribune, to interviews with Olympians and creating a Sports section that is about so much more than sports, I am so proud of what this section has become. I have no

doubt that it will only continue to get better from here.

I am so eternally grateful for all the brilliant minds that I have worked alongside at The Tribune. I hate change and I hate saying goodbye, especially to the place that gave me my best friends. To my fellow grads, I can’t wait to see all the great things

you go on to do. And for those of you who have a few years left, as corny as it sounds, the time really flies, so enjoy every moment.

Please don’t ask what I am doing next year. I do not know and I am very stressed.

Forever a loyal Tribune reader, Sarah

At the intersection of speed and sustainability, F1 faces environmental challenges

Julie Ferreyra Staff Writer

Between the roar of engines, lightning-fast pit stops, and pursuits of victory, the world of Formula 1 (F1) has successfully established itself as a world of glamour and exclusivity. Champagne showers, good-looking drivers, and yacht-filled victory celebrations paint the picture of a perfect, untouchable world. However, behind the velvet curtain is a dark side characterized by car crashes, political influence, and exorbitant amounts of oil-fuelled travel.

Setting restrictions on and off the track

As of late, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) has taken steps to promote a greener F1. In 2019, the FIA released a Sustainability Strategy with the goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030. The report also revealed that 45 per cent of F1 carbon emissions are linked to transportation, and an added 27.7 per cent to the transportation of personnel and event partners. Identifying these emissions revealed key areas of concern for F1 as the deadline to reach carbon neutrality looms over the world of pro sports.

F1’s strides to be more environmentally conscious begin with the conception and designs of cars themselves. While many believe that the actual racing of cars is what generates the most pollution in the sport, the FIA heavily regulates the fuel consumption and composition of cars since fuel types greatly impact how much carbon dioxide is released. In an effort to reduce competitive ad-

vantages between each car and reduce their environmental footprint, cars can only consume up to 110 kilograms of fuel per race, a substantive decrease from the 150 kilograms of fuel per race allowed in 2010.

“[The requirements for sustainability] are a little bit different than the requirements for performance that you need in racing,” said Susan Gaskin, a professor in McGill’s Department of Civil Engineering, in an interview with The Tribune. “In racing [...] the aim is to get the greatest power and the greatest speed, but if we’re thinking about sustainable aims, then we’re looking for the greatest utility for the lowest energy or material inputs.”

The core tension between the search for sustainability and performance creates a precarious task for teams trying to balance both. And with racing success hanging in the balance, more often than not, teams are forced to prioritize performance.

As part of their Sustainability Strategy, F1 also pledged to offset the emissions of certain Grand Prix races, as is the case for the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and the Algarve International Circuit, where solar panels will be used to power the venues.

When it comes to the engineering of vehicles, F1 acts as a sort of innovation playground. But while improvements are possible at the development stage of producing a car, there is a limit to how much advancements can significantly decrease pollution during races.

“You do have greater improvements at the beginning of

technology development and then improvements get smaller and smaller as you progress,” Gaskin said.

The track’s environmental impact

This year, over the course of nine months, each F1 team will compete in 23 races across 20 different countries and five continents, introducing the Las Vegas Grand Prix and returning to the Qatar Grand Prix—which was not part of the 2022 season because the country hosted the FIFA World Cup.

FIA takes several factors into account when deciding where and when races will be held. One of the most important factors is weather. While the Montreal Grand Prix must be held during the summer to avoid harsh Canadian winters, Gulf races in Bahrain, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi are held during the winter, spring, and fall months to avoid extreme heat.

Outside of weather considerations, the racing schedule, and more importantly, locations, are also based on tradition—many of the European races such as Monaco and Monza, Italy are attended by high-profile celebrities and other social elites.

The destinations and racing schedule make it such that drivers and teams will travel over 135,000 kilometres for the 2023 season, an increase from last year’s 115,000 kilometres. The insane travel schedule sees drivers, team personnel, cars, and all sorts of equipment transported around the world, resulting in astronomical fuel emissions which are not offset by controlled gas consumption in

races or other sustainable practices promoted by the FIA.

Grand Prix races are not solely for F1—Formula 2 and Formula 3 races are also part of the events and emit their own pollutants. As such, not only do 10 F1 teams travel across the globe every other week, but all 11 F2 teams and 10 F3 teams do, too. Those added participants come with their respective cargo and thus, emissions that cannot be ignored.

Some teams have suggested a rotating calendar for the regular season structure to reduce the sport’s carbon footprint. This method would see the FIA organize a limited number of races per year, allowing a different collection of cities to host races every season. Many fans believe the rotating schedule is a crucial step forward for the league.

“I won’t be [satisfied with the FIA’s efforts towards sustainability] until F1 makes major schedule changes so that the 10 teams do not have to fly F1 cars that weigh a lot over oceans and continents every other week,” McGill alumni Erin Smith, BA ‘22, told the Tribune “As the regulator, the FIA should do more. If individual drivers or teams want to, more power to them.”

In an effort to reduce their individual carbon emissions, Mercedes-AMG-Petronas experimented with the use of biofuels for transport during the 2022 European triple-header––a collection of races in Spa, Zandvoort, and Monza––and found that this reduced their carbon emissions by an impressive 89 per cent.

Mercedes proved that reducing emissions while remaining highly competitive is possible, so why don’t more teams do it?

Competing interests

Despite the importance of sustainable practices, F1 remains a business where money takes precedence and everything else takes the back seat. This leaves the FIA in a difficult position when it comes to sustainability.

“To some degree, I don’t think they can reconcile it fully. It’s more of a matter of figuring out what actually matters most to them,” said Matthias Hoenisch, a former senior editor for the McGill International Review and current master’s student in political science,

in an interview with the Tribune “Frankly, like in any sport, or any pastime, the people who are dedicated fans aren’t gonna stop being fans because of [F1’s] environmental progress or lack thereof.”

The FIA’s lack of tangible efforts to make F1 more sustainable aligns with its refusal to allow drivers to be outspoken about their political beliefs––an intentional move by the FIA to maintain a “neutral” stance on political issues and avoid controversy. The recently retired Sebastian Vettel has become outspoken about his efforts to promote sustainability and involvement in initiatives like Green Racing. Vettel’s actions are telling: Environmental concerns are not beyond the scope of drivers’ hopes for a better racing future.

Some of the biggest sponsors of F1 are heavy polluters, like ARAMCO, the biggest oil and gas company in the world that is also the world’s biggest polluter. What’s more, the newest races have been added in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and China––some of the leading polluters worldwide. These decisions reflect the FIA’s hierarchy of interests, with profits placed far above any concerns for the environment.

“By holding an event in a certain place, you’re still endorsing the government of that place, to at least some degree,” Hoenisch said. “It’s pretty cynical to claim that you can keep politics out of sport in any way. Sports have been instrumentalized by politicians forever.”

F1, one of the most elitist sports in the world, is known for its traditionalism and refusal to break from the status quo. It’s unsurprising that when it comes to the environment, the only way substantive, institutional change will happen is if public outcry becomes too loud to ignore.

“They have the technology, they have the funds, they have the resources, they have the engineers, they can figure it out,” Hoenisch said.

By continuing to prioritize environmental responsibility and push the boundaries of green technology, F1 has the potential to not only maintain its status as a premier motorsport, but also make a meaningful contribution to the global effort to build a more sustainable future.

Going green at 200 km/h: Formula 1 takes a climate-conscious turn

Hectic scheduling and, financial and political interests prevail over environmental concerns when it comes to F1. (Sofia Stankovic / The Tribune)

Farewell to ‘The Tribune’

Graduating editors reflect

Sarah Farnand, Sports Editor

on

lessons learned and friends and family gained

To the place I have called home for the past four years, the place that has helped me grow from a shy, insecure writer to someone who is proud of her work and confident in her abilities, The Tribune will have my heart forever. And to all of my lovely editors, staff writers, and contributors, I will miss you dearly. Don’t forget to believe in yourselves. Sending you all so much love.

Taneeshaa Pradhan, Social Media Editor

The Tribune gently coaxed me out of a shell built from online classes and too many breakout rooms, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Thank you for making the newness of moving across continents feel easier than it seems. I will carry my love and appreciation for the student journalists of The Tribune everywhere I go. Good luck with all future issues!

Madison Edward-Wright, Managing Editor

I came to The Tribune at a time when I felt like I had nothing to dedicate myself to in life. Looking back, that decision was one of the most important ones I’ve ever made. Not only did I learn to write, investigate, and ultimately become a journalist, I met the most amazing people. It has been an honour to call all who work at The Tribune friends and family— much love my dears <33

Madison McLauchlan, Editor-in-Chief

The Tribune is a special operation. Through every hardship, triumph, and late night, I never forgot how lucky we are—to have the means to tell stories, share opinions, and hold truth to power within the boundless world of McGill and Montreal. Thank you to those who edited me, and every person I edited: I am incredibly humbled to have led a team of such brilliant, insightful, creative people. You inspired me every single week. For those who are continuing on, remember why we do this: Curiosity delivers. Some truths are simple enough.

Mahnoor Chaudhry, Student Life Editor

What started off as just another extracurricular activity quickly became one of the most looked-forward-to experiences of my week. Reading, editing, and commenting on some of the most intelligent and beautiful pieces of writing has been an absolute treat this year. To be in the midst of such talented individuals has not only made me realize what journalism should look like, but also what camaraderie, friendship, and support in organizations feel like. The Tribune , I already know, will continue to inspire me, and I will forever carry this experience in my heart.

Oliver Warne, Web Editor

Last year, I joined The Tribune with little confidence in myself as a writer, yet I was determined to learn more and sharpen my skills. Thanks to the immense help and support of my fellow editors, I was

able to publish pieces that I was proud of, and I could never have done it without you all. I am constantly amazed by how hardworking and dedicated each and every member of The Tribune is, and it’s no surprise that you all run such an amazing newspaper.

Michelle Siegel, Arts & Entertainment Editor

Unlike anywhere else, at The Tribune , I was never told “ please stop talking about Twilight. ” All jokes aside, I’m so grateful for all the different editors and writers I’ve worked with; it’s been such a joy to read and edit pieces over the last few years. For every weird pitch or article idea I had, someone was always there to give feedback, encourage me, or sometimes, just help ground the idea in Montreal. I love and will miss you all, thanks to everyone who came to A&E meetings and entertained my strange icebreakers!

Sarina Macleod, Copy Editor

As a newcomer to The Tribune this year, being the sole member of my section with no managing editors or staff writers, I thought I would have a relatively isolated experience. Little did I know, I would be welcomed with open arms, becoming closer to my fellow editors with each passing post-Edboard Gerts night. What started out as a chance to add to my resume has now become a place where I’ve seen a true testament to people supporting people. I am incredibly grateful that all of you have given me the chance to one day say “I knew them when.”

(Maia Salhofer / The Tribune)

Journalism’s only vocal when it’s local

- The Tribune Editorial Board

Students suffer from ‘food desert’ at Macdonald campus

- Shani Laskin

Black history isn’t one uniform experience

- Monique Kasonga

Don’t buy into the myth of selling out

- Yash Zodgekar

Making a new world as we go

- Matthew Molinaro

Call off the search for a ‘normal brain’

- Ali Baghirov

McGill, it’s time to break up with Datamatch

- Suzanna Graham

We’ve got the(m) beat

- Eliza Lee