TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
SPVM racial profiling perpetuates racist systems within and beyond McGill
Is oral tradition dead?
SPHR at McGill calls on students to wear keffiyehs as sign of Palestinian solidarity NEWS PGS. 8-9 PG. 5 PG. 3
Mairin Burke Staff Writer
Call-and-response chants of “Union! Power!” punctuated the Association of Graduate Students
Employed at McGill (AGSEM)’s back-to-school rally on Sept. 4. AGSEM, the union representing teaching assistants (TAs), exam invigilators, and Academic Casu -
als such as graders and tutors at McGill, held the event to mark their full return to instruction after a lengthy TA strike in the spring.
The strike, which lasted three weeks, came to an end on April 15 when AGSEM and the university formed a new collective agreement (CA) dictating pay and working conditions for graduate employees. Although the CA ensured a pay raise for TAs—six per cent retroactively
Historically, police units have been known to target unhoused, queer, transgender, disabled, mentally ill, lower-income, Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities. Unhoused individuals sleeping on a park bench in Mon-
treal can get fined up to $1000 CAD. Atif Siddiqi, who is transgender, alleged that the police laughed at them when they attempted to report their assault and robbery. Most recently, the Superior Court of Québec confirmed that racial profiling is a systemic issue within the city’s police force, establishing that Service de Police de la Ville
de Montréal (SPVM) uses discriminatory and racist policing tactics. Taking all of this into account, McGill continues to make the deliberate choice of calling SPVM on campus for student and staff demonstrations. Beginning in November 2023, President Deep Saini called police on pro-Palestine demonstrators.
and three per cent in future years—McGill has not yet met the deadlines for remittance established by the backto-work protocol agreed upon.
The university agreed to compensate TAs for any unpaid hours worked before the strike. They additionally agreed to retroactively compensate TAs by paying the difference in the hours paid at the pay raise level established by the new CA versus the original pay level.
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Some tips for first years to start the semester off right
Auxane Bussac Student Life Editor
Starting your journey as a first-year university student is an opportunity for a fresh start. Your first few weeks will likely be dedicated to balancing academic deadlines, navigating campus, creating a social life, and learning how to live away from home. Some students show up with a game plan, while others enter the year with an open mind, ready to dive into the unknown. In any case, every single stu-
dent will have something to learn. The unknown—as exciting as it can be—is scary. Here are some things that upperclassmen would have wanted to know when first arriving at McGill.
In a huge university like ours, it can sometimes feel like you lack guidance. Organizing your degree is not an easy task, especially when you’re trying to do it on your own, without any counselling.
In an interview with The Tribune , Jeanne Lotz, U2 Arts, urged students not to be afraid of asking for help.
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Mairin Burke Staff Writer
Continued from page 1.
According to rally organisers, McGill committed to paying AGSEM members for all hours worked at the base pay level by June 20 and then with retroactive effect by July 19; however, McGill has yet to finish making these payments.
AGSEM delegate and McGill Physics TA Nick Vieira expressed the need for pressure against the university to receive the benefits of the CA in a speech at the rally.
“This contract doesn’t mean a whole lot unless we work with each other to defend and follow it, and unfortunately, at every turn, McGill has not followed that [...] contract,” Vieira said.
In a written statement to The Tribune , McGill’s Media Relations Office (MRO) reported that the university has been “in a transition period” since reaching the CA with AGSEM in the spring. The MRO maintained that they continue to collaborate with the union on any outstanding issues.
AGSEM organisers also reintroduced
their No More Free Hours campaign at the rally, urging attendees to keep careful track of their time worked this school year. Vieira explained in his speech that 48 per cent of TAs at McGill work an average of 13 hours over their contract, which amounts to $470 CAD of unpaid labour per semester.
Vieira also spoke to the importance of continuing to advocate for the union and its members’ rights.
“We went on strike, we worked hard to get it, we owe it to those who came before us, and we owe it to ourselves to defend our contract,” Vieira said.
Speakers at the rally additionally addressed the labour negotiations that have begun between AGSEM’s invigilator unit and the university in advance of the expiration of the current, invigilator-specific CA. Magnus L’Argent, President of AGSEM, reported that the union hopes to raise the current invigilator wage of $18 CAD an hour due to understaffing and the physically demanding nature of the role.
In a statement to The Tribune , the MRO expressed optimism about future negotiation with AGSEM’s invigilator unit.
“As for negotiations with AGSEM’s
invigilators’ unit, the collective agreement expires in December 2025 and we expect the negotiations will go well,” the MRO wrote.
Several other McGill unions showed their support at the rally, including the Association of McGill Professors of the Faculty of Arts and the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL), who are currently on strike.
Evan Fox-Decent, the President of AMPL, addressed the crowd— including many fellow Law professors associated with the union—outside the Bronfman Building.
“Only by working and fighting together will you make your working conditions and our students’ learning conditions better for all, and keep us together as a community and not [...] splintered [...] as McGill would otherwise [want],” Fox-Decent said.
Similarly, Dallas Jokic, an AGSEM member involved with CA negotiations
during the winter 2024 term, affirmed the importance of inter-union support.
“The employer has a lot of advantages against us [...] access to the fanciest union-busting lawyers that money can buy, [and] they have connections [among] politicians and in the media,” Jokic said. “But the advantage that we unambiguously have over the employer is that McGill works because we do.”
Dana Prather Arts & Entertainment Editor
The Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) of McGill University gathered for its first council meeting of the Fall 2024 semester on Sept. 4. Despite continued calls from Secretary-General Satish Kumar Tumulu for attendees to recruit other voting members to join the meeting, only 26 councillors were in attendance. The meeting marked another instance of the council failing to meet quorum—33 voting members, or roughly one per cent of the PGSS’ membership. As a result, attendees could not vote on the motions discussed.
In an effort to meet quorum going forward, the PGSS will be enforcing the Society Activities Manual’s (SAM) rule which requires councillors to attend at least three council meetings in order to keep their seat.
Next, Tumulu turned the conversation towards the legal dispute surrounding PGSS’ statements and motions in support of Palestine. This includes their statement following the December 2023 council meeting, as well as three motions that passed at the February 2024 Annual General Meeting: Motion 7.1, Motion 7.2, and Motion 7.3, which aims to “support and encourage [Post-Graduate Student Associations] to address the ongoing genocide in Gaza and investigate their ties to settler-colonial violence and [the] genocide against the Palestinian people.”
As per their Memoranda of Understanding (MOU), PGSS met with McGill to discuss the approved motions. The council then concluded that they would implement Motion 7.1 as is, that they would reject Motion 7.2, and that they would implement Motion 7.3 with modifications from McGill.
However, on June 20, McGill and the PGSS received a legal notice from an anonymous member of the society who asked both parties to abide by an interlocutory injunction against motions 7.1, 7.3, and the council’s December 2023 statement. The notice asserted that the motions contradicted the PGSS’ governing documents. Tumulu explained the chronology of events.
“After we received the legal notice and [attended the] first hearing, [...] McGill also said [their] legal consultation thinks that we are breaching the MOU, but before that [...] we never received [an] official email saying we’re breaching [the] MOU,” the SecretaryGeneral said in the meeting. “So [on] the day of the first hearing, it was decided that PGSS would go [into] discussion with McGill and come to a neutral point, if possible.”
In the intervening months, the executives requested that McGill provide amended versions of the Motions. Notably, the McGill administration revised Motions 7.1, 7.3, and the December 2023 statements to exclude all mentions of the words “Palestine,” “Israel,” “Gaza,” and “genocide.”
“The language would have to depart from a focus on Palestine and solidarity
with a particular people and instead focus on general commitments that allow PGSS to uphold its commitments to all of its members,” explains a comment left by a McGill administrator on the amended version of Motion 7.1.
Though they were unable to vote on whether to approve these modifications, attendees like Brenagh Rapoport of the Organization of Urban Planning Students (OUPS) expressed their gratitude that PGSS was looking to their members for consultation before amending the motions.
Moment of the Meeting
“I don’t think that anyone would say that we should hold a line that would actually threaten PGSS’ ability to continue representing our students and exist as the official representative body. But I am glad to hear that there is an interest on the part of PGSS executives to push back in some way against McGill,” Rapoport said. “Clearly it’s something that our student body cares a lot about, and it’s really important, and we can’t let McGill just completely erase it.”
Kumar Tumulu strongly encouraged members to apply to the Appointments Board Lottery to fill several notable vacancies, particularly the PGSS’ two seats for graduate students and one for a postdoctoral scholar in the McGill Senate as well as a seat on the Council of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (CGPS) Soundbite
“These motions were decided through democratic processes. If we let McGill just change motions whenever they want [...], we will never hear the end of it.”
— Ambre Lambert, Member Services Officer.
Fabienne de Cartier News Editor
olidarity for Palestinian Human Rights
(SPHR) at McGill called on students to wear a keffiyeh on campus on Sept. 5 as a way to show solidarity with pro-Palestinian mobilization. Other pro-Palestinian activist groups from across Montreal joined their call, including SPHR Concordia, Groupe de Solidarité pour les droits humains des Palestiniennes et Palestiniens de l’Université de Montréal, Palestinian Youth Movement Montreal (PYM), and Al Raya Dawson.
In a written statement to The Tribune, SPHR explained that wearing the keffiyeh was a way to continuously draw attention to proPalestinian activism on campus.
“The keffiyeh is a visual reminder of the Palestinian struggle—of the ongoing genocide and of the people’s fierce resistance,” SPHR wrote. “The goal for today is to make Palestine unavoidable on the same campuses where our administration continue[s] to fund occupation and genocide and where students have faced
brutal repression for simply speaking up. In that sense, it is a small but collectively powerful symbol of resistance.”
The square, chequered scarf, often worn as a headdress, has not always had political connotations. Political science professor Rex Brynen, whose areas of study include comparative politics in the Middle-East, explained that during the late Ottoman period, rural communities in various parts of the Middle East frequently wore keffiyehs around the head, especially ones that were all-white. Keffiyehs were widely used by Arab fighters in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule during World War I and were later incorporated into the uniforms of some Arab military forces. Brynen clarified that it wasn’t until the early-to-mid-20th century that the keffiyeh came to be a symbol of Palestinian identity and struggle.
patterned one, and the chequered keffiyeh became globally associated with Palestinian resistance,” Brynen wrote in a statement to The Tribune
At McGill, many students wear keffiyehs on a regular basis to continuously signal support for the Palestinian cause. The McGill Media Relations Office (MRO) explained to The Tribune that students have a right to freedom of expression on campus within the university’s limits.
“McGill supports the right to freedom of expression within the boundaries of the law and the University’s policies,” the MRO wrote. “The university is working to ensure an environment where every member of our community feels welcomed, recognized, and capable of sharing views without fear of retribution, regardless of who they are or what perspectives they hold.”
this summer. Rory* added that wearing a keffiyeh was a way for students to quietly protest outside of demonstrations.
“It’s [a way] to show without words that you do support [Palestine] [...] because a lot of people do support it, but they are scared,” Rory said.
Jordan drew a connection between the keffiyeh and the newly planted grass that proPalestinian protestors tore out of the lower field on Aug. 30, noting that, to them, both were a symbol of resistance.
“In Palestine, they became a symbol of resistance to British colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s. With the birth of [...] modern Palestinian nationalism after 1948, Yasser Arafat (head of Fatah and the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]) famously wore a black-and-white
“It’s the same thing as the keffiyeh [....] People see that lack of grass, and they [realize] that’s where the encampment was. It’s a constant reminder [...] that there’s solidarity amongst the university community,” Jordan said.
Jordan* explained that some students may not want to participate in protests for fear of academic or professional repercussions, as well as police violence following the police’s use of tear gas during the James Administration occupation and the arrests made at the encampment
Quinn*, who was wearing a keffiyeh on Sept. 5, told The Tribune that they are seeing support for Palestine continue to grow in the wake of the encampment.
“I think people are a lot angrier now,” Quinn said. “The administration clearly doesn’t listen to their own students, despite claiming to. I think we’re ready to see a shift.”
The organization’s workshop series encourages creativity as a catalyst for change
Shani Laskin Managing Editor
We created this workshop not to enrich the community, but to build community,” co-founder of Fleeting Form
Studio Hannah Marder-MacPherson said at the onset of the group’s inaugural event on Sept. 6. The organization, supported by McGill’s Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF), is hosting a series of six workshops inviting various artists to share their work, followed by creation sessions and discussions with the goal of fostering climate action through art.
Their first workshop invited artist Tina Marais—a visual artist who creates large, intricate textile pieces—to explore the theme of environmental change and degradation. After a brief lecture from Marais, the roughly 30 attendees broke out into discussion groups. The workshop ended with each attendee sewing together a small horn-like denim
structure, guided by Marais, which she will put together into a collective piece.
Evelyn Logan, U2 Arts, told The Tribune that she was initially drawn to the workshop by her interest in fine arts, but she was pleasantly surprised by the community-building she found.
“I feel like we’re at a point where community is something that we all thirst for,” Logan said. “It’s so important to have even small-scale events like this, where you can meet new people and just feel a sense of oneness with the people that you meet and with the spaces that surround you.”
Fleeting Form Studio is the brainchild of McGill undergraduate students Saskia Morgan, Ava Williams, and Marder-MacPherson. The idea came from a project Morgan and Williams worked on for the class FSCI 198: Climate Crisis and Climate Actions. Over the summer, they decided to pursue it and applied for funding from the SPF.
The SPF is a fund valued at about $1 million CAD annually and supports students and faculty members’ sustainability initiatives on campus. Since its inception in 2010, it has provided funding to over 350 projects, including McGill Feeding McGill and Campus Crops. The funding comes from a $0.55 CAD-per-credit student fee from the Students’ Society of McGill University, the Macdonald Campus Students’ Society, and the Post-Graduate Students’ Society. Money received from student fees is then matched by the university.
The SPF governing board is made up of eight members, including two SSMU representatives. (
“The Sustainability Projects Fund is a valuable resource that catalyzes student ideas into reality,” Shona Watt, Associate Director, Operations & Engagement at the McGill Office of Sustainability wrote to The Tribune
For Fleeting Form Studio, aid from the SPF went beyond just financial support. The organizers told The Tribune that they also got help brainstorming their idea and finding a space to hold it in: McGill’s Critical Media Lab.
“If I tried to do this project alone, it would just be lacking so much of the beauty that we created together,” Morgan said. “Every step of the way, I’ve felt so inspired that the SPF is there. I think it’s one of the best assets that McGill has—a platform for students to take action themselves.”
As students in fields such as Environment and Geography, the trio felt their coursework had disproportionately focused on the environmental degradation caused by humans with little emphasis on
society’s capacity for change. This is a pedagogical gap they hope to fill.
“You get no inspiration from destruction, you just get despair, and that’s not a way to go about solving any problems,” Marder-MacPherson said. “So finding that unity in creation and that inspiration in creation is really what we wanted to do with this project.”
For Morgan, Williams, and MarderMacPherson, fostering a space for dialogue and creativity is crucial when trying to spur climate action.
“Life [...] is just full of compromises and you have to forge that safe space for yourself,” Marder-MacPherson said. “You’re always going to be operating within institutions bigger than yourself that make decisions and have financial power [...] and that doesn’t mean that you can’t [...] forge your own path that is still working to create something that’s very safe and very beautiful.”
Eliza Lee News Editor
Phishing scams are nothing new to McGill staff and students, but some have reported feeling like the number of fraudulent messages in their university inboxes is increasing. The Tribune unpacks the threats phishing poses to members of the university, McGill’s efforts to mitigate it, and what staff and students should do if they are targeted by a phishing attempt.
What is phishing?
Phishing refers to a type of fraudulent message designed to trick recipients into providing scammers with personal or financial data. They often take the form of fake offers, such as employment opportunities or sales discounts, designed to entice the target into clicking malicious links or offering private information.
In an email to The Tribune, the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO) highlighted that phishing scams are on the rise in Canada, and that the university is a particular target for these cybersecurity threats.
“Generally speaking, organizations are more attractive phishing targets than individuals because organizations have more resources to exploit (e.g., financial information, research data),” the MRO wrote. “People may, therefore, experience more phishing attempts on their organizational accounts
(e.g., school or work emails) than on personal accounts.
In addition, the MRO noted that a perceived increase in phishing may also result from greater awareness of cybersecurity risks, allowing individuals to more consistently identify scam emails as phishing.
What cybersecurity risks does phishing pose?
Cybercriminals can use information stolen in phishing scams to access financial assets, research data, and even to extort victims. The MRO explained that those conducting phishing scams may also try to access digital resources, such as academic journal subscriptions, and take advantage of an organization or individual’s trusted reputation to create other scams.
What does McGill do to mitigate phishing attempts?
According to the MRO, the university has “security measures (for example, malware and phishing detection, threat intelligence, etc.)” in place designed to “reduce the volume of phishing emails that make it through to McGill inboxes.”
McGill also has enhanced anti-phishing protection, which includes scanning incoming messages for signs that they are fraudulent. When a suspicious email is detected, this feature warns the recipient that they do not often receive messages from the sender, alerting them to a potential phish-
ing attempt. In July 2023, McGill also introduced a “Report Phishing” button in the university’s Outlook accounts to alert IT Services of it.
The MRO went on to stress the importance of cybersecurity literacy, especially as the complexity of phishing schemes increases. The university conducts free training courses on cybersecurity awareness for staff and students and offers informational resources on cybersecurity through the McGill IT Knowledge Base to help community members better identify and respond to phishing.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre estimates $569 million CAD were lost to fraud in Canada in 2023.
(Rohan Khanna / The Tribune)
To increase cybersecurity awareness, the university also conducts phishing simulations for academic and administrative staff. In November 2021, eight per cent of the 12,000 recipients of a scam simulation email clicked on a malicious link, and just three per cent reported it to the IT Service Desk as McGill recommends.
What to do if you discover or interact with a phishing attempt in your university inbox
McGill recommends using the “Report Phishing” button in Outlook to notify IT Services of any phishing attempts. Reporting the message will au-
tomatically remove it from your inbox. Phishing scams on a personal email account can be reported to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
If you interact with a phishing email on a McGill-owned device or give away your McGill credentials, the university recommends calling the IT Service Desk to disable the compromised McGill account. If you expose your financial information in a phishing scam, McGill suggests notifying your bank and calling a credit reporting agency to place a fraud alert on your credit report.
Consult McGill’s “Phishing 101” guide for more information on phishing scams.
McGill: 12 McGill professors recognized by the Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC)— the oldest bilingual organization of Canadian scholars, artists and scientists— honoured 12 McGill professors for their outstanding research and academic contributions, in an announcement made on Sept. 3. Ten professors were named Fellows, and two early-career scholars were inducted into the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.
This year, the RSC recognized 104 new Fellows and 56 new Members in total. McGill’s Vice-President of Research and Innovation, Dominique Bérubé, praised the honourees for their impact on public policy, cardiovascular medicine, and more.
Fellows are elected for their significant academic achievements, while the College of New Scholars recognizes emerging leaders within 15 years of completing their PhD. Induction will take place at the RSC’s Celebration of Excellence in Vancouver from Nov. 7 to Nov. 9.
Notable new Fellows include Delphine Collin-Vézina, specializing in child trauma, and Karim Nader, working on memory reconsolidation. Jai Shah, who focuses on psychosis prevention, was inducted into the College of New Scholars.
Professional employees at Concordia University are striking over the lack of equitable access to hybrid work. The Concordia University Professional Employees Union (CUPEU) has been without a collective agreement since May 2023 and has made hybrid work its primary demand during strike negotiations throughout the Fall semester.
Concordia does not have a formal hybrid work policy. Instead, managers review and approve hybrid work agreements. Union president Shoshana Kalfon criticized the inconsistent application of hybrid work across departments, calling for a framework that guarantees access to remote work for all professional employees.
On its website, CUPEU issued a statement accusing the university of refusing to discuss hybrid work during negotiations. With planned walkouts continuing, the union is pressing for an agreement that ensures fairness for all staff, many of whom perform tasks that could be done remotely. Concordia has declined to comment on ongoing negotiations but expressed hope for a resolution.
Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) leader, Jagmeet Singh, announced on Sept. 7 that he ended the party’s agreement with the Liberal government. This move could push Canada towards an earlier federal election, initially expected to be held in October 2025.
The 2022 agreement between the NDP and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party had guaranteed NDP support on key votes in exchange for commitments on NDP priorities like dental and pharmacare plans. Singh has not confirmed when the NDP might vote against the Liberals in a noconfidence motion.
Analysts suggest the NDP’s move to terminate the agreement could be a strategy to stop Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre from gaining ground among working-class voters, as the party sits third place in the polls. Former NDP Member of Parliament Libby Davies said the end of the agreement increases pressure on Trudeau’s government and may give Singh more leverage in future negotiations.
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a six-month plan to address the mpox outbreak in Africa, following the WHO’s declaration of a global health emergency. The plan, with an estimated budget of $600 million USD, focuses on 14 affected nations and improving readiness in 15 others, with 55 per cent of the funding aimed at direct response and the rest for operational support.
Since the start of 2024, Africa CDC has reported 5,549 confirmed mpox cases and 643 deaths, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounting for 91 per cent of cases. Burundi is the second most affected country, with most infections occurring in children under 15. Africa CDC Director-General Dr. Jean Kaseya emphasized that vaccines alone will not stop the outbreak and that surveillance and community engagement are key elements of the plan.
On Aug. 29, Congo received 100,000 doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine donated by the European Union (EU), with another 100,000 expected soon. The rollout will initially target adults, prioritizing close contacts of infected individuals and sex workers. Dr. Kaseya said the continent needs three million doses to control the outbreak. More contributions from the EU are expected, though delivery timelines remain uncertain.
Editor-in-Chief
Jasjot Grewal editor@thetribune.ca
Creative Director Drea Garcia Avila dgarciaavila@thetribune.ca
Managing Editors Yusur Al-Sharqi yal-sharqi@thetribune.ca
Shani Laskin slaskin@thetribune.ca
Ella Paulin epaulin@thetribune.ca
News Editors Fabienne de Cartier
Eliza Lee
Titouan Le Ster news@thetribune.ca
Opinion Editors Lulu Calame Monique Kasonga Nell Pollak opinion@thetribune.ca
Science & Technology Editors
Jenna Durante Coco Zhang scitech@thetribune.ca
Student Life Editors
Auxane Busac Malika Logossou studentlife@thetribune.ca
Features Editor Amalia Mairet features@thetribune.ca
Arts & Entertainment Editors Kellie Elrick Dana Prather arts@thetribune.ca
Sports Editors Lialah Mavani Anoushka Oke sports@thetribune.ca
Design Editors Mia Helfrich Zoe Lee design@thetribune.ca
Photo Editor Rohan Khanna photo@thetribune.ca
Multimedia Editor Ian Chang multimedia@thetribune.ca
Web Developer Roberta Du webdev@thetribune.ca
Copy Editor Matt Adelberg copy@thetribune.ca
Social Media Editor Aliya Singh socialmedia@thetribune.ca
Business Manager Sophie Smith business@thetribune.ca
Continued from page 1.
SPVM officers were onsite again on Feb. 22 during the Bronfman Building blockade.
Months later, on June 6, the university called the SPVM on students occupying the James Administration Building, with the police making at least 15 arrests after pepper spraying and forcefully pushing students away from the building.
Unwarranted police presence goes beyond the university’s perceived threat from pro-Palestine students. In March 2024, McGill called the police on the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) picketers, with the justification that it was illegal to intimidate others or disrupt operations and academic activities on campus.
To add, the Tribunal Court ruled that the university was in obstruction of the Labour Code
in reference to their interactions with the Association of McGill Professors of Law. Even dating back to 2011, Montreal riot police brutalized McGill students who were protesting against tuition hikes. It seems as though the university suppresses opposition of any kind. It is clear that McGill uses security as an intimidation tactic, actively discouraging students and staff from exercising their essential rights to protest and assemble.
Throughout this, students have repeatedly condemned McGill for its police reliance.
The consensus within the student body is clear: More police on campus does not make people feel safer—it does the contrary. By enlisting what is known to be a violent institution upon its students at any point of dissonance with the administration, McGill signals threatening rhetoric that dissenters are dangerous, compounding fear and tension on campus.
The administration’s
Lulu Calame Opinion Editor
Two weeks ago, I moved into my first apartment.
I have the privilege of living in a bright, homey little place with high ceilings and two balconies, and that of living with my best friend. As my mom got ready to leave, she told me how excited she was for us. “You and Renée are both so stubborn,” she said, “and you know what you need.” She also pointed out how lucky we are to have in-house laundry. “I didn’t have that until I was in grad school,” she said wistfully. I hugged her goodbye, and walked inside feeling selfpossessed and splendidly grown up.
willingness to rely on police as a first resort to manage campus activism and discord sets a dangerous precedent, as the criminalization of young people perpetuates a cycle of violence that disproportionately targets racialized students and community members. McGill is sending a consequential message that student movements and protests should be suppressed rather than engaged with, undermining the university’s supposed commitment to fostering critical thought and positive change. By normalizing obedience and silencing dissent, McGill risks stifling the next generation of passionate activists and thinkers.
More importantly, McGill needs to get cops off campus because it normalizes discrimination and vigilant policing of BIPOC students.
The more that over-policing is normalized on campus, the more that students will internalize the notion that protesting is an inherently aggressive act
“What do we do now?” Renée asked me when I got to the top of the stairs. Her eyes were red and I had a painful lump pressing against the back of my throat. Under the kitchen’s brash overhead light we surveyed our unfamiliar pantry. “My dad makes really good chili,” Renée said. I said I’d ask my mom about her bolognese. We turned off the kitchen light and scurried into the living room to wait for communications from headquarters. And so, our first evening passed.
At IKEA the next day, I campaigned for smaller serving bowls—not for practicality (in fact, against it) but because they were the closest to the blue ceramic ones that nestle above the counter at home. Renée was used to the big plates with bowlesque rims. We settled civilly in the middle, and the mediumsized gray bowls remain jarringly foreign to us both.
My mom is right that Renée and I are as strong-willed as we are assured in our sensibilities. But during our first weeks living in a home of our own, that grounded self-possession— and the energy that went into it—morphed into a vehicle in
that warrants police presence. Students are afraid to participate in movements in which they fear their university will target them—especially brown, Arab, and Palestinian students in the Pro-Palestine protests. As long as the McGill administration endorses and commissions SPVM’s racist policing, students are not safe.
As a prominent public university, McGill’s primary obligation to its students is to provide a safe and conducive learning environment, meaning that all students deserve to feel protected on campus. How can racialized students feel secure in an environment where a police force that is proven to engage in racist practices is welcomed, rather than denounced? It is abhorrent that the university would ever jeopardize student safety to promote their own interests. It appears as though safety is a privilege reserved only for some at McGill—the administration itself and those who do not challenge it.
which we carried and displayed the sensibilities of those who had raised us. When we disagreed about whether butter should be kept in the fridge or on the counter, it was not a fight of personal convictions, but a defence of our upbringings, which were, now, our only grounds of familiarity. The confident composure with which we seasoned a chicken breast with oregano and cumin was a weak cover for our desperation to enact our parents—the same way a toddler repeats a curse word proudly without knowing what it means. The moment our parents drove away we pledged a new patriotism to their ideologies—those from which we had worked so hard for so long to diverge, rebel against, and reimagine.
I have since become fond of the way in which Renée and I are growing in two directions at once—returning to the absolute dependency of childhood while turning into the oldest and most capable versions of ourselves. We filled those first days living alone together with stories—of how to use old tomatoes, find the studs in the wall, and cook with the doors closed so our sheets
wouldn’t smell like garlic— all gathered from the lived encyclopedia of our separate lives, and brought forward for reference, comparison, and evaluation.
Now, two weeks after moving in, our parents’ world has settled around us and from it, the buds of a world completely ours have started to spring, in more and less glamorous ways. Only yesterday Renée and I stood on the back porch surveying our trash bin, alive and teeming with maggots. She and I put on gloves and an apron respectively and poured kettle after kettle of boiling water down the trash bin walls and into its infested ridges until our thousands of writhing rice-sized foes had been boiled to death and flushed down the toilet.
Amidst groceries, bills, and maggots, Renée and I are finding our sea legs on the current of adult independence, where we are worldlier, intuitive with spices, and conscious of our energy consumption. But to get here we had to hold tightly to our parents’ hands, becoming, for a fleeting moment, children again—but this time with inhouse laundry.
Monique Kasonga Opinion Editor
ast weekend, what was meant to be a three-and-a-half-hour Via Rail trip between Montréal and Québec City turned into a disastrous 10-hour ordeal. Due to the train breakdown, passengers were stranded mid-tracks with no food, water, or access to a toilet for hours on end. This delay is just one of many challenges that Canadian railways have faced in the past month. On Aug. 23, rail workers voted to authorize a strike, claiming that Canadian rail companies were not bargaining in good faith and were attempting to undercut progress on working conditions. Though Via Rail’s commercial passenger trains were not directly impacted by the strike, the unpredictable shifts in railway traffic during this period incited delays on all fronts of railway transportation.
When comparing Canada’s railway systems with those in other countries, it’s clear that the country prioritizes freight over passenger services. Historically, railway infrastructure was funded by taxpayers, but today it is privately owned with no public obligations. The privatization in 1995 of the Canadian National Railway (CN) led to the company acquiring both trains and tracks. This effectively created a freight-dominated
monopoly as the commercial line, Via Rail, must pay CN to use the train lines. In contrast, 80 per cent of European rail transport is dedicated to passengers, while only 15 to 20 per cent is for freight. This disparity highlights a significant issue in Canada, where the focus on moving goods rather than people has led to inadequate transportation options.
Many Canadians have heard rumours of a high-speed train connecting Toronto and Montreal over the years. Via Rail’s high-frequency rail proposal seems like the most recent move towards this becoming a reality. However, no concrete plans have been set into action. Countries such as the Netherlands and France have benefitted from high-speed trains connecting Amsterdam and Paris since 2009, and Japan’s Shinkansens have been around since 1964. These demonstrate the availability of technology and infrastructure for efficient and climate-friendly travel for those who are willing to invest in it. Despite Canada being one of the world’s self-proclaimed leaders in climate action, Canadians wanting to travel sustainably by rail are faced with old trains and tracks, delays, unfair labour conditions, and exorbitant prices. Sustainable transportation is not simply achieved through pushing for electric vehicles; it entails allowing Canadians to get
around their large country at a reasonable rate, and to eliminate a dependence on cars and planes for shortdistance trips.
Many students consider more than one city home. In McGill’s fall 2023 entering class, 21 per cent of McGill’s undergraduate and graduate students were from outside of Quebec, pointing to an urgent need for a modernized and efficient rail system in Canada. As Canada’s rail system continues to prioritize freight over passenger services, students—many of whom are already grappling with tuition fees, housing costs, and other rising expenses—are disproportionately impacted by the lack of affordable, dependable, and eco-friendly transit options. This adds an additional stressor that the Canadian government could easily remove by implementing laws to place passenger trains at the forefront of railway traffic and travel.
encourage and incentivize students to travel by train, whether through discounts, annual passes, or reward programs.
Additionally, McGill has a vested interest in lobbying for a system that works better as it would benefit its students. If a better passenger transportation system is to be established, universities like McGill should collaborate with Via Rail to
The Canadian government must work to end the monopoly that the CN has on Canadian railways, which has impeded efficient passenger travel for far too long. A shift towards a passenger-focused approach in Canada’s rail system could transform infrastructural priorities, making private rail companies’ profits dependent on their ability to transport people efficiently. This would also ensure that commuters are not caught in disputes between private sector workers and management, ultimately aligning workers’ rights with the public’s need for reliable transit. And most importantly, it will emphasize how Canada’s trains can be central to a sustainable future.
Fanta Ly Contributor (B.C.L. / J.D.’24 McGill Law)
Last week, the Labour Tribunal ordered McGill to cease meddling in the activities of the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL), the first faculty union at McGill. This decision, rendered amid a strike that resumed on Aug. 26, garnered national media attention, with many beyond the McGill community expressing confusion and surprise over the administration’s blatant disregard for its legal obligations. However, these actions are neither surprising nor out of character in the context of McGill’s history of administrative abuse of power.
Through this lens, unionization presents an opportunity to reshape the governance structure and, whether intended or not, becomes a matter of accountability. In the eyes of many, McGill’s opposition to unionization appears to be driven by greed, but the stakes are far more complex. Administrators have restructured their roles and accumulated conflicting mandates. They have justified these changes by lining their pockets, blurring the lines between offices, and disguising misconduct along with its farreaching impact.
The Faculty of Law exemplifies the structural decentralization of a university burdened by administrative abuse of power. Take AMPL’s findings that the Law Faculty Dean’s salary increased by over 65 per cent between 2017 and 2022, while professor salaries increased by only seven per cent in the same period. This figure becomes more concerning
considering the Dean’s multivalent role as an administrator, professor, and legal advisor to both the Provost and the President. While these overlapping responsibilities might not seem inherently problematic, they become significant when abuses arise within the Faculty of Law. Despite the establishment of the Office of Mediation and Resolution following longstanding demands and public student advocacy by the Black Law Students’ Association in 2020, the Provost still oversees the final stage of investigations under the Policy on Harassment and Discrimination, extending the conflicts of interest.
Moreover, unlike most universities, McGill’s Equity Team is embedded within the Provost’s office, insulating it from equity oversight. This structure creates a clear conflict of interest, further exacerbated by the fact that the former Associate Provost, responsible for Equity, is also a professor of Law at the university. Despite the increasing number of cases of harassment and discrimination being reported and declared as founded, the position of Associate Provost Equity has been removed from the list of administrators, and unusually, there is no one serving in an acting capacity. This abrupt absence raises serious concerns about the university’s commitment to addressing misconduct, especially at a time when oversight is more crucial than ever after the former Provost Academic Lead and Advisor on the Anti-Black Racism Action Plan stepped down over a year ago, with no replacement since. McGill’s troubling retreat from accountability has only heightened the need for oversight.
There are 14 unions and two non-unionized associations at McGill. (Drea Garcia Avila / The Trib- une)
In this time of reform and opposition, McGill unions have the opportunity to address critical governance issues by championing structural changes. These include replacing the Associate Provost for Equity with a Vice-President of Equity who reports directly to the President, as called for by the Dr. Kenneth Melville Black Faculty Caucus. Measures must be introduced to avoid conflicts of interest.
For instance, the Provost will be removed from harassment and discrimination cases to guarantee independent oversight. The Dean of Law will not be involved as a legal advisor in disputes involving members of his Faculty or anyone he reports to. Greater oversight will be established regarding the influence of donors and the allocation of administrative roles, from Chancellors to Associate Deans. This is particularly important to prevent financial
influence from outweighing accountability and student safety. The Black Student Affairs Advisor will be relocated from the Equity Office to the Office of the Dean of Students while formalizing his obligations of confidentiality towards Black students. These changes will promote transparency, fairness, and accountability within the university’s governance structure, making the mobilization efforts for a non-decree-like collective agreement transformative and worthwhile for the entire McGill community. Most importantly, these recommendations serve as a critical reminder to all emerging Faculty unions that, while their mobilization is groundbreaking, they carry the responsibility not to erase an institutional history plagued by abuse, which extends beyond their call for collegiality and solidarity.
Yasmine Mkaddam Contributor
We all share a responsibility as consumers to seek the most ethical and practical options— the best way to do this is to thrift. Thrifting consists of shopping at second-hand clothing stores that offer other options than fast-fashion outlets, which contribute to modern slavery, countless human rights violations, and environmental issues worldwide. Turning towards this alternative to expand your wardrobe is both a conscientious and affordable choice— perfect for students on a budget! After all, shopping ethically is the key to being truly fashionable.
Here are some stores you can visit for good finds.
La Boutique Les Petits Frères
Boutique Mont-Royal, 1284 avenue du Mont-Royal Est Boutique Gilford, 1380 rue Gilford
Located in the Plateau Mont-Royal since the 1980s, La Boutique Les Petits Frères presents thrift clothing, vintage items, jewelry, books, toys, and furniture. There are currently two Petits Frères boutiques in the Plateau, situated a short walk away from each other, both restocking well-curated items daily. All revenue generated goes towards the Little Brothers Foundation, which funds
programs to support Quebec seniors and counteract isolation among the elderly.
La Boutique Les Petits Frères welcomes volunteers from various backgrounds and prides itself on providing excellent customer service.
Mala MTL
Rosemont, 5425 rue de Bordeaux suite 101-F
Mala MTL is a Latinx-owned and operated plus-size thrift store offering sizes from L to 6X. Founded by Sandra Munoz Diaz in 2018, this independent business aims to promote body positivity through affordable clothes, vintage items, accessories, jewelry, and commissions for custom pieces. Shopping for plus-size clothing has been and continues to be especially challenging, with most stores putting little to no effort into offering fitting and stylish size-inclusive clothes. Diaz displays her passion for fashion by creating a safe place for the plus-size community and hand-selecting various quality pieces. You can catch the frequent promos of the store on its Instagram account @malamtl , with “2 for 1” deals and items going for $10 CAD and below!
Salvation Army Thrift Store
Côte-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce 1620, rue Notre-Dame ouest Montréal ― Centre, 7066, rue St-Hubert
Montréal ― Sud, 4025, rue Wellington, Verdun
The Salvation Army is a Christian Protestant church and international charitable organization serving more than 130 countries worldwide. They offer a wide range of clothing, shoes, fashion accessories, books, toys, antiques, and more. The stores provide accessible shopping for people with disabilities by ensuring access for wheelchair users and people with mobility aids. It also participates in a program to help reduce waste production in Canada and the profits finance its services.
Renaissance Saint-Léonard, 4127, rue Jean-Talon Est Outremont, 1085 avenue Bernard
The renowned and go-to thrift store Renaissance is a non-profit organization. You can find one at almost every corner of Montréal, offering exceptionally affordable selections—most clothing items cost less than $10 CAD, and you can find many pieces from well-known and trendy brands by browsing through the racks. Renaissance has welcomed volunteers with mental and physical disabilities for more than twenty years. Plus, if you’re looking for a day of thrifting, you can pass by the two Les Petits Frères boutiques in Plateau Mont-Royal, conveniently located beside Renaissance Plateau.
Ville-Marie, 2015 Boulevard St-Laurent
Eva B is a Montréal-based vintage boutique decorated with an 80s flair and a vegan café inside. The store has shoes, jewelry, books, paintings, artsy pieces like modified mannequin torsos, and furniture making the place unique. While the bottom floor is reserved for selected vintage items predating the era of fast fashion—with prices over $25 CAD—the top floor offers more modern and affordable clothes starting at only $3 CAD. Eva B’s bistro/bar presents a selection of drinks, sandwiches, and sweets you can enjoy inside, including a $1 CAD espresso! Eva B preserves the authentic thrifting experience of hunting for good finds and also has a second boutique called Eva D just a minute’s walk away. You can donate or sell clothes and receive store credit for your next purchases!
Auxane Bussac Student Life Editor
Continued from page 1.
“What I’ve told the Froshies is that there is help at McGill. Sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming,” she said. “There is help, you just have to always reach out for it because no one is going to come and be like ‘Do you need help?’ [....] I know [that] for a math class, the Faculty of Engineering organized free tutoring where you just show up [...] and there is also intense training before exams.”
Reaching out for help also includes meeting with your department advisor to get advice and make sure that you’re on track to meet your degree requirements.
It can be tempting at the beginning of the year to focus on building up a solid social life at the expense of academics. This is especially true with the whirlwind of moving into residence, Frosh, and Open Air Pub. However, at some point, the carefree summer months must turn to fall.
For Colette Ayissi, LLM Law, focusing on your courses as soon as school starts is crucial to avoid getting caught off guard by work later in the semester.
“My advice would be to start working from the beginning of the year and not wait for October and November be -
cause you get the midterms and everything at the same time,” she explained.
However, your first year of university shouldn’t just be a slog through endless coursework.
Qetsia Misenga, U2 Science, emphasized that while school should remain a top priority, having fun activities to look forward to is crucial to a healthy lifestyle.
“My advice is make the most out of your first year by joining clubs and associations and making friends in a bunch of different settings, because you are going to need them,” Misenga told The Tribune
Attending Activities Night, which will be held from Sept. 11 to 12 in the Fieldhouse, is a great way to get to know the school’s clubs and other student organizations. That’s where you’ll be able to register for a variety of clubs and talk to existing members about what they do.
McGill is known for being a cosmopolitan school, with roughly 30 per cent of its students coming from outside of Canada. International students might feel even more disoriented than others when
first settling into Montréal. Diane Potignon, U2 Arts, relates to that feeling and advises international students to live in residence.
“When you’re an international student [...] your English is usually not as good as other people here so it’s easier to communicate with people who speak [my] language for me personally [...] and
it’s hard finding that outside of [residences],” she explained.
Overall, the best advice you can receive as a first year is to try things out. That’s the only way you’ll figure out how to make the most of your university experience.
Diane Potignon’s quote was translated from French to English.
“Ican always point out your great uncle Charlie right away. I think he must’ve had a different father,” my grandmother says, only half-joking, as we page through family photos together.
This conversation was one of many small moments where a piece of family history was passed on to me—usually after a couple of beers. It’s the usual sort of material for an Irish Catholic Wisconsin family: Which cousin drowned in which lake, the farmhouse they used to live in next to Dundee Mountain (which is about 50 metres tall, but still taller than anything around), and the trials and travails of having a sibling in evand
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to patch these stories together into some kind of cohesive narrative, working against the natural inconsistencies of a few tipsy old women burdened with 70 years of Catholic guilt. My view of the story has deepened and evolved over time, as I’ve heard different versions and gotten
Although I didn’t call it this at the time, this was my first experience of what I’ll (somewhat loosely) refer to as “oral tradition.” An exact definition of oral tradition is a little hard to pin down, but we can think of it as a practice that passes on stories, ideas, and knowledge from one generation to the next via the spo-
“Oral tradition is really tied to living culture and stories that are passed down through generations,” Steven High, a professor in Concordia’s history department and co-founder of Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling explained in an inter. “And it’s often tied to the land [...], but I think it’s important to actually think broader than that; like every family has an origin story that gets passed down.”
The oral traditions of different families and cultures have varying degrees of structure and religious meaning and also incorporate writing and technology to different extents. To take the example of my family, the stories were relatively unstructured, told in spontaneous bits and pieces, as opposed to being concentrated in a relatively consistent set of stories, memorized and passed
Written by Ella Paulin, Managing Editor
on with the aid of formal structures and mnemonic devices. Our family tale also incorporates some writing—parts of the story are only supported by a handful of journals, typewritten documents, and emails.
Researchers sometimes make a binary distinction between “oral” cultures, with no writing system, where all stories must be passed down through speech, and “literate” culture, with a written body of literature and an emphasis on the prestige and utility of writing.
However, this categorization ignores the many ways that written and oral material interact with one another. For this reason, Ruth Finnegan proposed the concept of the oral-literate continuum, with different cultures and texts incorporating different degrees of spoken versus written transmis sion. As Robert Miller writes in his 2012 paper on the topic, “Oral tradition and written literature are related phenomena, and in fact, writing often sup ports oral tradition and vice-versa.”
This is perhaps more obvious to our gener ation than it ever has been before: We wouldn’t blink an eye at watching a TikTok with a caption referencing one trend (possibly displayed in two different languages), narration referencing another, and a video of something else. Or imagine a friend of yours sends you an audio message summarizing a book you were supposed to read for class, told in their own style, and tops it off with a couple of pictures of quotes and some emojis.
Breaking down this binary distinction between oral and literate begs the question: Where do we fall along the continuum? As students in twen ty-first-century Canada, how do we experience and participate in oral traditions? Do we at all? In what ways are those experiences supported, changed, or undermined by writing?
For many students, family history is their first exposure to an oral storytelling tradition, but there are often large gaps, where previous generations either did not or could not pass on their stories.
“A lot of the students I work with come from diasporic communities, and so in a sense, they’re geographically cut off from their heritages,” Anna Sheftel, a professor in Concordia’s School of Com munity and Public Affairs, said in an interview with The Tribune. “And those are often the students that are really interested in oral history and oral tradition, because they’re trying to put together pieces of a puzzle where they have missing pieces.”
the other side of memory is forgetting,” Sheftel said. “So you’re never going to have the full story, but you have an obligation to understand the silences and why they’re there and acknowledge them.”
Similarly, if people’s retellings change over time, either intentionally or as a result of changing memories, the stories shift too, and minor differences can add up.
I recently asked my great uncle Charlie (yes, the one from before) about a story from his youth, and he began his answer with a warning.
“I’ll do my best,” he told me. “But you know,
Additionally, while there is often a strong emphasis on oral tradition in Indigenous cultures, many stories have been lost as a result of the Canadian government’s attempt to break the generational transfer of knowledge in Indigenous communities through measures like residential schools and cultural suppression.
This is a serious hazard of oral tradition: If the last person to remember dies, the stories and knowledge go with them.
“In memory studies, we talk a lot about how
consistent stories and ideas, which individuals re peat and rework. Each time a given story circulates, its teller makes modifications, either because their memory has shifted, or to adapt it for their audience, goals, and personal style.
Lynn Kozak, a professor in McGill’s Classics department who has performed the Iliad before live audiences, noted that while these changes introduce instability, they also add something special to a given tradition.
“There’s something wonderfully human about it too, right? Because it’s like that game of telephone where everybody gets to put their own spin on it. And when I perform Homer, it comes out in my voice, and the way I translate Homer, it’s my
Editor & Designed by Zoe Lee, Design Editor
vernacular that’s coming out,” Kozak said in an interview with The Tribune
Molly Frost, U3 Arts and Executive Director of Tuesday Night Café Theatre (TNC), described a similar experience in her work with TNC, which often finds creative ways to perform classic plays.
“It’s really about taking a story that has been told, and breathing new life into it, and finding moments that maybe some of the things that were funny when it was first being performed or first being written, may not be as relevant now, because times have changed and the context has changed, but you can find new things and new moments to -
peractivated oral world of today,” where electronic media connect us to more oral content than ever before. However, he cautions against assuming that, “since [prehistoric] man was highly oral and we are likewise more oral than our immediate ancestors, we are back in the state of preliterate man once more.”
Lastly, one of the oral traditions we engage in most often as students is also one of the least talked about: University classes. Oral classroom instruction in universities goes back hundreds of years in the modern European tradition, and thousands of years more generally. Originally, this was a result of technical constraints: Prior to the printing press and widespread literacy, getting a bunch of students in a classroom and explaining concepts to them was the most efficient way to pass on information quickly.
ists have begun to wonder
rytelling and Coping with the Internet on TikTok” that trend cycles on TikTok fits the traditional folklore paradigm of “conservative precedent and dynamic transformation,” with each new video both referencing a popular idea and putting a unique spin on it.
But TikTok and other social media platforms are also clearly different from more traditional ways of sharing folklore. For one thing, they’re on hyperdrive.With short-form content, no geographical boundary on how far stories can travel, and a phone in your pocket at all times, there is an unprecedented opportunity for stories to spread and change quickly.
Walter Ong refers in a 2013 essay to the “hy-
Rather, Ong proposes distinguishing between “primary orality,” which describes a culture without a formal writing system at all, and “secondary orality,” where a culture does have an oral tradition, but it exists alongside writing, print, and digital technology.While they can look similar, Ong argues that there are several key differences: For example, since we can use writing as a backup for knowledge, we no longer need to rely on easy-to-remember structures and mnemonic devices to remember stories. He also argues that having writing allows us to place more emphasis on creativity and originality, rather than skill in remembering and retelling
These differences began to pop up in our culture as soon as print media became widespread, but the internet has further revolutionized how we pass on stories and knowledge. Crucially, you can now orally transmit a story to someone without any in-person conversation or performance. While this is incredibly convenient for connecting people across time and space, it risks bypassing some of the human aspects of storytelling.
Kozak spoke about the emotional power of live performance, which is impossible to fully replicate online. “The moment when you’re performing, it’s a shared experience. And I can see people’s responses, and I can see how people are feeling, and you know, I can always see that there’s one person asleep or something, but there’s that space that’s created through orality.”
While students have the opportunity to experience this kind of communal, live performance through student theatre and spoken word events like Mcsway’s open mics, it’s worth exploring campus radio as a kind of halfway point between live performance and podcasts. Radio is an interesting edge-case of oral transmission, since the broadcaster is completely disconnected from their audience in space, but is almost always broadcasting
“When you’re doing radio, you’re sitting in front of a microphone and you’re talking to the void, and you don’t know who’s listening,” Jack Solar, CKUT’s Spoken Word Coordinator and McGill alum (MA ‘19), said in an interview with The Tribune. “But I do think of radio as a spontaneous and constant co-creation, so everything that we are doing and broadcasting is meant to become part of the fabric of our communities.”
While the number and variety of radio stations have decreased in recent years, campus radio stations have largely managed to hang on, continuing to provide a platform for students to find and share music and stories that matter to them.
But as the printing press caught on and literacy spread to the middle classes in Europe, people began to wonder if lectures still made sense as a teaching method. 18th-century literary critic Samuel Johnson even went so far as to say we should get rid of them altogether: “Lectures were once use ful, but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary.” In other words, he argued that a literate tra dition should supersede the old oral tradition of earlier universi ties.
And yet, here we are three hundred years later, still (mostly) attend ing oral lectures as a primary means of learning, although it is deeply intertwined with written materials like lecture slides and course texts. We seem to believe that there is something meaningful about a professor’s unique personal ex planation of a topic. We intuitive ly recognize this value when we complain about a professor who reads paragraphs from the textbook off of their 15-year-old PowerPoint slides: A university lecture is not simply a live audiobook. The missed opportunity of this approach is the missed chance to connect over the material on a human level. While we have clearly strayed far from Ong’s idea of “primary orality,” I believe that oral tradi tions are more alive and present in our lives than we generally recognize. Whether through family history, technology like social media and radio, lectures, and performing arts, we all engage with oral storytelling in our own ways, both as speakers and listeners. While these traditions may be fundamentally changed by print and digital media, they are still alive, and they are still deeply human.
Why study in your dorm when you can explore McGill’s top study spots?
Malika Logossou Student Life Editor
Although the semester has just begun, time at McGill flies by quickly, and it’s essential to prepare for the demanding coursework ahead by finding the best study spots. Look no further! The Tribune has some fantastic recommendations to help you make the most of your study sessions.
Nahum Gelber Law Library
Address: 3660 Peel Street
If you’re aiming for a productive day and can handle the extreme silence, the Law Library is the perfect spot for you. The library features modern glass windows and multiple desks with built-in lamps. With its five floors, spacious basement, and second floor reachable via a charming spiral staircase, you can always find the perfect seat in this place.
Pro: A quiet environment ideal for serious study sessions.
Con: Situated between Dr. Penfield and Pine, the walk-up is a bit of a hike, especially in the winter.
Islamic Studies Library
Address: Morrice Hall, 3485 McTavish Street
If you’re searching for a noise-free
setting paired with gothic architecture, the Islamic Studies Library is the ideal spot for you. This library has two floors and a cozy couch which can come in handy during midterm season. If you have a moment between assignments, stop into the Octagon Room to check out Maison Palestine’s exhibit on Arab art in Mandate Jerusalem.
Pro: The aesthetic setting makes you feel like you’re in a movie.
Con: It’s not the best choice for group study, as finding spots for more than one person can be challenging.
Birks Reading Room
Address: 3520 Rue University second floor
If you need another study spot with old architecture, take a trip over to the School of Religious Studies. If you’re looking for a bustling but studious atmosphere, the Birks Reading Room will fulfill your expectations. Studying under the enchanting glow of the library’s green lamps and enormous stained glass windows is a must.
Pro: Very peaceful and serene.
Con: No shoes allowed, which might be inconvenient for some—remember to wear socks!
Marvin Duchow Music Library
Address: Elizabeth Wirth Music, 527
Sherbrooke St W, third floor
The Marvin Duchow Music Library is a big, modern library that is calm and offers several spots to study. The first floor is ideal for group studies, with several conference and group rooms that feature instruments, which can add a fun element to your sessions.
Pro: There are always study spots available.
Con: The sleek, modern architecture can feel a little impersonal.
Burnside Basement
If you’ve ever wished for a subterranean study space without the pesky distraction of windows, the Burnside Basement is the place for you. With multiple plugs, seats, and tables available, it’s a functional space for a quick stop between classes. If you’re feeling gloomy, make sure to look up and catch a glimpse of the fake sky through the ceiling tiles!
Pro: Conveniently located next to the Soupe Cafe.
Con: The basement’s lack of visual appeal makes it better suited for a nap than a study session.
Honorable Mention: Redpath-McLennan Library
Malika Logossou & Auxane Bussac Student Life Editors
Whether you prefer your coffee iced or hot, with whole, oat, or almond milk, flavoured with syrup or plain, there are as many ways to drink coffee as there are students at McGill. While it is best to keep one’s consumption of caffeine reasonable, a nice cup of coffee to accompany your study session, a reading break, or to share with friends is always pleasant. Here are off-campus coffee shop suggestions by The Tribune
If you are looking for affordable cafes with an enjoyable ambiance near campus, here are our top picks for you.
OSMO X Marusan
51 Rue Sherbrooke St W
OSMO X Marusan is a Japanese café that’s both student-friendly and exceptionally cozy. It provides ample workspace with accessible charging ports and a selection of snacks and coffee to keep you energized. If you need a break from screens, there’s a designated no-laptop table perfect for reading. The café’s spacious layout makes it ideal for both solo study sessions and group hangouts, while maintaining a relaxed atmosphere.
Price: $
Milton B is a coffee shop located just a five-minute walk from campus, and is open 24/7. They offer a variety of drinks, sandwiches, and pastries, so you will definitely have plenty of options. The café is a popular hangout among McGill students, so it’s not uncommon to find many of your peers there, deep into a paper or cramming for deadlines. Whether you’re looking for a quiet corner to focus on, a place to meet up with friends, or simply a change of scenery, Milton B Café is your pick.
Price: $
Coffee is said to be the third most popular beverage in the world, according to Cafely. (Drea Garcia Avila / The Tribune)
If you’re looking for a café that’s both aesthetic and Instagram-worthy, The Tribune recommends the following two spots:
Améa Café
1188 Rue Sherbrooke St W
Améa Café is a gourmet restaurant, coffee shop, and pizzeria all rolled into one. It has a clean, classy atmosphere with a lovely outdoor courtyard, mak -
Address: 3459 McTavish Street
Last but not least, while the RedpathMcLennan Library is not a hidden gem, as almost everyone on campus has passed through it, it is a reliable study space. The Redpath Library has a main floor where you can talk with friends, chill, charge your phone and electronic devices, or simply study in silence. It also has many floors of study space, including a basement where you can use Cyberthèque Pods.
Oddly enough, whereas McLennan is also very crowded, it is quieter, making it better suited for intense study sessions. McLennan-Redpath is open from 8:00 AM to midnight—including weekends starting on Sept. 8th—and starting from Oct. 20, the library complex will be open 24/7 until the end of the semester, making it the best spot to lock in for a late night. Pro: It has the most extensive opening hours of any campus library. Con: The library’s modern look lacks a cozy appeal that induces productivity.
ing it an ideal place for studying or meeting up with friends. The spacious seating area is gorgeous, and the café’s close proximity to McGill campus makes it a convenient spot for a change of scenery or a quick decompression session. The customer service is great, although it can be hard to find a spot during rush hours. The Tribune recommends trying their New York rolls along with a cup of flavoured coffee.
Price: $$
Crew Collective & Café
360 Rue Saint-Jacques
Crew Collective & Café is a great alternative to Améa Café if you are looking to get a coffee further away from the McGill bubble. This chic coffee spot is housed in the former Old Royal Bank, featuring high ceilings, stunning chandeliers, and grand staircases, while maintaining a modern touch. The ambiance gives off major Pinterest vibes, like it’s been taken from your dream board! You can even book meeting rooms and order food online for delivery to your table. However, given its popularity, it can get quite busy and difficult to find seats with plugs, so it’s best to arrive early.
Price : $$
If you like Old Montréal’s scenery, the following spot is for you:
49th Parallel Café
488 Rue McGill
Located near the Square Victoria metro station, 49th Parallel Café is the perfect spot to study. With a wide array of coffee options and delicious pastries, it’s a haven for caffeine lovers. The inside is spacious, offering a great ambiance that encourages productivity. It can get crowded, but regardless, this place needs to be on your list for your next locking-in session. Although it’s a 25-minute walk from campus, taking the bus is a convenient alternative and their to-die-for doughnuts make the ride worth it.
Price: $
and
community highlights
Russel Ismael Contributor
The McGill Faculty of Science hosted the 38th edition of Soup & Science in the SSMU Ballroom from Sept. 3 to 6. Here, professors and students across many disciplines, from psychology to astrophysics, presented their scientific passion projects.
Monitoring Arctic sea ice
To begin the Sept. 5 presentations, Mallik Mahmud, assistant professor in the Department of Geography, discussed how satellite imagery can detect changes in sea ice.
“The area of sea ice is decreasing drastically. At the same time, the thickness of the ice is also reducing over the years,” Mahmud explained. “Com- pared to the last 20 years, we have a very different set of ice in the [Arctic].”
Mahmud and his team also trekked to the Arctic to set up weather towers and use techniques like radar imaging, which uses light to create two-dimensional landscape images, to confirm the satellite imagery.
Eco-evolutionary dynamics in Alaskan lakes
Andrew Hendry, a professor in the Department of Biology, studies the evolution of biological diversity and is especially interested in the ecology of Alaska’s lakes.
“What [the Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics Laboratory does] is think about the fact that within each of those species, there is evolu-
There is only one
tionary variation,” Hendry explained.
His group is researching how genetic variation affects the structure of lake ecosystems, paying special attention to the population of fish.
“[The fish] have all been sequenced individually with high coverage across their entire genome,” Hendry said. “We have complete knowledge of the genetic variation of all the [fish] in these lakes.”
Fast radio bursts—a cosmic mystery
Victoria Kaspi, a professor in the Department of Physics, discussed fast radio bursts (FRB), which are short radio wave flashes from space that last a few thousandths of a second. Kaspi said that FRBs are an “astrophysical mystery” that has received much
public attention, with many erroneously ascribing it to extraterrestrial intelligence.
“How do you study the phenomenon? That’s the challenge,” Kaspi explained. “We need a telescope that can point everywhere all at the same time, all the time. We haven’t invented that, but we’re close—and that’s the CHIME telescope; the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Telescope.”
Canada’s CHIME telescope is located in British Columbia and has detected thousands of FRBs since its activation in 2018.
How and why are friendships formed between people?
Melanie Dirks, a professor in the Department of Psychology, runs a lab that studies relationships and focuses on friendships. Dirks explained that adults have certain beliefs about romances that extend to friendships. These beliefs are categorized into two groups: “Destiny” and “Growth” mindsets.
A person with a Destiny mindset believes that a person is either “right” for you or not, and there is nothing to do about it. A Growth mindset, however, emphasizes the importance of overcoming conflicts that arise within the relationship.
“We tracked undergraduates’ friendships over the course of a year, and it turned out that
people who more strongly endorsed Destiny beliefs and weakly endorsed Growth beliefs were more likely to tell us they had friendships end over the course of the year,” Dirks explained.
Sloths & science: The Panama Field Study Semester
Kristy Sanchez Vega, U2 Science, talked about her Panama Field Study Semester (PFSS), a four-month academic endeavour in Panama, and how beneficial the experience was.
“You take some amazing courses in PFSS,” Sanchez Vega said. “They vary from year to year, but the ones I took were history, agriculture, biology, and then an environment research course.”
Sanchez Vega described PFSS as an intellectually rewarding exchange which shaped her knowledge about land and environment. She also said that PFSS members receive an opportunity to present their research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
“There’s only so many opportunities that you can take like this in undergrad, so if anyone decides to take PFSS after this, then I think I’ve done my job,” Sanchez Vega said.
Soup & Science is a semesterly event that showcases McGill’s brilliant minds. The event allows the student audience to explore their scientific curiosities and aims to foster their drive to pursue new academic challenges.
Leanne Cherry Contributor
Before kids obtain the ability to smoothly track a moving object with their eyes, there is a brief period in infancy when this skill is out of reach. Visual tracking, a crucial milestone in our cognitive development, begins to develop about one month after birth.
In a recent publication in the journal Brain and Cognition, Patricia Silveira, an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry, explored the relationship between visual tracking abilities in newborns and several factors, including the mother’s biological features, the surrounding environment, and neuromotor development in the infant. Various existing studies suggest that early development of visual tracking has a positive correlation with cognitive skills in the long run.
“I was always fascinated by the fact that you could check fine motor skills in newborns just by observing the way they could [visually] track a stimulus. In a way, you were testing their future capacity for handling objects, and could even predict things like cognition and more elaborated executive functions,” Silveira said in an interview with The Tribune Silveira was interested in investigating how the physical characteristics of both the infant and their surrounding environment were correlated with better eye-tracking capabilities.
She collected data from 51 pairs of mothers and their newborns through a series of
home visits in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
“Maternal behaviour and this interaction with the baby is something that drastically influences development. But for this particular ability, it didn’t make a difference,” Silveira said. “The visual ability of the baby was much more linked to metabolic and nutritional aspects.”
When the mother’s breast milk had a higher concentration of proteins, the children tended to have a poorer capacity to track visually. However, breast milk with a higher concentration of prolactin and thyroxine—two hormones known for their involvement in child development—was correlated with better visual tracking capabilities.
Although Silveira’s study was conducted in Brazil, she made efforts to ensure the study was applicable to a global population.
“All the instruments that we use are instruments that exist in many different countries and are validated tools. For example, Coding Interactive Behaviour is classic for assessing maternal behaviour. So is the Alberta Infant Motor Scale, which is actually a Canadian tool, but it’s used in Brazil and many other places,” she explained.
In addition to Silveira’s research, there are numerous pediatric studies being conducted in Canada. One example is McGill’s Montreal Antenatal Well-Being Study, a national initiative which examines how different factors affect the likelihood of mothers developing mental health problems during and after pregnancy. What differentiates Silveira’s research
from the other studies is its focus on collecting indepth data. The smaller sample size enabled her and her team to collect significantly more detailed information. During home visits, they were able to observe the mother-infant relationship and the living environment, and collect biological samples.
“We don’t have extensive numbers, but we have a very detailed phenotype, which can be an interesting way to look at the research question as well,” Silveira explained.
A child’s brain is 90 per cent developed by the time they turn five. (
As both a pediatrician and a researcher, Silveira has long been involved in groundbreaking natal and perinatal studies. The significance of her work can be partially attributed to the philosophy that guides her.
“I think it’s very important to provide support to families and children very, very early and set them up for a good trajectory in life.
What motivates me is to really make an impact for the lives of young children,” Silveira said. Silveira’s work sheds light on the many factors that influence early visual motor skills. Continuing her dedication to her work and her drive to support families, Silveira plans to conduct larger prospective studies to confirm these findings and identify potential biomarkers for early neurodevelopmental outcomes in newborns.
Sarah McDonald Staff Writer
Globally, over 301 million people live with anxiety disorders, making it the most common group of mental disorders. According to the World Health Organization, as few as 27 per cent of patients receive any treatment, a situation researchers are currently making significant efforts to remedy.
One such researcher is Randriely Merscher Sobreira de Lima, a postdoctoral fellow in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry. She has set out to better understand the role the environment plays in the progression of anxiety and other mental health concerns.
In a recent paper, published in the journal Brain and Behaviour, Sobreira de Lima and her colleagues explored early-life environmental enrichment and its protective role in one’s emotional development.
Environmental enrichment occurs when the brain is stimulated by social or physical surroundings; for example, spending time in nature. This stimulation helps promote synaptogenesis and neuron plasticity, and has been proven to help protect against the effects of stress caused by early life adversity.
Early-life adversity—such as low birth weights, exposure to violence, and economic hardship—is not only common but a known risk factor for psychopathological developments, including depression, anxiety, and cognitive development disorders.
“This first study […] was to try to mimic
the early life stress in an animal model to analyze if exposure to environmental enrichment could improve the development of the animals after stress,” Sobreira de Lima explained in an interview with The Tribune
In her experiment, rats were randomly separated into two categories. Half of the rats underwent maternal separation on postnatal days 11 and 13 in order to establish early life stress, whereas the other half did not. Following this, each group was further subdivided into two groups, in which half were provided with environmental enrichment, and half were not. In this experiment, environmental enrichment consisted of various toys and objects with differing colours, textures, shapes, and sizes. These rats spent 39 days in their respective environments, after which they were subjected to behavioural tests.
Environmental
At the end of the study, Sobreira de Lima compared the effects of early life stress and environmental enrichment. The results were shocking.
“Most surprising for me was the lack of effect of this stress exposure,” Sobreira de Lima said.
The environmental enrichment increased explorational behaviours, illustrated through
increased time spent exploring habitats—and also reduced anxiety-like behaviours. Nonetheless, there was no consistent effect from maternal deprivation, illustrating the major role personal difference plays in the study of mental health.
“I came from a big family with six siblings adopted, and all of them developed [mental health conditions] related to anxiety,” Sobreira de Lima explained. “So at the beginning, I was really interested to better understand how this stressor or adversity […] could affect individuals through life and how to better manage their symptoms.”
Sobreira de Lima’s work contributes novel insights into effective stress management. Assuming that these correlations hold true for humans, they help to paint a better
picture of how to combat anxiety. Therefore, activities such as physical exercise and social interactions in our daily lives are key to managing stress and improving emotional well-being.
This experiment also raised more questions that pertain to Sobreira de Lima’s ongoing work.
“Considering this variation in susceptibility and resilience to mental health disorder after the stress exposure is something really important for humans, […] that’s something that I’m working on right now,” Sobreira de Lima explained.
In her current role at McGill’s Meaney Lab, Sobreira de Lima and her supervisor, Dr. Patrícia Pelufo Silveira, are working to find ways to directly apply their research to humans.
“At McGill, instead of using rats, I’m using mice. And instead of using stress exposure, I’m focusing only on environmental enrichment,” Sobreira de Lima said.
Sobreira de Lima aims to improve preventative measures and refine solutions for people with conditions such as anxiety.
“[I’m] trying to identify […] the molecular basis for resilience so we could focus more on individuals that are resilient or vulnerable to stress exposure,” Sobreira de Lima said.
Moving forward, Sobreira de Lima will work with both mice and humans, allowing her to fully explore the relationship her team has previously determined and more deeply understand stress-related psychopathological disorders.
How can ChatGPT be an asset in your research project? Understanding where AI can and cannot help in academic research
Ella Paulin Managing Editor
At this point, many students are familiar with ChatGPT’s weaknesses: Creating boring, bland text and making up erroneous citations, for example. But what about its strengths? When used carefully, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to enhance your research.
One of the most frustrating moments of a research project is when you know that answers to your question exist on the internet, but you can’t figure out the right search terms to type into the library database to find them. This can often happen because you simply haven’t found the right synonym or combination of words to tap into the literature on a given subject. ChatGPT is excellent at coming up with different paraphrases for the same concept, so you can type in something like “I’m trying to find research papers on [your topic]. What are some search terms I could use to find them?”
One of the great things about ChatGPT is that you don’t have to spend any time trying to compose your research question in a machinereadable way. Simply type your question out exactly as you might explain it to a friend, and it will usually get the gist. You can always give follow-up instructions if the results aren’t exactly what you are looking for.
Paraphrasing abstracts in simple language
We’ve all had the experience of reading through an abstract two or three times, only to realize we still have no idea what it means. The abstract is a unique and highly structured form of writing that prioritizes information density and the usage of specialized terminology. It’s crucial, though, to accurately understand them to quickly determine whether the rest of the article will be relevant to your project and to make sure you aren’t misinterpreting the article’s main point.
While ChatGPT’s simple writing style produces bland essays, this can actually be an asset for making complicated concepts easy to understand. You can copy and paste the full text of the abstract into ChatGPT along with a command like: “Paraphrase the following biology research paper abstract in simple, nontechnical language.”
Getting a basic understanding of terminology
Sometimes, you can understand most of an abstract or research paper, but there are a couple of terms you haven’t seen before. While it’s important to remember that ChatGPT can produce wrong answers or hallucinate, it functions fairly well as a basic, interactive dictionary. Try asking it something like “Explain the term cryobiology in simple language.” And if you don’t understand part of the answer, ask for a follow-up! ChatGPT remembers previous parts of the conversation, so you can build a string of answers to get more relevant results and gain a deeper understanding of a given topic. Make sure to specify what field you
are interested in to make sure you don’t learn that a mole is “a small, burrowing mammal known for its subterranean lifestyle,” when you really want to learn about the unit of measurement.
Finding gaps in your research approach
Many who conduct work with large language models such as ChatGPT have remarked that they are good at going broad, but not really at going deep. This is one area we still have an advantage as human researchers: Doing in-depth research on specific questions and thinking about them in complex and novel ways.
ChatGPT was publicly released on Nov. 30, 2022.
( Rohan Khanna / The Tribune )
Use a prompt like “I’m interested in learning more about [your research question]. What are some research directions I should explore?”
However, it’s natural that human researchers may miss certain approaches to a research question simply because it didn’t occur to them. This is common, especially for students, who lack the background and intuition in a given field to notice their blind spots. The best way to notice these gaps is to talk to professors and friends in the field, but ChatGPT can provide a good first pass, just to get your bearings.
Disclaimer: Different professors have varying opinions and rules about the appropriate use of ChatGPT, and in many cases have serious consequences for misusing it in their classes. While some only have restrictions against using text written by ChatGPT, others also restrict the use of ChatGPT for outlining and research. It is important to check with your professors about their guidelines to avoid being penalized for plagiarism.
Zain Ahmed Contributor
Having recently returned to Canadian soil one Olympic silver medal richer, Caroline Crossley was a prominent member of the Canadian Women’s Rugby Team at the 2024 Paris Olympics. As an incoming student in the Faculty of Law, she has had to balance a demanding curriculum with her international athletic commitments.
Like many McGill athletes, Crossley’s love for rugby began at a young age. She was encouraged by her friends to join a local team. The lack of girls’ teams at local clubs meant Caroline and her peers had no choice but to play for the boys’ team as her introduction to the sport. As rugby grew in popularity, Crossley played a pivotal role in establishing women’s programs at her local club and high school with the help of her father, David Crossley, who organized the first girls’ team at their local rugby club. Within four years of organizing the team at her club, Crossley’s exceptional talent caught the attention of the Canadian national team, leading to her selection for the Canadian national sevens team at just 16 years old.
“It was really easy to have role models, they definitely helped me find confidence in the sport,” Crossley said in an interview with The Tribune on the impact of being surrounded by so many high-performance woman athletes.
Crossley is excited to transfer her confidence on the field into the classroom. With
aspirations to juggle a rigorous law school schedule with international rugby competitions, it will be no small task. Crossley candidly discussed the challenges she faces, including time management, the anticipation of her academic pressures, and the physical demands of both pursuits. However, she remains optimistic about her ability to excel in both realms.
“It’s a constant balancing act, but I’ve learned to prioritize and make the most of every opportunity,” Crossley said. “I think my whole life I’ve been balancing a thousand things, like when I was in high school, I was travelling internationally and trying to keep up with high school. I’ve taken courses all throughout my national team career and had to balance those things.”
Despite the challenges of juggling life off the field with her athletics, Crossley’s dedication and determination are propelling her to new heights. Competing in the Paris Olympics was a dream come true for her.
“We weren’t sharing the stadium with the men, like we had our full weekend to ourselves, and we had almost 70,000 people watching us [in a] sold-out stadium at our quarterfinal. And I was like ‘Oh, my God, all these people are here to watch us,’” she said. “It was definitely a full circle moment for me, because I honestly never thought that that would be a reality within my lifetime.”
Looking ahead, Caroline expressed her desire to continue playing rugby while pursuing her law degree. She emphasized the importance of exploring various career paths
and building a well-rounded identity beyond her athletic achievements, to develop herself in a more holistic and professional manner.
“I think for me, I [am] actually kind of excited to shed my athlete identity a little bit coming into law school, because it’s just something so different,” Crossley said. “I am very ready in my life to pursue other passions. I love rugby, but I’m not one of those athletes that’s like, this is my be-all, end-all, and I’m going to stay in the sport as long as I can.”
Crossley is a strong advocate for gender equality in rugby and within the sporting world, having witnessed firsthand the strides made in recent years. However, she acknowledges that challenges persist, emphasizing the need for continued support and investment in women’s athletics.
“It’s incredibly inspiring to see the growth of women’s sports, but we still have a long way to go to ensure that young girls have equal opportunities to pursue their athletic dreams,” she said.
Crossley’s journey from grassroots rugby to the global stage is a testament to her unwavering dedication and exceptional talent. As a woman athlete navigating a sport dominated by men, she has faced unique barriers. Despite these challenges, her perseverance and leadership have been instrumental in fostering a more inclusive and equitable
environment for women in rugby.
Beyond her athletic achievements, Crossley’s commitment to academic excellence and personal growth is equally inspiring. Her ability to balance demanding law school coursework with international competitions demonstrates her remarkable determination and resilience. As she continues to break down barriers and inspire the next generation of woman athletes, Caroline Crossley’s future is undoubtedly bright.
Club fosters a community around the Japanese martial art form within and beyond McGill
Eliza Lee News Editor
Many McGill students only encounter the McGill Kendo Club through brief glances into the glass windows of the Aerobics Room on their way to the B2 gym. In the hallway, the dull whirl of the air conditioner and the B2 stereo system muffle most of the noise coming from the club’s practice. Yet just a few steps inside, yells, the stamp of bare feet on the gym floor, and the slap of colliding shinai—bamboo swords—echo around the mirrored room and fill the space with sound.
Kendo is a form of Japanese martial art which focuses on swordsmanship using bamboo sticks. This lively period of sparring comes at the end of each of the club’s practices, which are offered as classes at the Athletics Centre. Lesley Roberts, U3 Arts and Vice President Curriculum and Training of the club, explained to The Tribune that these classes are led by experienced sensei, many of whom are alumni from McGill or Université de Montréal. Classes are open to all experience levels and to the general public, not just students.
“At the start of the Fall and Winter semesters, we take people who’ve never done kendo before aside, and usually we rent a separate room, and we teach them all of the basics that they need to know. Then they rejoin the main class on
Tuesdays and Saturdays,” Roberts said. “Around your second semester, you’re invited to join Thursdays too, [which] is our day for people who have been in what’s called Bogu—the armor—for a little while.”
Roberts added that self-motivation is an important aspect of practices. This opportunity to challenge herself is among Roberts’ favourite parts of being involved with the club.
“I think every practice is a chance to push yourself as hard as you want, and it’s your choice how hard you work,” Roberts said.
Throughout the year, the club also performs demonstrations at Montreal festivals such as Otakuthon and YATAI MTL, and attends tournaments to compete against other clubs from across North America. At a competition in November 2023 at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, the club’s team of Roberts, Ai Matsumoto, U1 Arts and Science, and Véronique Marchand won first place in the women’s team category. Matsumoto also took home second place in the women’s Nidan and up category.
Matsumoto has been practicing kendo since she was seven, and told The Tribune that a major draw for attending McGill was its reputable kendo club. She highlighted that several of its alumni have gone on to compete for Team Canada, such as Tania Delage.
Outside the gym, the club organizes
social events, with past activities including combat archery, disco bowling, and a stay in New York City following a tournament there. Post-practice boba tea is another common outing for the group.
Kevin Nguyen, U2 Engineering, joined the club after having practised fencing for around five years. Nguyen spoke to the club’s sense of community, which he found especially beneficial when he joined as a new student at McGill.
“It’s really good for meeting people,” Nguyen said. “You start out [at university] and you’re a bit lost. You’re like, ‘I don’t know anyone.’ But [through the club] you get to get really close to people. It’s really fun, and a good way to socialize.”
For Matsumoto, the club was not just a way to meet other people at McGill but also a way to connect with a wider kendo community beyond Montreal over a love of the sport.
“If you go
to Toronto, you can meet people from the University of Toronto, or just regular people who practice kendo,” Matsumoto said. “You can get to share Instagrams, and you can become friends. The next time you go there, you can text them and be like, ‘Oh, we can stay at your house?’ or [say], ‘Let’s GO train.’ There’s a whole network of people who love kendo and make no money from it. They just love kendo as a passion, and you get to be friends with them.”
The McGill Kendo club’s next competition will take place on Nov. 23 at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto.
Anoushka Oke Sports Editor
American soccer player Alex Morgan announced her retirement on Sept. 5, signalling the end of an era as she closed off her well-decorated career with the San Diego Wave match on Sept. 8. Morgan spent most of her playing career in the United States, playing for teams in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL)—including six seasons with the Orlando Pride, her most with any club—and brief stints abroad in Lyon and north London. Internationally, she is in the top 15 for most-capped women’s soccer players, and she was part of the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) squads that won the 2015 and 2019 FIFA World Cups, the 2012 Olympic gold medal, and the 2024 CONCACAF W Gold Cup. She has also routinely been a champion for gender equity in the sport and has hopes of investing in women’s sports even after retirement. Here is a look at some of the iconic moments of her career, both on and off the field.
Pink pre-wrap
Morgan’s signature hairstyle includes a headband made out of pink pre-wrap. This had soccer girls everywhere rushing to stores to buy pre-wrap and try the look themselves. In Morgan’s prime, most girls’ soccer games in the U.S. featured at least a few girls imitating the style of their idol as part of their gameday outfit.
Her look is more than just a fashion statement—she began wearing pink pre-wrap as a show of her support for her motherin-law, who was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Her goal and tea celebration vs. England
Sorry Brits—it had to be done. Alex Morgan’s tea-sipping celebration, which came after she scored the winning goal against England in the 2019 World Cup semifinal, was in part meant to be a way of saying “that’s the tea” along with a cheeky nod towards the fact that they were playing England; however, it ended up being taken as an insult to English teadrinking culture. Although she was criticized across the pond, it is a memorable moment in women’s soccer history and contrasts the narrative that women’s soccer players should conduct themselves in an overly humble manner.
Stoppage time header against Canada in the 2012 Olympics
The U.S. was up against Canada in the semifinals of the 2012 London Olympics, and by the end of the second half of extra time, it appeared that the game would be decided with penalty kicks. The game had been steadily back-and-forth up until that point, with Canada going ahead in three separate instances and the U.S. equalizing each time. However, in the 123rd minute—three minutes into stoppage time of the second period of extra time—Morgan got her head on the end
of a Heather O’Reilly cross and scored the winning goal, which is now one of the most famous goals in USWNT history. The USWNT went on to beat Japan in the final, winning their fourth gold medal.
The 2019 World Cup also saw the USWNT win 13-0 against Thailand in the group stage, a game that still holds the record for the largest scoreline in the competition. Morgan was the standout player in this game by a long shot—she scored five goals and assisted three others, achieving a FotMob rating of 9.9. Her goal tally tied the record for the most goals scored in a single game for both the men’s and the women’s World Cup.
Filing the complaint that led to the equal pay agreement
In 2019, players on the USWNT were still being paid less than the men—despite the fact that the USWNT had generated more revenue than the men in the
Lialah Mavani Sports Editor
Online trends constantly come and go, and this year, running seems to be what’s in. While running used to take a backseat to pilates and lifting, it has now come to the forefront of attention. Its popularity has been attributed to the countless viral TikToks claiming that running clubs are becoming the new way to meet people. With this newfound attention, Strava—an activity-tracking app used to record and post runs, hikes, and other forms of activity—has skyrocketed in popularity as a social media platform and even a dating app.
Strava users can follow and connect with friends, deal out “kudos,” and comment on friends’ activity posts; in a sense, Strava is becoming the Instagram of athletic apps. Its growth is seen in the increasing number of users of the app, with 120 million users in 2023 and roughly two million joining each month.
Strava’s growth has simultaneously added to the development of running clubs, encouraging users to join local groups, view routes, and more. Running clubs have taken off with more and more people in their twenties becoming inclined to join. Although it is typically used by a younger demographic, Strava and running groups encourage people of all skill levels and experience to take part
In 2023, Strava saw a 26 per cent increase of users from the year before. (Drea Garcia-Avila / The Tribune)
in keeping an active lifestyle.
The app acts as a way to connect with new people, and allows us to break away from our devices and interact in person, spurring organic meet-cutes. For example, running groups act as mediators in forming new relationships, using Strava athletes to meet up to run together and often attend a post-run social. Some running clubs host events, where single runners wear one colour shirt and runners in relationships wear another, explicitly
making the club a matchmaking space. Countless TikToks poke fun at this aspect of running clubs with some women joking that dating apps have become so bleak that they need to “start acting clueless at run club” to meet partners. Imagine post-running club drinks, you see someone cute from across the room, you walk over and dazzle them with a fool-proof opener: “What’s your Strava?” From there, you give them a couple of kudos’ on their Strava activity posts and the love
three years prior. That year, Morgan was one of five USWNT players who filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) on the grounds of gender discrimination—a lawsuit they won in 2022 in a milestone moment. As a result of the case, USSF gave players a lump sum back payment, opportunities for post-retirement funding, and a commitment to equal pay.
story of a century is born.
But now the question arises: Are Strava and running clubs really an effective way to meet people and potential partners? Will Strava actually encourage face-to-face interactions and decrease the use of online dating apps in a world where social media is so prevalent in our daily lives? Or will we remain stuck behind a screen, comparing paces and giving kudos to our crushes?
There are still criticisms of having apps such as Strava as the facilitators of new relationships. It is unclear how these kinds of apps could affect our behaviours online; like Instagram, it could turn into another place where people curate their posts rather than sharing organic moments from their lives. The consequences of using social media to connect with others still leave us in harm’s way by cultivating unhealthy online habits and, in turn, creating the possibility of further negatively affecting one’s mental health. However, unlike other forms of social media and dating apps, Strava presents a solution—encouraging users to get outside. Strava encourages us to stay active and meet people in person, facilitating face-to-face interactions, and potentially creating new relationships. So lace on your running shoes, prep your pick-up lines, put those headphones in, and start up your Strava app—it is the time to join a running club!
Adrienne Roy Contributor
It is no secret that the entertainment industry is crawling with nepotism babies. For those of us without our parents’ illustrious networks, the path to a career within the industry is unclear and unpredictable, but McGill alumna Samantha Shier (BA ‘14) is climbing the ranks. Starting as an undergraduate at McGill’s Faculty of Arts, she is now a Staff Writer on FX’s English Teacher , which premiered on Hulu and Disney+ on Sept. 2.
In an interview with The Tribune , Shier emphasized that she does not define her undergraduate years by the things she did, but by the people she met.
“I was still trying to figure out who I was,” Shier said. “I had friends who started doing improv and stand-up [...] and I never really found my footing while I was there, but I made connections.”
Shier’s narrative—of feeling stuck and uncertain about where to go or how to get there—is one that undergraduates don’t hear very often, but reflects the inevitable hurdles of young adulthood. Now, at 31, Shier’s credits include Emmy-winning series What We Do in the Shadows and The Bear , highlighting that it’s not only okay to feel lost, but it’s part of the journey.
When she moved home to Toronto and pursued a Television Writing and Producing Diploma at Humber College, her innate ability and genuine desire to seek out fellow TV enthusiasts proved crucial. In the entertainment industry, it
is often those skills that, more than anything, propel careers to new heights.
“We weren’t handing scripts to anyone, we were just gabbing [...] because all of those things count,” she explained.
Upon completing her diploma, Shier worked at various production offices in Toronto, running errands and filing paperwork for big shows. By the time she received an offer to be an Office Production Assistant on What We Do in the Shadows , Shier had begun moving up the
ladder as an assistant on other American shows. She was familiar with the 2014 movie of the same name that inspired the series, and seized the opportunity to join the production.
“It was a movie I had seen and if it was going to be a TV show, that’s the best I’m going to get,” Shier said. “I immediately said yes, knowing that it’s the lowest position, but that I’d be so happy to be in that situation [....] And that is the show that changed everything for me.”
While working for Shadows , Paul Simms ( Girls and Atlanta ), a writer and Executive Producer for the series, hired Shier as his assistant after the first season. In this coveted role, she frequently corresponded with the show’s writers and executives at FX, which helped her land a writer’s assistant job in the same company. Finally, in 2022, the network promoted her to Associate Producer on Shadows Shier joined The Bear for its third season as a Writer’s Assistant and Script Coordinator. Five years after she began working on Shadows , Shier presented her spec script to Simms and comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez, who was developing a new show at FX. At last, Simms and Alvarez offered Shier a spot as a Staff Writer for English Teacher . In many ways, it was a dream come true for her.
“My main goal was to work on a halfhour comedy. It’s the only thing I’ve been interested in,” Shier expressed. “TV has always been in my body. I feel like all of my home videos are of me glued to a TV screen.”
Anyone who loves TV knows how important it is for a show to have writers who are as passionate about the material as the viewers. Between her work on Shadows , The Bear, and English Teacher , her trajectory has not always been clear, but seeing Shier work her way into the writer’s room to accomplish her dreams will inspire a new generation of McGill writers to do the same.
English Teacher, The Bear, and What We Do in the Shadows are available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu
Isobel Bray Contributor
AWay to Be Happy is the latest work of short stories by Canadian author Caroline Adderson. Adderson, who currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., has published five novels and several popular children’s books.
The eight stories in this collection range from mundane to fantastical, showcasing the benefits of the short story as a form; without reading an entire novel, you get to experience a variety of tales. Adderson weaves between stories without losing her artistic voice, delivering compelling narratives throughout. Each story in A Way to Be Happy exists within its own world, shaped by the unique characters within it. Whether dealing with a routine colonoscopy, a string of holiday robberies, or moving to a new town, the stories’ uniting factor is, as the title suggests, a consideration of what happiness is—and what it means to find it.
Adderson’s prose is straightforward but doesn’t flatline; every word choice feels intentional. When she goes into detail, it is perfectly placed to highlight her characters’ idiosyncrasies, making the reader empathize with their struggles. The beauty of a short story collection is
the narrative diversity which means that, hopefully, there can be something for everyone. Here are some of my favourites.
“From the Archives of the Hospital for the Insane” is a poignant depiction of a group of women attempting to help a young girl escape from the hospital they have been admitted to. While the women’s names are fictionalized, their experiences are not. In the acknowledgments, Adderson reveals that she took inspiration from British Columbia’s Provincial Hospital for the Insane in the early 20th century, using records from the BC Archives to shape her story. She incorporated quotes from real patient files to highlight the historical attitudes towards women’s mental health. Adderson shows the tenderness and solidarity the women develop through their shared circumstances and explores their agency, even in a marginalized position.
“Yolki-Palki” is the story of Varlam, a Russian hitman with a mysterious lung disease who begins to recall past events, some of which he has a hard time placing. Though they are fuzzy, Varlam keeps returning to visions revolving around an older woman and the forest. He struggles to understand the source of his distress and isn’t sure if he’s dreaming, but as the story progresses, his visions solidify
in his mind. When Varlam finally understands his illness, so do the readers, and we see how the natural imagery within the story comes to symbolize Varlam’s lost innocence and unresolved guilt in a dream-like ending.
In “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone,” Adderson follows a couple, Corey and Taryn, on New Year’s Eve in Vancouver. After losing their friend Kayla to an overdose, the pair infiltrate a holiday party to rob it so they can make a new life somewhere else. We follow Taryn throughout the night, who struggles with her confidence more than Cory, creating internal conflict. Adderson explores the difficult experience of grief in relation to the glimpses she gets of the partygoers’ lives. Despite being the shortest story of the collection, Adderson skillfully balances character-building and narrative tension. Her stories also incorporate Canadian locations and brands, making this story and others more familiar to Canadian readers.
These humorous and touching stories are perfect for a rainy day this upcoming fall, whether you’re an avid reader or someone looking to get into it.
A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson will be available at local bookstores on Sept. 10.
‘Short n’ Sweet’ highlights Sabrina Carpenter’s range and confidence as an artist
The five-foot-tall singer delves into a range of emotions, both positive and unflattering, when it comes to love
Sylvie Bourque Contributor
FRating: (out of 5)
ollowing the success of singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” Sabrina Carpenter capped off her summer of pop domination with the release of her sixth studio album Short n’ Sweet on Aug. 23.
As a fan of Carpenter’s music since her Singular: Act I (2018) era, I am thrilled to see Carpenter finally getting her flowers. However, I think it is precisely her slow rise into the limelight that has prepared her for the success she’s now experiencing. Developing her sound and style outside of the scrutiny that comes with mainstream success allowed her the freedom to experiment, make some flops, and grow as an artist. Now, with 10 years of hard work and five previous studio albums under her belt, her visuals, vocals, lyrics, artistic vision, and live performances are the best they have ever been.
Short n’ Sweet pushes the cheeky humour of emails i can’t send fwd: bops “Feather” and “Nonsense” to the extreme, tackling the tribulations of romance in a light yet unforgiving way while owning her sexuality and desire. The lead single, “Espresso,” perfectly sets up the summer vibes that dominate this album with its groovy production,
silly innuendos, and visuals of a sixties summer beach day. “I know I said ‘I can’t relate to desperation,’ but turns out I’m just a girl,” Sabrina said when introducing “Please Please Please” during her performance at the June 2024 Gov Ball.
Track three, “Good Graces,” introduces new genre influences into the album with a strong R&B vibe to the track’s vocals and rhythm. Similar to “Please Please Please,” this track is a warning to her partner to treat her right, but with more edge and threat than desperation.
Tracks four and eight, “Sharpest Tool” and “Dumb & Poetic,” deviate from the previous pop bangers. Carpenter gets more vulnerable about the lack of closure and communication difficulties in a crumbling relationship over an accentuated acoustic guitar. “Coincidence” and “Slim Pickins” draws on country sounds as Sabrina details the process of all the “coincidences” that led to the person she is seeing getting back with their ex and reveals her difficulties in finding love.
The album also showcases Carpenter’s raunchier flirty side that borders on unhinged in “Bed Chem” and “Juno,” which are paired with upbeat, playful instrumentals and vocals. The final tracks, “Lie To Girls” and “Don’t Smile,” end the album on a somber and more emotional note. In “Lie To Girls,”
Sabrina reveals that not only her, but so many of the women around her, will often bend the truth about situations to present their partner in a more favourable light. “Don’t Smile” plays on the Dr. Seuss quote—“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened”— which Carpenter flips to express how she doesn’t want her ex to get over their relationship while she remains heartbroken.
The only thing missing from this album was the depth of vulnerability she displayed in moments from emails i can’t send , such as in the album title track, which touches on infidelity in her parents’ relationship. As of right now, my favourite tracks on the album include “Sharpest Tool,” “Bed Chem,” and “Don’t Smile.” The contrast of the upbeat production against the not-so-upbeat themes of “Sharpest Tool” made for a unique and captivating album. In “Bed Chem,” Sabrina is completely unserious and cheeky, and her vocals on this track are stunning. Finally, I am a big fan
of Sabrina’s softer vocals and production on “Don’t Smile.” Overall, I love this album, and it is almost skipless for me. Though I understand the criticisms that jumping genre and sound can make this album feel sonically discordant, the sonic variety in this album is one of the things I love about both Short n’ Sweet and Sabrina as an artist.
Carpenter released four studio albums with Hollywood Records after being signed at 14 and signed with Island Records in 2021, resulting in the release of emails i can’t send and most recently, Short n’ Sweet (Sylvie Bourque / The Tribune)
Siena Torres Contributor
Content warning for sexual violence and violent content. Contains Spoilers for Strange Darling
With an endorsement from The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan on its poster, JT Mollner’s latest film, Strange Darling , is receiving high praise from Stephen King and critics as a shocking and brilliant new thriller. It follows two characters named in the opening sequence as “The Lady” (Willa Fitzgerald) and “The Demon” (Kyle Gallner) who play a cat-and-mouse game after a one-night stand turns into an unidentified serial killer’s latest spree. While the film has unique stylistic elements and strong acting by the leads, the twist left a feeling of discomfort as it played out to the end. Strange Darling begins by announcing that it was shot entirely on 35mm film. Its most notable stylistic aspect is that the story is broken up into six parts, shown non-linearly. It starts with Part 3: We see “The Lady” running through a field for her life as a cover of “Love Hurts” by Z Berg plays, clearly referencing the deadly turn their potential relationship has taken. The fragmented storytelling purposely
confuses the audience as the first two parts immediately follow, starting violently with no build-up. As evidenced by the name “The Demon” and the loud, ominous score that accompanies his onscreen appearances, the audience is led to believe that he is the serial killer.
Despite the promise of a shocking twist, it was no shock to me that Fitzgerald’s character was the serial killer instead. By watching the one-night stand unfold, we see their kinky dynamic progress as her sexual desires turn darker. A shot from the film’s opening of “The Demon” choking her is recontextualized when it is revealed that she requested and encouraged this violent act. The film could have delved deeper into the kink aspect of a budding relationship like the films Secretary and Sanctuary . Instead, in a typical femme-fatale act, “The Lady” uses “The Demon’s” sexual desire for her to incapacitate him with drugs and attempts to murder him after finding out he is a cop. The cat-and-mouse game ensues as he gets away and then hunts her down.
My distaste for Strange Darling was strongly shaped by the final parts of the film and the dangerous message they convey. As “The Lady” finally kills her target, the cops show up and a troubling scene emerges. She pulls down her pants
and falsely claims that “The Demon” raped her in an attempt to get away. The female cop immediately believes her claims while the male cop has doubts despite the violent scene she shows. After the revelation that Fitzgerald is the serial killer “The Electric Lady,” the cop’s initial disbelief of a self-proclaimed sexual assault survivor is proven right.
However, only a small percentage of rape allegations are false, which raises the question of why this was included if not to be used as a fearmongering example of a vindictive woman. In what could have been a compelling film about a female serial killer, the film chooses instead to play on unfounded fears of men who feel unease about the #MeToo movement. This male fantasy of a lying woman being punished is clear when the film ends with her apparent death.
While Strange Darling stands out among recent horror films for its inven -
tive structure and gorgeous cinematography, the misogynistic tones of the ending sequence left me feeling troubled. “The Electric Lady” is not given enough backstory to make her a compelling character—though Willa Fitzgerald does much heavy lifting with her powerful acting skills, especially when she realizes that she has truly been caught. In 2024, a film’s final message should not translate to “women can lie, too”—especially when concerning sexual violence.
Strange Darling is now playing at Cinema du Parc.
