The McGill Daily Vol105Iss15

Volume 105, Issue 15 Monday. January 11, 2016

McGill THE

DAILY

Climbing ladders of SSMUccess since 1911 mcgilldaily.com

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Halfway there: SSMU Reviews

Table of Contents 03 NEWS

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SSMU starts Memorandum of Agreement negotiations

Exploring vaginal microbiomes

Elections SSMU fails service review

Potential doorways to treating Alzheimer’s

SSMU supports 15 and Fair, doesn’t pay $15/hour

06 SSMU MIDTERM REVIEWS 08 COMMENTARY To a professor in a “grey area”

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Calling yourself an ally isn’t enough Terrorism and capital

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FEATURES

Short story: Anila

16

SCI+TECH

ART ESSAY

Openminded

17

CULTURE

Festivals to check out this month

18

COMPENDIUM!

Suzie gets stuck in time

19

EDITORIAL

Don’t punish welfare recipients

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News

January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

SSMU starts Memorandum of Agreement negotiations

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Reclaiming rights to use McGill name for clubs among priorities David Aird News Writer

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he Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) is set to begin negotiations with the McGill administration over the renewal of their Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), a binding document outlining the legal relationship between SSMU and the University.

The MoA is renewed every five years, and the current one is set to expire on May 31, 2016.

This year, for the first time, the VP Finance and Operations is replacing the President in negotiations with the University. Faced with an increased workload following the resignation of both the VP Internal and the General Manager, President Kareem Ibrahim delegated the task of negotiating the MoA to VP Finance and Operations Zacheriah Houston, who will be in charge of negotiations alongside VP University Affairs Chloe Rourke.

“It makes a lot of sense for the VP Finance [and Operations] to be involved, because so much of the MoA is financial,” Houston told The Daily. “A lot of it has to do with how our student fees are dispersed, what fees we pay to McGill and what services we receive in return. The VP Finance [and Operations] has to be very familiar with the MoA.” In 2011, 132 student clubs underwent name changes as per a controversial clause introduced in the MoA in the very last round of negotiations that restricted student groups’ right to use the McGill name.

Josh Redel, who was the President of the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) during the negotiations in 2011, was disappointed over what he perceived as a lack of student consultation on the part of the executives. In an interview with The Daily, he had said at the time, “Nobody knew it was going to SSMU Council. [...] No

one knew. Clubs didn’t even know.”

The agenda of the Council meeting where the MoA was discussed was not widely publicized.

Asked whether there would be more transparency this year, Ibrahim said that executives are “definitely hoping to involve students in the process.”

“We definitely want students to know what we will be negotiating in favour of,” Ibrahim added, despite the fact that negotiations are typically confidential, as per the preference of the University.

Since 2011, many more clubs have been forced to change their names. VP Clubs & Services Kimber Bialik said that over the last year and a half, clubs have been updating their constitutions only to realize their names were incorrect. “[This] has been causing a number of issues for all of the clubs for their social media presence, their web presence, and what they’re putting on their posters,” said Bialik.

McGill is actually “cracking

down,” says Bialik, on clubs that are not meeting the rules set out in the last MoA. Certain clubs have received requests from the University to change their logo – particularly those using the McGill Martlet or crest. As well, many clubs have been forced to add “McGill Students for” at the beginning of their name. Athletics groups are generally not allowed to use the McGill name, except in certain circumstances.

“There are varying levels of strictness on the different clubs which seem relatively arbitrary,” Bialik added. “There does not seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to how that happened or how these categories were determined or why they differ. It’s inconsistently applied among the groups, as well, which is a big grievance the clubs have.”

Negotiation process Last year’s SSMU President Courtney Ayukawa attempted to

open negotiations with the University a year early to ensure they would be resolved within a reasonable timeframe, but the University was unwilling to open the discussion early. At the time, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Ollivier Dyens had told The Daily, “That’s why we sign agreements – so we don’t reopen them every year.”

According to Houston, current negotiations will focus on the restrictions placed on clubs and SSMU’s operations. Houston cited the example of the University limiting SSMU’s ability to cater on campus.

Rourke and Houston communicated their demands to the University in November, but have yet to receive a response. However, Houston seems hopeful that their demands will be met by the University and that overall negotiations will be finalized before the end of the semester.

“We’d like [to not] have to pass on negotiations to the next execs,” Houston said.

SSMU services structure in need of overhaul Elections SSMU fails service reviews

Ellen Cools The McGill Daily

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n December 3, 2015 the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Services Review Committee released a report to the SSMU Legislative Council revealing that Elections SSMU, First Year Council (FYC), McGill International Students Network, Organic Campus, Players’ Theatre, and Savoy Society failed their service reviews.

Another five services (Black Students’ Network, Nightline, Plate Club, Queer McGill, Union for Gender Empowerment) passed service reviews with reservations. The remaining nine services passed the review.

According to the report, in order to be considered a service, a group must offer “resources, support, referral, awareness, or education to members of [SSMU ...] and their operations must fall into at least two of these five categories.”

In an email to The Daily, SSMU VP Clubs & Services Kimber Bialik explained why the Committee chose to review all twenty services, when it is only mandated to review five per semester.

“Service reviews have not been conducted since 2011, and many services have no records of being reviewed at all in the past ten

years,” Bialik said.

This, Bialik continued, contributed strongly to the large number of services that failed or passed with reservations, adding that it “certainly indicates that the service review process was well overdue.”

The Committee’s report further provided recommendations to each service that failed or passed with reservations. According to Bialik, “nearly all of the services who failed their service review did so because their operations were incompatible with the definition of a service, not because those services were failing at what they do. [...]

The fact that the majority of the failures were due to incompatibilities with the services structure indicates that our services structure is in need of an overhaul.”

This structure has undergone little review since its implementation. Bialik explained that when “services” as an affiliation status was created, SSMU had “interest groups” (groups of people united by an interest) and “functional groups” (groups of people that perform a specific function).

These functional groups became services, “despite the fact that not all of them were necessarily service providers.” This incompatibility was never resolved.

Elections SSMU The Committee has determined that Elections SSMU “only fulfills the resources pillar through their rentals of the online voting software to other student groups,” and therefore, does not meet the minimum of two criteria required to maintain service status.

Consequently, the Committee recommended that the Ad-Hoc Electoral Reform Committee remove Elections SSMU from the SSMU structure and make it into an independent body.

“It’s important that Elections SSMU be entirely politically neutral, but placing them under any executive with the knowledge that all executive portfolios are inherently political in some way, detracts from that neutrality,” Bialik said.

Luke Steverango, a U2 Mathematics student, agreed with Bialik that Elections SSMU should be politically neutral. When asked how services such as Elections SSMU could better represent students, he emphasized communication as a problem.

Steverango said, “If [Elections SSMU] actually talked to students about what they’re voting for, why they’re voting, that would be better, because SSMU has turned into more of a laughing stock, which you can see

Clubs & services listing.

Sonia Ionescu | The McGill Daily

when looking at voter turnout.”

Similarly, a U2 Psychology student who wished to remain anonymous agreed that services, particularly Elections SSMU, need to be reorganized.

In an interview with The Daily, the student stated, “Honestly, I think SSMU should just be taken out and we should start with a whole new system, because I feel that all the resources they have to get the information out there are being used currently – but it’s not enough.”

The Committee made similar recommendations for other services, including the FYC. It recom-

mended that the “First Year Council make an effort to focus more on direct resource provision and referrals” and that SSMU Council consider an alternative to service status. Likewise, the Committee found that Players’ Theatre and Savoy Society failed to meet the definition of a service, and “must work to differentiate their operation from other performing arts groups on campus.”

The Daily reached out for a comment from the implicated services, however only Savoy Society responded, saying that they “do not want to make a comment until they meet with SSMU.”

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News

January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

15 and Fair fights for living wage at McGill

SSMU supports campaign despite paying employees below $15 per hour Saima Desai The McGill Daily

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ampus mobilization is wrapping up for the “15 and Fair McGill” campaign, which seeks to implement a $15 per hour minimum wage for all employees of McGill or a McGill organization

by May 1, 2018. However, one of the main supporters of the campaign, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), does not ensure a $15 per hour minimum wage to its own employees.

In Quebec, the minimum wage currently stands at $10.55 per hour. The goal wage of $15 is based on a study by the left-wing think tank Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économiques (IRIS) that calculated the wage necessary for workers in Montreal to meet their basic needs, accounting for prices of necessities like rent and food. The campaign proposes a three-year timeline that would increase wages across campus in increments of about $1.80 per year.

“If you go to work-study job postings [...] and just look at the amount of money [students] are being paid, it’s really low,” said Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), one of the five participating McGill unions.

“The students are being exploited,” added Cory.

In May 2015, the University was accused of the “casualization” of its labour force – replacing highly paid positions that include job security and benefits with minimum-wage positions that involve unpredictable or part-time hours and no benefits. McGill’s justification is the provincial government’s budget cuts to education.

The University, however, declared a $4.3 million surplus in its 2014-15 fiscal budget.

“To increase salaries at the lower end of the scale is not that much money, because [minimum wage workers are] not paid much to begin with. But it makes a huge difference on their lives,” Cory said.

“15 and Fair McGill” poster.

SSMU’s support “15 and Fair McGill” consists of a coalition of five McGill labour unions, as well as Midnight Kitchen, QPIRG-McGill and SSMU. Emily Boytinck, SSMU VP External, has been attending the “15 and Fair McGill” meetings as an “informal” member of the coalition. However, Boytinck told The Daily that despite supporting the campaign, SSMU only pays most of its student staff between $12 and $13 per hour.

“Obviously [SSMU is] coming from a very different position,” said Boytinck. “Instead of being a union that has the ability to fight for higher wages, we are managers that have the ability to increase our wages.”

“To put it in context, this year we’ve eliminated some permanent staff positions – our budget is very, very tight. And so to increase to $15 per hour right now would be extremely irresponsible for the staff that we have right now, with the budget that we currently have adopted,” said Boytinck. “I don’t want to say it’s not an option, but to do it with our current operating budget would be incredibly difficult.”

Boytinck maintained that it was nonetheless important for SSMU to voice its support for the campaign, even though she conceded that “at this point we’re still super hypocritical.”

“The increase of casualization on campus affects students, and it affects the services that students get, and it affects the overall culture of our campus,” Boytinck continued. “To have the student union be silent on this issue would be really unfortunate to the campaign.”

A $15 minimum hourly wage would mean that mimimum-wage

Sonia Ionescu | The McGill Daily employees would only have to work two-thirds of the time they currently do to earn the same income, meaning that “they can put that energy and that time that’s freed up into their lives – their schoolwork, or their families, their social environment,” said Cory.

But some SSMU student employees are comfortable with their current wages. “There’s a lot of jobs that aren’t paid $15 and absolutely should be – but I also don’t necessarily think that it needs to be the standard,” said Emily Bilton, an employee at Gerts, in an interview with The Daily. “Especially at a place like SSMU where it’s giving opportunity for students who wouldn’t necessarily get a job outside, like a lot of anglophones.”

“I think the fact that we’re getting paid pretty comfortably above minimum wage in a [student union] that works completely around our schedules is a really great thing to start with,” Bilton continued.

Asked about whether it hinders the campaign to have support from a student union that pays workers below $15 per hour, Cory responded, “A bit. I think if you can show that you yourselves have made that effort and show you’re leading by example, it would help.”

“It might end up being that SSMU has to increase their fees in order to pay for this. The student population would have to decide if they want to do this,” commented Cory. “Or SSMU would have to decide if they want to reorganize, or to change their pay structure.”

“We would hope that by the end of this executive mandate, they have a timeline toward that goal, rather

than a new executive coming in and having to start over,” he continued.

“We’re not trying to shove it under the rug. [...] We are actively looking into it,” Boytinck emphasized.

Past and future of the movement According to the “15 and Fair McGill” website, the fight for a $15 per hour minimum wage began in the New York City fast food industry in 2012, and spread rapidly to other low-wage industries. Over the last two years, the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have responded to mounting union pressure and protests by passing legislation to raise their minimum wages to $15 per hour. In May 2015, the newly-elected provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) made Alberta the first Canadian province to plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2018.

The fight for a higher minimum wage has long been connected to a goal of decreasing inequality on many fronts, since women and racial minorities are overrepresented among minimum wage workers.

“When we started there was no one else in Montreal that we could see that was working on this,” Cory said. “Now it’s starting to pop up more, and [...] others in Montreal are getting involved.”

Cory said that the movement has so far focused on student mobilization, but the unions will be raising the issue at Senate and Board of Governors meetings, and during their negotiations with the University.

Cory added that the movement’s impact may extend beyond McGill’s campus. “We won’t have to fight against McGill if Montreal [or Quebec] as a whole decides to impose a $15 minimum wage.”

On

Thursday, January 21 will elect the rest of

the staff of

The McGill Daily

the 2015-16 editorial board.

We hope you’ll consider running for one of our open positions. If you are interested in joining our nonhierarchical team, here’s a quick guide on the election process for becoming a Daily editor.

the basics: Unlike many student newspapers, our editors are elected by Daily staffers rather than hired by a committee. To run for an editorial position or to vote in the election, you must be Daily staff.

becoming staff: To be staff, you must have six staff points – contributing articles, photos, graphics, and illustrations count as one point each. Writing a feature or coming in for a production night both count as two points. If you’re not staff yet, there’s time before the election, so email an editor to get involved!

the editorial board:

the positions:

Twenty editors share equal voting rights on issues, and work together to produce the newspaper every week. Each editor receives a monthly stipend.

News Features Sports Culture Illustrations Design & Production Community Multimedia (video) Web and Social Media

For more information on individual positions, contact specific section editors (emails can be found on page 19 of this issue). You can also stop by The Daily’s office in Shatner B-24.

Candidate statement

Candidate rundown

Elections

January

January

January

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Submit a one-page letter of intent to coordinating@mcgilldaily.com.

All staffers who want to vote in the election must attend rundowns in Shatner B-24.

Candidates will interview in front of all voters at the election in Shatner B-24.

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deadlines: The Daily requires all candidates to submit a one-page application, including your qualifications and interest in running, as well as two samples of writing, photos, illustrations, or design.

Email your letter of intent to coordinating@mcgilldaily.com

by January 19 at midnight.

SSMU Midterm Reviews

January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Being an executive for the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) is always a demanding job. But this year has been particularly draining for SSMU executives, with their working hours often exceeding 90 per week. This year’s executive saw the resignation of VP Internal Lola Baraldi, General Manager Jennifer Varkonyi, and Daycare Director Aline Karagioules, with the Building Manager Ryan Hughes also going on leave. The remaining executives were forced to divide the responsibilities of these vacant positions among themselves on short notice.

This consistent overcommitment means that the executive’s time has been consumed with day-to-day minutiae, instead of being spent on large-scale projects. In addition, most of the considerable projects realized this semester have concluded initiatives started by previous executives. As such, while SSMU has still been able to function, it has been somewhat stagnant in adding to its list of political campaigns and policies.

Luckily, the executives have managed to survive the Fall term and the future looks somewhat brighter. But, Fall has just been half the hurdle and Winter has come. This term, the executives will have to deal with restructuring SSMU, electoral reform, and the training of a new generation of executives.

Former VP Internal Lola Baraldi resigned on September 29, and as she no longer holds the position we will not be reviewing her term. Omar El-Sharawy is the current VP Internal, having assumed the role on January 7.

President – Kareem Ibrahim

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Kareem Ibrahim.

Andy Wei | The McGill Daily

nvolved in student politics since he was a wee firstyear, Kareem Ibrahim has worked his way through almost all layers of university student governance. In his rather vague campaign platform, Ibrahim highlighted the importance of improving communication with constituents and creating new consultation channels. In addition, Ibrahim promised advocacy and support for SSMU’s equity policy.

For some of these promises, Ibrahim has managed to deliver concrete items: SSMU now has an Indigenous Affairs Coordinator, a Student Engagement Committee, and increased family care resources for students with dependents. However, most of Ibrahim’s time has been spent taking on the responsibilities of the multiple vacant positions and supporting other executives – or in his words, “putting out fires.”

Ibrahim has recently focused on the restructuring of the SSMU executive. The work distribution amongst executive positions has become unsustainable, with many executives’ schedules fully booked from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m..

Ibrahim raised a question regarding the issue at the Fall 2015 General Assembly, which failed to meet quorum and

also saw no motions brought forward. Although student apathy is not necessarily his fault, Ibrahim has admitted that were the GA better promoted, there might have been at least one motion, prompting student engagement. Nevertheless, it remains the SSMU executives’ job to encourage student participation in decision making processes, which will have tangible consequences in their day-today experiences.

Ibrahim has made an attempt to bring up student priorities at Board of Governors and his other meetings with the administration, but admits that because of executive understaffing he has not been as effective or proactive as he would have liked to be regarding advocacy.

Next semester will hopefully see Ibrahim relinquish some of his extra work to the newly elected VP Internal Omar El-Sharawy and newly hired General Manager Ryan Hughes and Daycare Director Zineb MouhtamSoubai. With a lighter workload in mind, Ibrahim wants to improve institutional memory at SSMU. He plans to set up a human resources policy and create document templates so that next year’s executives will be better prepared for the task ahead of them.

VP Clubs & Services – Kimber Bialik

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Kimber Bialik.

Andy Wei | The McGill Daily

hen she ran unopposed for the position last year, Kimber Bialik’s platform revolved around consultation, representation, and advocacy. Throughout last semester, Bialik focused on developing better outreach and engagement strategies in order to follow up on her promises. In this regard, Bialik has significantly improved SSMU’s presence on social media, with interesting initiatives such as live-tweeting SSMU Council meetings.

Bialik also created a Club Consultative Committee, as an alternative to the SSMU Clubs Council. Unfortunately, this committee became a failed experiment, as no club executives wanted to join. According to Bialik, club executives are vocal when they don’t like something, but in the formative process they don’t have much to say. Disappointed, Bialik has since decided to stick to surveys and listening to feedback from Clubs Representatives.

Most concretely, Bialik has worked on the reallocation of student spaces on the fourth floor of the Shatner building, an initiative that was spearheaded by her predecessor Stefan Fong. In a move that was criticized by some clubs due to a perceived lack of consultation, Bialik has converted all of the office spaces formerly reserved for clubs into general bookable

spaces. While this helped make those spaces more available to a greater number of students, it has come at the expense of permanent office space for those clubs that definitely need it.

In addition, Bialik is still working with VP University Affairs on creating a Mental Health Space on the fourth floor of the Shatner building, which will likely be operational next year, if SSMU is to have enough time to consult students thoroughly.

While technically not under her portfolio, Bialik also pledged to be involved in the upcoming Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) negotiations with the University. Specifically, she will strive to re-establish the right for clubs, services, and independent student groups to use the McGill name.

Bialik’s hesitancy to acknowledge SSMU’s political nature remains, unfortunately, unchanged. For instance, she abstained from voting during the adoption of the Climate Change Policy, claiming that there wasn’t a clear majority desire among the undergraduate students at McGill to vote in favour of it – despite the vote at Council suggesting otherwise. Should her workload decrease as expected in the Winter semester, we’d like to see Bialik focus on more overtly political activity in her involvement with SSMU Council.

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SSMU Midterm Reviews

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January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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VP External – Emily Boytinck

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Emily Boytinck. Sonia Ionescu | The McGill Daily

lthough she had never worked under the VP External portfolio before, Emily Boytinck came into the position with around two years of organizing and community engagement experience from her work with Divest McGill and the Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) office.

Following the demise of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), Boytinck has been actively involved in the creation of two new provincial student federations, the Association pour la voix étudiante au Québec (AVEQ) and the Union étudiante du Québec (UEQ). McGill students will soon decide whether to join a federation, and if so, which one.

In terms of political affairs, Boytinck’s biggest success has been the adoption of the climate change policy, which was added under the VP External portfolio at the Winter 2015 General Assembly. When such a policy was first discussed at Council, most councillors approached it with skepticism; however, the final draft of the document passed in Council with an overwhelming majority, as a result of six months of extensive consultation with all the faculties.

Notably, SSMU’s anti-austerity campaign has also gained traction during her term, with the organization of an anti-austerity week and the creation of the student group, McGill Against Austerity. Overall, Boytinck has been passionately and commendably engaged with politics, despite the apparent political apathy on the part of the broader student body. Mobilizing at McGill is tough, and Boytinck is aware of this. Although the number of people attending demonstrations is increasing, she will have to find a way to increase political participation, especially if she believes that SSMU should join a student federation.

In the absence of a VP Internal, Boytinck took over the planning of 4Floors and the oversight of Students’ Society Program Network (SSPN) as well as the Francophone Commission. Unfortunately for Boytinck, 4Floors failed to sell out this year, and ran a significant deficit. According to Boytinck, this is because the tickets for the event were sold online. However, Boytinck was confident in saying that 4Floors was otherwise a success, given the fact that those who did show up enjoyed themselves.

VP University Affairs – Chloe Rourke

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Chloe Rourke.

Andy Wei | The McGill Daily

hen she ran, Chloe Rourke’s platform largely rested on the continuation of initiatives from last year, which included the development of the sexual assault policy and following through the SSMU mental health five-year plan. Under Rourke, both initiatives seem to have now gained sufficient momentum to be seen through to their completion in due time.

Rourke has had some high-profile achievements this semester, despite the fact that she was out of office in December on bereavement leave. She has begun Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) negotiations with the University, organized the first Student Academic Summit for VPs Academic of faculty and departmental associations, and re-established the McGill academic round table.

Rourke has long been a fierce advocate for mental health initiatives on campus, and has addressed McGill’s antiquated and insufficient mental health services with vigour during her term. Rourke has also been working with VP Clubs & Services Kimber Bialik to create a Mental Health Space in the Clubs Lounge on the fourth floor of the Shatner building. However, Rourke has focused on transferring the burden of mental health service provision onto student-run services,

which distracts from the fact that the university’s mental health services are blatantly inadequate and underfunded.

Rourke attempted to re-establish the Policy Advisory and Resource Committee (PARC), which aims to provide an independent avenue for students who want to impact change at the university but don’t know how to get involved. Unfortunately, with SSMU running an air-tight budget, there were no funds to hire a staff member to coordinate PARC, and it has been shelved indefinitely. In addition, equity and outreach have both languished under Rourke’s term, largely because of a lack of time.

Next semester, Rourke hopes for more progress on the newly-struck Indigenous Affairs committee, which only met once last semester. This would involve the solidification of campaign plans in addition to the creation of an Indigenous solidarity policy.

Hopefully, should the planned SSMU restructuring take place, the overloaded University Affairs portfolio will be more manageable next year. This would give a future executive more time to focus on supporting student senators, seeing projects through, as well as consulting students on what they want to see happen and approaching the administration with those requests.

VP Finance and Operations – Zacheriah Houston

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Zacheriah Houston.

Andy Wei | The McGill Daily

f all the executives, Zacheriah Houston has arguably been the most seriously affected by the early resignation of Jennifer Varkonyi as SSMU General Manager (GM). While the GM and the VP Finance and Operations usually collaborate on the budget revision, this semester Houston did the budget revision alone. Houston said the budget revision consumed most of his semester, extending into November, and being finally approved on December 3.

Unfortunately, Houston has done little to fulfil his campaign promises of presenting the budget to students in accessible and engaging ways. There was also little student consultation or councillor involvement in the creation of the budget. That being said, the budget this year is notably more clear and readable than in the past, and Houston hopes that he will have the time to present the budget to students in the Winter semester. Overall, he has been one of the less visible and accessible executives, a reputation he hopes to change this semester.

The budget shows Houston to be a cautious and prudent VP Finance & Operations, not prone to excessive displays of fiscal optimism. Last year, The Nest was over-zealously budgeted for a $60,000 surplus, which Houston has revised

so that it more or less breaks even. Moreover, SSMU usually budgets for a $50,000 transfer to its Capital Expenditures Reserve Fund, which was eliminated this year as the result of “a lot of little changes,” in Houston’s words.

Houston’s successes have not been showy. Instead, he has focused on organizational and institutional memory.

Many of these changes seem obvious and long-overdue, but will have an enduring positive impact on SSMU’s operations and relationships. For example, he has moved forms to online platforms in an attempt to facilitate club audits and funding applications. Houston has also commendably created the adhoc Health and Dental Review Committee, which would add mental health coverage, smoking cessation, and other health coverages to the existing SSMU health plan.

Going forward, Houston is hoping to start January by developing a better long-term financial plan. According to him, the current five-year budget for capital expenses doesn’t look at operating the budget holistically or accommodate for increased expenses each year. For next year, he’s working on creating a better schedule for funding applications, along with tiered deadlines and a separate appeals committee for clubs.

Commentary

January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Let’s talk about grey areas To a professor who should have known better

Sonia Ionescu | The McGill Daily Anonymous Commentary Writer This article is a response to “Let’s talk about teacher” (September 1, Features, page 11).

D

ear Professor, You asked me, some time ago now, what it was that made me delete you from my Facebook. I’ll first note that “I’m sorry for whatever I did, but I confess I’m shocked” is not an apology. It is merely a way of denying responsibility for the consequences of your actions and making me out to be the hurtful one for having deleted you ‘inexplicably.’

So I will explain now, much too late, because I want to and not because I owe it to you. I waver as to what I think the wrongness of your actions consisted of. When I think back on the summer we worked together, I don’t think of the work.

I think instead of you telling me “I never comment on students’ appearances, but rest assured you’re fine” when I admitted to struggling with body dysmorphia, thereby effectively commenting on my appearance anyway. I think of you submitting an A as my grade before

I’d earned it (and I never really did).

I think of you going out of your way to make it known to me that you’re exclusively attracted to brunettes, which I was at the time (“C’mon, as far as picky tastes go, this is a pretty innocuous one”). I think of you responding with “what a fool” when I told you I’d been dumped (why were you the first person I told?). I think of leaving your office around or after midnight on Saturdays. I think of you telling me about taking your ex-girlfriend on wild dates, knowing I’d be impressed.

As you know, my mental health has been deteriorating for years. But the difficulty wasn’t only from within. I felt like an utter fraud taking part in a research group I’d gotten into on the basis of a glowing letter of recommendation you’d written me that I did not earn and (as I thought then) could not live up to. I felt the same way in my seminar taught by your colleague, with whom I was in good standing before I even set foot in her classroom because you put in an over-inflated good word for me some months before. This

It has taken me a long time to achieve the clarity of mind required to understand that the closeness we shared was inappropriate, full stop.

I think of two lonely people finding company in each other.

I think of a profoundly insecure just-turned-20-year-old who felt validated by her professor in a way no one had ever validated her before, and so didn’t object to the increasingly inappropriate closeness in the moment.

The academic year after that summer was a difficult one for me.

is how academia works, of course, but when the student’s sense of her own merit is bound up with the impression that her professor finds her attractive, it is epistemically disempowering indeed.

Maybe you never found me attractive. But, to my mind, all signs point to you having considered me valuable beyond the usual ways in which a professor values

any bright student, and not only because I am especially bright.

You knew that you were the first person (in a position of authority, moreover) to tell me I was good at academic work. You knew that you had deliberately sought me out in your class as someone who was good enough at this work to do it with you. So you ought to have known to take special care not to confuse in my mind what it was about me that you were validating.

It has taken me a long time to achieve the clarity of mind required to understand that the closeness we shared was inappropriate, full stop. What I’m still unclear on is why you, someone who has a robust academic background in feminism and who is professionally meticulous in every other respect, let this happen. That the subject matter of our work was sensitive is not sufficient to justify the extent to which we grew close, though you rationalized as much at the time. And I know you know this, too, because at the end of the summer you indicated that you didn’t want your higher-ups knowing we’d exchanged a total of 700 emails over three or four months, and turned thereafter to

infantilizing me (“kiddo,” “munchkin”), which was jarring and further disorienting. So, when I say I waver, it’s between thinking what happened was a product of mutual loneliness, and thinking you knew exactly what you were doing. These things are probably not to be disentangled.

Either way, you hurt me. I have spoken to some people about my experience, as I think is my right to do as a student who was hurt by her professor. I was concerned, to be honest, because you’ve betrayed that you’re only interested in supervising other (“badass”) women, which could be coming from a place of affirmative action or somewhere more sinister, I can’t be sure.

I’m not out to ruin your career.

Rather, I mean to encourage you to take better care in the future. And I implore you to remember that just because you’re hurting, too, doesn’t mean you’re incapable of hurting others, particularly those under your academic care.

Signed, Student The author has chosen to remain anonymous. To contact her, email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

Abuses of power happen at McGill.

Visit mcgilldaily.com/LetsTalkAboutTeacher to share your story anonymously.

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A ‘love’ letter to the Ally™ You don’t deserve the label if you won’t do the labour Paniz Khosroshahy The McGill Daily “What I need is for [white] people to come and work with us in the trenches and be there alongside us.

It’s not about being on the outside and saying ‘yes, I support you!’ It’s about ‘not only do I support you, but I am here with you, I am rolling up my sleeves. What do I need to do?”

—Feminista Jones

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ast semester, after one of my professors shut me down in class when I called her out for racism and every single White Rad Queer (WRQ) in class stayed silent (but filled my Facebook inbox with their sympathy), I officially gave up on white Allies™.

I’ve given up because whenever I go to an event about racial justice, I can count the number of WRQs on one hand. The same WRQs that would be normally present at any queer dance party suddenly get overwhelmed with midterms and assignments when it comes time for an event focused on the experience of queer people of colour.

When, in a typical women’s studies course, the single week focused on theorists of colour and on the experiences of people of colour finally rolls around at the end of the semester, the same WRQs that are so ready to call themselves intersectional feminists refuse to shut their mouths and listen. And these are just the ones that do make some effort to be decent people. The rest are just Allies™, whose empty ‘allyship’ really means nothing; they might as well call themselves a washing machine or a screwdriver if they can’t back up the label with solid action.

Empty labels Allyship in general has somehow been distilled to an identity label and commodified as such; at Pride, there are actual “Ally” stickers being sold along with “Gay,” “Butch,” and “Stud.” First things first: allyship is the process of coming to terms with your privilege and unlearning your harmful behaviours rooted in patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and so on – and yes, it involves learning what these words actually mean instead of crying “social justice warrior” in deflection.

It is indeed a step forward, for example, for men to overcome the constraints of masculinity and be able to call themselves feminists in the first place – even if it comes in the flawed form of “I support the real feminists that are about

equality, not the radical ones; I’m not too sure who they are but I’ve heard this excuse before so I use it.” But white men are generally quick to call themselves feminists, and not just for politically admirable reasons. First, because it’s easy.

While there’s an adjective for supporters of gender justice, no such adjective exists for anti-racism, for instance. Second, because gender inequality necessarily affects people defined in personal relation to men – wives, sisters, mothers. But what does feminism, as a collective movement, gain if one more man identifies as a feminist with no effort to actually act in a feminist manner? And what does it mean for women of colour if these feminist allies don’t speak about race? Not much.

Allyship in general has somehow been distilled to an identity label and commodified as such.

I have cut the racist misogynists (courtesy of rez and high school) out of my life. Yet I still receive hatred from men who call themselves feminist on a regular basis, feeling as if I owe them something now that they are Allies™ – “Paniz, you know I’m a feminist and support gay rights.” Allies™ often see their apparent allegiance to one cause as enough to have earned their selfadopted label, yet very often know next to nothing about what they’re supposedly supporting. Considering yourself an Ally™ is a baby step, and at some point, you really need to take the next step. No, you’re not an ally if you support men’s rights activism. You’re not an ally if you cry “not all white people,” if you get hennas done to look edgy, if you are anti-choice, if you bring up false rape allegations during conversations on sexual assault, if you are against affirmative action. You aren’t an ally if you – gasp – vote for conservatives and actively support people in power who trample on the rights of marginalized people.

Allyship isn’t just whatever you feel like it should be.

Good allyship: taking action and taking direction So what is good allyship? When I talk about the need for allies to take actual action, I am not asking them to join us at every march and conference and event (though that

Sarah Meghan Mah | The McGill Daily would be nice). If anything, at least understand your privilege, unlearn harmful practices, and learn about systems of oppression. Understand that, when it comes to activism, for once in your life, it’s not for you – or people who look like you – to be in charge. For once in your life you don’t get to set the agenda, your voice isn’t the loudest one, and you need to take the backseat and do as you’re told.

dreadlocks. Demand that event organizers hold their events in accessible venues. Don’t ever call women “slut,” “bitch,” or their derivatives.

Take on the responsibility of calling out and educating whitesplainers (I’m looking at you, WRQs). Stop telling us how to feel or what to do about our own lives – we have our own brains and understand our struggles much better than you do, thank you very

Don’t claim space in a movement that is not about you. Instead, work to make the many spaces that have been built to accommodate you and your needs accessible to the people to whom you’re supposedly an ally.

Allyship is an incredibly uncomfortable process. But it is worse for those you claim to support, who actually go through life in a society that constantly and consistently erases their existence and ignores their needs. Don’t claim space in a movement that is not about you.

Instead, work to make the many spaces that have been built to accommodate you and your needs accessible to the people to whom you’re supposedly an ally.

Here’s how you can start. Shut down rape jokes. Have a conversation about cultural appropriation with that white roommate with

much. As an ally, understand that your opinions on many things are irrelevant because your so-called allyship isn’t about you, nor is it about your personal feelings as a member of a dominant group, or the fact that you’ve read bell hooks or have three friends who are people of colour. While, for you, activism may be an edgy thing you do on the side, for some people this fight is necessary to be able to survive in a system that is, regardless of your personal opinion, actively benefiting you.

That is why I don’t believe that we have to roll out the welcome

mat in order for white people to feel the need to listen to marginalized voices. I think if people really cared, they would not ask us to water down our demands just to appeal to their fragile white egos.

I will take pride in sounding harsh and “alienating people,” those “good people,” those people who are “really on my side,” those people who “aren’t racist, just grew up in a rural redneck town.” Because to be a real ally you also need to stop tone-policing marginalized voices and quoting Martin Luther King Jr. on the importance of love out of context, as if what we are saying is less important than how we say it and how it makes you feel.

Yes, MLK was full of love, and so are we. But he was also full of rage, and so are we, because our anger comes from a place of love for ourselves and for others in our communities – something that takes a lot of work in a society that erases our existence in the first place.

We are angry, and we are entitled to be angry, but even if we weren’t also so full of love, the fact of the matter is that what activists fight against isn’t all sweet and dandy. Activists are fighting against the prison industrial complex, sexual violence, Israeli apartheid, racist immigration systems, settler colonialism on stolen Indigenous land, imperialist wars, police brutality, state surveillance. These are not fun topics by any stretch of the imagination; they are very serious, and reducing the complexity or horror of any of them in order to placate white egos is downright offensive to those who are most affected by them.

And, speaking of your ego: if it is too fragile to stand the tone of my voice, it probably is also too fragile to come to terms with your privilege and complicity in oppressive systems anyway. If this is all too much for you, maybe it’s not yet time for you to call yourself an ally. Go spend a few afternoons reading Everyday Feminism and Black Girl Dangerous. Go to any of the hundreds of social justice events happening on and off campus. Take WMST 200 (Introduction to Women’s Studies), INDG 200 (Introduction to Indigenous Studies), or SDST 250 (Introduction: Sexual Diversity Studies). If you are still an Ally™ in name only, take your allyship and burn it, because we don’t need you anyway.

Paniz Khosroshahy is a U2 Women’s Studies and Computer Science student. To reach her, email paniz.ksy@gmail.com.

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January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Terrorism and its beneficiaries

Capitalist elites take advantage of Daesh’s fascist ideology Constantinos Yanniris Commentary Writer

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s we try to make sense of the new divisions and conflicts that shape our world, it is questionable whether neutrality remains a viable option. Today, the actions of Daesh (the “Islamic State”) leave no space for compassionate understanding, forestallment, or policies of appeasement.

Daesh’s ideology has a number of similarities with fascism: its ideology of cultural superiority and the means and circumstances through which it summons popular support are reminiscent of European fascist cells during the interwar period. Daesh’s fascism parallels European fascism not only in its hatred toward diversity, otherness, and individual rights, but also in its relationship to the capitalist class.

Both resurgent European fascism and ‘Islamic’ fascism recruit populations who are economically marginalized and feel powerless because of their alienation from the political process. According to Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, fascism is a “plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers.” In Europe, fascism has built its ideology around the construct of the nation state, whereas in the Middle East, where the states are postcolonial artifacts, fascism builds around both ethnic and sectarian lines. Despite this difference, Trotsky’s description remains disturbingly accurate in the case of Daesh, which has been reported as receiving direct funding from rich individuals in many countries, both Islamic and nonIslamic. These individuals – who benefit from Daesh’s lucrative oil trade, for example – seem determined to maintain and capitalize on Daesh for as long as it can prove useful to their economic interests.

In the West, a sector of the capital-

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily ist class also profits from terrorism and war – note, for example, how the stocks of weapon manufacturers surged after last November’s Paris attacks.

agendas. In the days after the Paris attacks, there was a deliberate attempt by the ruling class to capitalize on the attacks by multiplying the terror effect on the population,

In the days after the Paris attacks, there was a deliberate attempt by the ruling class to capitalize on the attacks by multiplying the terror effect on the population.

The fascist character of Daesh has also proven extremely useful for the European political elite, notably in France, where it has been keen on taking advantage of the attacks to promote its own

in particular through the French government’s ban on public demonstrations. This manipulation has helped to align the population with the government, give increased powers to security forc-

es, and restrict political dissent in ways unrelated to terrorism, such as the repression of climate change activists during the COP21 conference. Ruling elites routinely manipulate the fear created by terrorist attacks into an opportunity to consolidate their power. By appealing to fear, the ruling class is able to further propagate it and use it as a form of social imposition and control. In this context, the state has the opportunity to reassert and legitimize its monopoly on the use of force.

‘Islamic’ fascists in the Middle East and resurgent xenophobic elements in Europe are now entangled in an escalating feedback loop that works for the benefit of both – Europeans fear terrorism, and

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their violent backlash stimulates the hatred that helps fuel recruitment for terrorist organizations.

Refugees from Syria and other warzones who cross into Europe may soon find themselves trapped between Scylla and Charybdis: trying to flee Daesh, they can only hope to be spared from the aggression of Europe’s xenophobes. Meanwhile, capitalists and governing classes manipulate terrorism and use it to their own advantage, cynically creating opportunity for themselves amid global catastrophe.

Constantinos Yanniris is a PhD candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education. To contact him, email constantinos.yanniris@mcgill.ca.

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January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

BY Aishwarya Singh

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overs can find ways to hide time, at least for a while. I know that I did. Each Saturday night, I used to unplug our alarm clock so that I didn’t have to notice how long Anna and I spent tangled up in each other’s limbs on our slow Sunday mornings. My fingers would get lost in her hair, her toes would gently fight mine for an extra piece of the blanket, and we would slowly plan our entire day; run some errands, fold some laundry, maybe go to the local farmer’s market in the evening. Nothing special.

Eventually, she would find her way out of my arms and unfurl her body with a long stretch. She always threw her head back, opening her neck up to the world. Some mornings, she’d stay like that for longer than usual and you could see a blade of sunlight cut across her collarbone.

For the rest of the afternoon, our house swelled with the scent of coffee and slightly burnt bread. She’d turn on some Christmas jingles on our old CD player, even if it was July. I’d always stay in bed for a little while with my eyes closed, letting the music wrap itself around my bones like tinsel.

It’s funny how we count on these little moments to save us.

*** All of that feels like another world. This morning, I crawl away from the sun, burying myself in the same sheets Amma bought for me when I was 14. I can hear her downstairs, making her early Saturday morning calls to family in India. Fragments of their con-

versation come to me through the air vent. Someone’s sick. Someone else’s daughter is getting married in July. Some of the names I vaguely recognize. Most of them I don’t. They say that blood is thicker than water, but you can’t hold your grandmother’s weathered hand or crawl into bed with your favourite cousins when entire oceans are in the way.

When I finally make my way into the kitchen she hands me a cup of tea.

“How was your sleep?” she asks in Hindi.

“It was okay,” I answer in English.

We drink our tea in silence. Out the window I notice that there’s a fresh coat of paint on the Banarjees’ garage. A red-haired woman in a power suit is rummaging through her purse on their porch.

“Wait, did uncle and auntie leave?” I ask her.

“Are you surprised? Uncle was on his way to a six-figure salary around the time you were moving away.”

“Wow, I can’t believe it—” She rolls her eyes. “You big city people think that your hometowns will be as you left them. But we’re allowed to move on too, you know. Now, if you hadn’t left—” I want to remind her that I hadn’t left, that they were the ones who put a suitcase in front of me when they caught me kissing another girl in the basement. I want to remind her that it was below freezing that day and I only had time to grab my windbreaker. I want to take her across the street and show her the phone book that I flipped through trying to find other people with our last name,

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January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

hoping they were distant family who could take me in. I want her to hear the mechanized operator telling me that the only number I did find had been disconnected. I want her to feel the way the handle of that suitcase dug into my fingers as I pulled myself down the street. But there’s no use dwelling on the past. So I just shrug as she goes on and on.

*** I was still using that same suitcase the night Anna and I moved into our apartment. After months of living in decrepit basements with semi-functional plumbing, she convinced me to sign a lease on this new place: “Come on, I’ll pay your rent while you look for a job,” she’d pleaded.

“You can’t do that,” I said, “You’re still in school. I don’t think your parents—” “Don’t worry about them; they’ve got money to burn. I just really don’t want to see you living like this—” It had been an empty argument. We both knew I’d give in.

That afternoon she went to get some lunch and I emptied my entire life onto the kitchen floor. I’d forgotten to pack a lot of things, but I’d managed to tuck in a couple of little paperbacks I hadn’t touched since middle school. I opened them, letting the dust from their pages cascade through wedges of sunlight; a single creased photograph fell from one. It was a picture of a tiny woman in a sari, hair tied into two tight braids, eyes closed, brows scrunched up, mouth somewhere between a polite grin and an amused smirk.

“Anila,” the back read, “1983.”

“She’s so beautiful,” Anna said from behind me.

I hadn’t noticed her come in. She put her bags to the side and took the photo from over my shoulder.

“I can’t believe you were using her as a bookmark. Who is she?”

“I don’t know. I know we used to have a couple maids back in India, but I was so young—” “How old do you think she is here?”

“Here? I would guess about 21. I like how she looks like she’s waiting for something big; it’s kind of nice that she gets to stay like that forever.”

“Well, you know, she’s probably out in the world somewhere, moving through life like the rest of us. It’s kind of fun to think about what the real Anila must be doing right now, don’t you think?”

I really didn’t.

But we hung our Anila up on the fridge. We’d meet her every morning when we’d make our way for some orange juice, and every night when we’d go to heat up our dinner. The world spun and shook and screamed, but Anila stayed the same. She was always there with her eyes closed tight, waiting for something big.

*** Nowadays, waiting is all I do.

I’m sitting on the porch, staring at new cars in old driveways, new bodies on old pavement. Eventually, I can’t even recognize the past. The recollection of my first car crash clashes with that of my first kiss. I remember the wheels of bicycles turning, but not the people riding them. It’s like someone took slides from my memories, cut them up, shuffled them in a shoebox, and scattered them across my consciousness.

I feel a hand cup my shoulders. Amma uses my body to settle down next to me. The skin on the back of the hands looks like crumpled packaging paper, but her palms are stiff with calluses.

She used to tell me that up to her wedding day, she hadn’t worked an hour in her life. Back then, her hands were smooth and white, like she bathed them in milk every day. There are a dozen pictures in her wedding album just of those pearly palms, bursting with hot red henna.

“We should go to the temple tomorrow,” she says.

“I would really rather not,” I reply.

Her mouth falls, “I thought you had come to your senses, leaving that girl—” “Amma, she left me—” We’re silent for while. I really shouldn’t test her too much. Trying to avoid her gaze, I turn my head and look into our house through the open door. The suitcase is still sitting in the living room, like some kind of a threat.

“Sometimes I wonder why we even brought you here in the first place,” she starts, her voice quivering, “you first generations don’t understand – you’re all just copying them, copying the way they dress, the way they talk, things that they do. But mark my words, you will never be like them. And none of them will ever love you, not like family. You’ll end up neither here nor there.”

*** “Where you are from?” Anna asked a few months after we’d first moved in. “Show me.”

She had just found an old globe on her bike ride back from work and placed it on our kitchen table. She spun it around, making me feel a little bit dizzy.

“What do you mean? You know where I’m from.”

“Well, yeah. But I want to know exactly where.”

“What, you want me to me to pick out my great-grandfather’s village?”

“You’re so vague when you talk about your family. I really want to know more about your past.”

“I moved when I was 5; that’s not really my past. I know you want to hear that I grew up being chased by tigers in a tropical rainforest, but I was raised in the suburbs; I took swimming lessons at the community centre, I went to public school. The biggest difference between your childhood and mine is probably that the other kids didn’t make faces at what your mom packed you for lunch.”

“Oh come on, now you’re just being difficult,” she rolled her eyes, letting her index finger graze the spinning globe, not paying much attention to where it landed.

Later that night, we were lying in bed. I brushed my fingers against the hollow of her collarbone. I could still smell the sweat from her bike ride.

“Oh!” her eyes lit up, “we should go there, visit your family! I mean, you’ve had Thanksgiving dinner with mine. My finals end early this year and tickets aren’t that expensive in December. I really want to meet them.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you’re the kind of groom my family has in mind.”

“Come on, I feel like we barely go anywhere—” “I just don’t like going places for the sake of it. I mean if there’s something interesting happening, then sure. But I’m happy here, I’m happy with you. I like things the way they are.”

“I like things the way they are too, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend all my time cooped up in this tiny apartment. India would be so much fun; we don’t even have to visit your family. We can just be tourists. Hey, we might even bump into Anila.”

“That Anila is probably old and grumpy and has ten kids she can’t afford. I like the Anila on our fridge, and I get to see her every day.”

She stared at the ceiling for a while, and then threw off my arms and walked over to the vanity table. I stared at her face in the mirror. I realized that her hair had grown considerably in the past few months. A couple of tiny, thin silvers grazed the left of her head.

There was a crease mark on her forehead that I hadn’t quite noticed before. She stood there for a while, playing with the latch of her jewelry box.

“I don’t know why you’re like this,” she started softly. “Sometimes you can be so closed off. I feel like I tell you everything—” She really did. In the first half-hour of our first date she had told me she was 50 per cent Irish, 25 per cent British, and 25 per cent German. Maybe she was looking for common ground, trying to show me that neither one of us were just one thing. And I guess

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January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

that was true. But at least all of her jewelry was in that one box.

Amma told me that a week before the midnight flight from Indira Gandhi International Airport, she had taken all the gold chains and earrings and bangles that overeager family had gotten me over the course of my five birthdays and had divided them amongst three wooden containers. Each container was at a different relative’s house.

“This way we don’t have to depend too much on one family,” she’d said.

Anna kept talking, but her voice began to feel like elevator music. Suddenly all I could think about was my gold, glittering in three different dark places.

*** Sometimes Amma likes to turn the ring on her finger around and around as if she’s trying to open a particularly stubborn lid. She’s doing it right now as she stands in front of the stove, waiting for the oil in her frying pan to warm up.

It starts hissing and she slides in some thinly cut lady fingers.

The pan spits hot oil at her every once in a while, but she barely even flinches. I think about all the other women who cook like she does, who have the same little burns on their arms. Maybe Anila is one of them. Amma used to say that you can only talk to people with the same wounds as you. I think about all the different conversations she could be having.

“Amma,” I pipe up from the kitchen entrance, “did you know someone named Anila growing up?”

“Someone? I knew several. There was Anila, the butcher’s daughter. She got married to the tailor’s son, but he died after ten years. She had three children by then. She also had a beautiful smile, the whitest teeth you’d ever see. And she couldn’t even afford toothpaste! Then there was the Anila who worked for your grandmother. We all despised her; she would always...”

And one by one, she remembers each Anila to life. She knows who they were married to, how many children they had –­­ for two of them she even knows what their favourite food was.

“And then there was Anila whose father shared some land with mine. She was a little bit older than me. She always wore jasmine in her hair; every room she visited would smell so good. I used to follow her around like a little dog,” she laughed, “I acted like I was in love with her.”

She catches my glance and her smile fades.

“I mean,” she says stiffly, “she was a good friend.”

She wipes her brow with her left forearm and keeps stirring the vegetables. Eventually, the sound of her cooking is so loud that we both have an excuse to be silent. The smell of cumin and chilli powder rises and loosens the tension in the air. A part of me feels jealous of her, though, jealous of her for knowing all those Anilas.

I guess some would say that I’m feeling nostalgic. But nostalgia is a longing for the past. This isn’t longing. This is not knowing what exactly is missing in the first place. This is every life you’ve ever lived spitting you out like a bad taste. This is feeling the ghost of the little girl you once were dancing around your heels and vanishing in a cloud of giggles when you reach down to grab her. This is exile with nowhere else to go.

*** Some nights Anna liked to have parties in our home. Everyone was welcome. She’d leave the door open and streams of people would float in and out. It was a tiny space, but that was okay; conversations were started by falling onto the sofa or almost spilling your food onto someone’s lap. In the beginning, we’d move from one pool of people to another together, reminding one another names we’d forgotten. But eventually Anna insisted that we try to socialize on our own.

“We can’t be one person,” she’d said. “Sometimes I feel like you—”

She paused for a moment to brush some mascara up her lashes.

“I mean, we’re just too co-dependent,” she finished, snapping her makeup kit shut.

So while I might have wine with the man from down the hall, she’d talk to the lady upstairs about some new art exhibit in town.

Sometimes, we’d pass by each other. Other times, we’d catch each other’s eyes. That has to be one of the strangest things in the world, making accidental eye contact with someone you love. You almost forget for a second that you know them.

One of these parties fell on the night of our anniversary. Around midnight, we were both sitting in a single loveseat, watching two bottles of champagne surf the crowd. I could smell the wine on her breath; she’d never liked to drink much before.

“How long has it been?” yelled a pot-bellied man from across the room.

“Um, I think about two years,” I replied.

She secretly traced her fingers down my back. “We’ve come so far,” she whispered softly into my ear.

I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant. Did she mean that we’d grown up together, taken on the world side by side? Or did she mean “so far” like so far away from home, like so far away from anything or anyone else that we were sitting in that chair and holding each other out of necessity rather than love? Did she mean “so far” like we couldn’t make our way back even if we tried?

When everyone left, I’d often do the dishes by myself, letting the warm soapy water fall through my fingers. That night Anna came into the kitchen and hugged me from behind.

“That was nice,” she slurred, “a lot of new people showed up. I wish we could see those people more often.”

“You can if you want,” I said, struggling to pull out a free arm to close the tap.

She rested her chin on my shoulder. “You don’t actually mean that,” she whined, “I see the way you look at me when I’m going out or when I have new people over. You – you’ve barely touched me in three months.”

Her mouth pressed against my shoulders; it felt like cold metal.

I could smell the alcohol on her lips. I didn’t want her but I could barely move. Her entire body felt like a straitjacket. I thrust my elbows back and she fell, crashing against the fridge, knocking over Anila.

I turned around, picked her up, and put her back on the fridge.

I stood there for a while, ironing out any creases with my fingers.

Anna looked up at me from the floor like she couldn’t recognize who I was.

“Seriously,” she choked, “it’s a damn photograph.”

*** Lovers can be turned into homes, at least for a little while. But you can’t count on someone to stay in one place. And, besides, neither people nor places can save you.

Those last days were just a frenzy of boxes and paperwork; we could barely look at each other.

“Do you know where you’re going to go?” she asked the final morning, twirling a sugar cube in her coffee.

“Not really,” I said, stuffing the last bits of my clothes into my suitcase, “probably home – or like, my parent’s house.”

And I’m here.

Amma is out in front, on her knees, trying to plant jasmine flowers in the little garden right outside of our house. I hope that when they bloom, the entire air feels stuffy with their scent, like Anila’s spirit is running up and down our stairs.

I don’t actually know what happened to our Anila. She must have gotten lost in the tumult of the move. Maybe she slipped under the fridge, or slid into one of those little openings at the bottom of our walls. Maybe she fell out of a box or a suitcase outdoors and is now passing through the city, under bright lights and strangers’ boots, her braids and sari forever in place.

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Sci+Tech

January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Getting to know the vagina

14

Microbiomes and our health

Daniel Vosberg Sci+Tech Writer

T

he vagina is an ecosystem home to a plethora of bacterial communities, that consume vaginal nutrients in exchange for defense against disease-causing microbes (microscopic organisms). One of the pioneering researchers of the microbiomes of vaginas was Albert Döderlein, who cultured bacteria from vaginal secretions in 1892. He discovered a bacteria, now known as Lactobacillus, that ferments sugars into lactic acid.

The lactic acid reduces vaginal pH, and thus prevents the growth of dangerous pathogens. Since then, scientists have reported that reduced Lactobacillus incurs vulnerability to preterm labour, yeast infections, sexually transmitted infections (including HIV), urinary tract infections, and bacterial vaginosis (BV), a vaginal disorder characterized by an abnormal vaginal odour and discharge. However, many microbes resist laboratory cultivation, leading to a simplified picture of the vagina’s bacterial ecology. Recently, DNA sequencing studies have questioned the dogma that Lactobacillus is the only predominant vaginal microbe present.

In 2011, Jacques Ravel and other scientists of the Institute for Genome Sciences in Baltimore, investigated vaginal microbial communities of healthy, asymptomatic participants in four ethnic groups (Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white). The study uncovered that, while the definitive causes of variation among vaginal microbiomes (the microbe ecosystem) are unknown, the causes of differences between ethnicities could include differences in immune systems and substances present in the vagina. The report also stipulates that health practices, personal hygiene, birth control, and sexual behaviour have all been shown to affect the microbial makeup of vaginas.

The study revealed that although 73 per cent of participants had Lactobacilluspredominant vaginas, the remaining 27 per cent had higher proportions of anaerobic bacteria, which grow without oxygen, but like Lactobacillus, also produce lactic acid. They also found that vaginal pH is higher among Hispanic (pH 5.0) and Black (pH 4.7) participants, relative to Asian (pH 4.4) and white (pH 4.2) participants.

Consistently, about 80 per cent of Asian and white people have Lactobacillus-predominant vaginas, whereas only 60 per cent of Hispanic and Black people do. BV was overrepresented in Hispanic and Black people, but all par-

Sonia Ionescu | The McGill Daily ticipants studied were asymptomatic, leading the authors to caution that non-Lactobacillus-predominant vaginas should not be viewed as “unhealthy.” According to the authors, vaginal ecosystems are dynamic and complex, varying between and within individuals and across their lifespan; there is no single “normal” vaginal microbiome.

Differences in immune systems... health practices, personal hygiene, birth control, and sexual behaviour have all been shown to affect the makeup of vaginas.

Incidentally, it is known that vaginal douching – washing out the vagina using water or other fluids – destabilizes the vaginal

microbiome and increases vulnerability to infections.

The research of primates Süleyman Yildirim and fellow reserachers at the Institute for Genomic Biology in Illinois, found in a study that increased vaginal length and volume, multiple partners, and genital swelling, result in increased exposure to microbes in the case of primates. Accordingly, the authors reported that primate vaginal microbial communities vary as a function of these traits, as well as the geographic origin of each primate species.

In humans, vaginal biodiversity decreases in puberty, during which period certain bacterial communities become predominant in the vagina, a development thought to maximize fertility and protection against pathogens. Stability of vaginal microbiomes has been reported to decrease during menstruation and increase during the follicular phase (higher hormone count) of the menstrual cycle.

Mayu Uchihashi and fellow researchers at the University of Michigan decided to study baboon vaginas, seeking to establish a relationship in baboon vaginal microbiome composition with age and reproductive cycle.

The biodiversity and pH of non-

human primate vaginas is significantly greater than among those of humans. There is a relative scarcity of Lactobacillus in nonhuman primates. Although microbial diversity in baboons did not vary with reproductive cycling or menstruation, it did reduce during puberty, presumably to optimize bacterial composition for each baboon’s health with the introduction of sexual activity.

Vaginal ecosystems are dynamic and complex... there is no “normal” vaginal microbiome.

As baboons have a relative scarcity of Lactobacillus, Uchihashi and colleagues proposed that the high microbial diversity of baboons leads to greater competition for limited niches (specialized environments for survival), which inhibit colonization (invasion) of infectious bacteria. However, this would

suggest that bacterial diversity ought to increase in baboons during puberty, whereas the study found a decrease. The authors proposed that maintaining high bacterial diversity requires high amounts of energy, but that the fewer species represent a wider variation in function, and thus effectively compete with pathogens for limited niches. Thus, pruning of vaginal bacterial communities during puberty may select out functionally-redundant bacteria. Surprisingly, bacteria associated with BV and considered pathogenic in humans, such as Prevotella, Sneathia, and Mobiluncus, were found in healthy, asymptomatic baboons.

These findings reiterate that the vaginal microbiome is an unpredictable and incredibly complex ecosystem. Some scientists such as Ravel have proposed computational models as a solution to this complexity, so these microbiomes cannot be reduced to ratios of bacterial communities. Understanding the vaginal microbiome in humans and other primates has implications for vaginal health such as BV, STIs, and fertility, as well as appreciation of vaginal ecology, brimming with life forms whose dynamics are essential to vaginal health.

Sci+Tech

January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Ten more years of Alzheimer’s

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Why researchers find themselves without a cure

Chelsea Cavanagh Sci+Tech Writer

A

t the start of my PhD, a highly respected researcher told me that within ten years, we’d have some real treatment options for patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Now, almost six years later, I’m nearing the end of my degree and these treatment options are nowhere in sight. Was this researcher wrong? What is happening? Why is this taking so long?

AD was first described in 1906

by Alois Alzheimer. He described a patient named Auguste Deter, who repeated “I have lost myself” during an examination. Upon her death, Alzheimer described the plaques and tangles found in her brain that became hallmarks of the disease.

Only in the eighties, through modern biochemical techniques, was the composition of these plaques and tangles determined. The protein in the plaques was characterized and named beta-amyloid and the protein making up the tangles was identified as tau. The last – and arguably most important – hallmark of AD is cell death, which is widespread at advanced stages of the disease.

The first drugs used to treat AD were introduced in the nineties and worked by adjusting the levels of chemical messengers in the brain.

The relief offered by the drugs is minimal, and is no permanent solution. And yet, though this treatment for AD has since fallen out of favour, these drugs are currently the only available options for treatment.

Since then, the field has been focused on the “amyloid cascade hypothesis,” based on the discovery that amyloid is toxic to neurons. There are very convincing lines of evidence that show that excess amyloid production is the cause of AD and yet, no amyloiddirected clinical trials have produced new treatment options for AD patients. Why? My top three reasons are that we’re using the wrong models, we’re intervening too late, and we don’t know how the brain works.

Incorrect models There are two types of Alzheimer’s disease. One type is caused by dominant mutations in genes coding for either the amyloid precursor protein (APP), presenilin-1, or presenilin-2, which all affect the same pathway and cause an overproduction of amyloid. This type of AD is often called “earlyonset” since symptoms typically arise before the age of sixty, sometimes in people as young as thirty or forty. However, this form accounts for less than 1 per cent of cases.

Almost all mouse models of the disease are based on early onset.

On the other hand, the second type of AD accounts for the majority of cases, has an unknown cause, and is referred to as “sporadic”.

Although this form does have a genetic component, it has been more difficult to model in mice. The genetic risk factor for this type of AD is the presence of the ApoE4 gene, which can increase the risk of developing AD by up to 60 per cent. However, unlike dominant mutations, having this gene doesn’t guarantee AD development and conversely, not having the mutation is not a safeguard. Understanding the relationship between the ApoE4 genetic risk factor and AD development would likely improve our current understanding about the cause of the sporadic form of AD. In comparison to APP and amyloid, the ApoE4 genotype is underrepresented among mouse models, which makes it difficult to study the underlying causes of AD. In addition to modelling only the “early-onset” subset of AD cases, the vast majority of mouse models currently being studied do not display any cell death. This lack of cell death may be the reason why it turns out that AD is actually very easy to treat – in mice. Researchers do it every day. Dozens of compounds have been shown to improve memory and reduce amyloid pathology – in mice. But when the most promising compounds went on to clinical trials, they all had to be stopped due to lack of efficacy or safety concerns.

It’s not that these mouse models are bad – quite the opposite. These models have allowed researchers to perform detailed studies on the effects of amyloid pathology and dissect the molecular pathway of how amyloid is produced. The research generated from these models holds great promise for the identification of a therapy that targets the underlying molecular cause of AD. These mice just need a bit of a remodel. We can’t reasonably expect these mouse models to recapitulate all aspects of the human disease and reliably predict drug efficacy and safety. An emerging theory suggests that researchers should consider the pathology of these mice as a model of early stage AD, before neuron cell death. If this theory holds weight, we should be able to use these mouse models to understand mechanisms that may contribute to AD pathology.

Late treatment A recent study by Randall Bateman looked at people with a dominant AD mutation who, based on their family history, had a predictable age of symptom onset. The researchers found that they could detect changes in amyloid levels in the cerebrospinal fluid up to 25 years before the estimated age of symptom onset. This study and others indicate that AD develops insidiously over decades. By the time cognitive symptoms arise, neurological damage is extensive and hard to reverse. In the past, clinical trials invited participants who

Young Jin Cho | Illustrator were already experiencing cognitive symptoms to take part. This may have been one of the reasons for the failure of these trials. Intervening as early as possible before there is extensive neurological damage, or even cognitive symptoms, would give the greatest chance of successful intervention.

Why not just treat people earlier? The cost of a clinical trial varies widely, but most estimates put the cost in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars with phases 1 to 3 typically lasting five years. This cost is a major obstacle to conducting a trial that would last twenty or thirty years without the promise of a definitive therapeutic project.

However, the field has undergone a shift in thinking about preventing AD and starting treatment earlier.

Clinical trials are now recruiting people who are cognitively healthy, but who may be at a higher risk of developing AD. These trials include the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s (AA) and the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN) Trial that are recruiting patients as young as 65 and up to 15 years before the expected age of symptom onset, respectively. These studies are a major step toward intervening before it’s too late.

The unknown brain It’s true. Bradley Voytek, assistant professor of Computational Cognitive Science and Neuroscience at UC San Diego, estimates that we know about how 2 per cent of the brain works. We know different brain regions are associated with

different functions, but that is far from understanding how this complex organ produces our thoughts and personalities.

On top of the 86 billion neurons that can each connect with other cells at up to 10 000 sites called synapses, Voytek writes in an article in Nature that there are at least as many, if not up to ten times as many, glial cells. Named after the Greek word for “glue,” glial cells were initially thought to just hold neurons together. Now, growing evidence shows that glia are also involved in signalling and communication, adding another level of complexity to the brain.

If this is not staggering enough, try and map out the connections.

The growing field of connectomics aims to map out synaptic connection networks and is facing unexpected challenges. In a recent article, Jeff Lichtman, professor of molecular and cell biology at Harvard University, and his colleagues point out that acquiring the data is “actually the (relatively) easy part.” Using electron microscopy, researchers can acquire an image of the brain on a nanometer scale that reveals all synaptic connections. Lichtman’s team converts these nanoscale images to a digital connectivity graph that is essentially a map of all the synapses. One of the challenges is the sheer volume of data generated. The article explains, “Acquiring images of a single cubic millimeter of a rat brain will generate about 2 million gigabytes or 2 petabytes of data.” Take larger brain regions than this, and we’re into unit prefixes that just sound made up.

A complete rat brain will produce about an exabyte (1,000 petabytes) of data. This goes way beyond the ability of any storage system in existence today. Mapping a complete human brain in this manner “will require a zetabyte (1000 exabytes), an amount of data approaching that of all the information recorded globally today.”

The brain is astoundingly complicated. While a comprehensive map of the human brain is still a while away, a map of the mouse brain may not be that distant. In addition to microscopy, newly developed techniques, such as optogenetics, are gaining prominence.

Optogenetics is a method that allows researchers to essentially shine a light on a specific area of the brain to activate those synapses and measure the downstream effects. The advances made to understand how the brain works would undoubtedly impact the way AD, and for that matter all neurological diseases, are studied and treated.

Despite these obstacles, researchers have made great progress toward understanding and treating AD. The old adage just happens to be true that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Nonetheless, we have dissected the amyloid pathway with the help of mouse models. We’ve shifted billions of dollars to clinical trials aiming to prevent AD. And the amount of knowledge about this final frontier is growing at an unprecedented rate. So when do I think real treatment options will be available to AD patients? Maybe in the next ten years.

Art Essay

Openminded

Watercolour, acrylic and ink with digital manipulation

January 11, 2016 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

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Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

Culture

January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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January festival previews Music and theatre you don’t want to miss

If you’re suffering from winter blues, here are two festivals happening this month that you should check out, if only to distract you from the frigid Montreal air biting your face.

Rosie Long Decter The McGill Daily

Wildside Theatre Festival January 7-17 Centaur Theatre, tickets $16 regular, $13 for students, those under 30, seniors This 19th annual Wildside Theatre Festival is co-curated by Johanna Nutter, who curated the 2014 edition and performed her acclaimed play My Pregnant Brother at Wildside in 2011, and Roy Surette, a B.C. theatre staple and the current artistic and executive director of Centaur Theatre. Known for shedding light on young, budding Canadian talent, Wildside is a chance for Montreal theatre-goers to see indie shows that surpass the realm of what you might normally find on Montreal’s biggest stages, without having to sift through the overwhelming Fringe Festival program. This year, Wildside’s is featuring seven shows from local companies like Kaleidoscope Montreal and MaryBeth Productions, as well as imports from Vancouver, Ottawa, and Brooklyn. The shows range from quirky to terrifying, dealing with such topics as female superheroes, the commodification of happiness, and school shootings.

Must see: Co. Venture and In Search of Mrs. Pirandello Co. Venture is a dance show that delves into the multi-generational influence of choreographer Merce Cunningham. It won the prize for Outstanding Choreography at the Fringe Festival in 2015.

Be sure to also check out In Search of Mrs. Pirandello, a play from the Black Theatre Workshop’s former artist in residence Michaela Di Cesare. The play looks at the life of author Luigi Pirandello’s wife, a woman who was unfairly labelled crazy and irrationally jealous in her time.

Coming soon at the Phi Centre Nov.

EXHIBITION

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— Jan.

and

Canada’s Top Ten Shorts / Student Shorts

Georges & Guy Justin Kingsley

KickDrum Winter Marathon

15 — 16

FILM

11

Jan.

FILM

14

14

30

Jan.

Jan.

Various directors

FILM

Jan.

FILM

16

Ninth Floor Mina Shum

Jan.

FILM

19 — 21

January 14-16 Various locations, tickets $5-15, with various free events KickDrum, a Montreal music promotion and management company, is putting on its inaugural Winter Marathon, a music festival that seeks to fill the void of cultural activities in Montreal’s cold winter months. Different from Igloofest, the popular electronic winter music festival that encourages Montrealers to embrace the cold and dance in the snow, the Winter Marathon focuses on alt folk, rock, and pop, and takes place at cafes and bars throughout the city, allowing festivalgoers to forgo the frostbite and enjoy a warm latte or beer with their music. Not only does this festival give you a chance to see some of Montreal’s top up-and-coming acts, it also gives you a great tour of some of the city’s best coffee.

Don’t miss: Look Vibrant Look Vibrant is a McGill band that has successfully broken out of the McGill bubble and into the Montreal scene. Their off-kilter brand of art pop pairs fuzzy, nasal vocals with noisy guitars and catchy synths for a dance sound. Also, their videos are pretty weird (like, floating penises weird). They’re playing the closing event on January 16 with CTZNSHP and Technical Kidman.

Montreal Premiere

Sleeping Giant

Tharlo

Pema Tseden

Jan.

18

Felt

Andrew Cividino

INSTALLATION

Jason Banker

SPECIAL EVENT

— Mar.

Jan.

24

SPECIAL EVENT

30

Virtual Reality Garden 4 experiences surrounding 21st century challenges

L

I

G

H

T

T H E R A P Y

BRIGHTEN YOUR WINTER

Le Rhinocéros by Phi

Boutique and Curiosities

Phi Centre—407 Saint-Pierre Street, Old Montreal—phi-centre.com

DIE POD DIE

Album-listening sessions on vinyl

Square-Victoria—OACI

Compendium!

January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

18

Lies, half-truths, and keeping up with the times.

Suzie Forte fails to enter new year Board of Guv’nors passes emergency new year’s resolution to help befuddled boss

Djemme Arrikan The McGall Weekly

O

n December 31, most people on Earth finished up with the year 2015 and collectively declared “New year, new me.”

In a haphazardly written letter sent to campus publications, including The Weekly, Duke of Media Relations Douglas Sweetie wrote, “Friends, we need your help. Suzie Forte failed to enter the new year!”

While Sweetie failed to respond to any of our follow-up questions, The Weekly successfully uncovered that McGall Principal and Vice-Baroness Suzie Forte was stuck frozen in time, eating soup and breadsticks and watching re-runs of the classic Discov-

ery Channel show Ice Road Truckers.

Entering the frozen Forte’s foyer through the front door, The Weekly’s budding prime news reporter Helen Pulls found the aliens!

What?

And Pulls was then abducted!

Having heard the news that Pulls was abducted by the aliens, The Weekly’s editorial board organized an emergency editorial board meeting, wherein it decided to send in Gore Semantikov, former news writer and current One-Hundred-Percent-TotallyObjective-Opinions editor.

Having entered Forte’s abode, Semantikov found Forte sitting exactly where she was sitting when Pulls was abducted. Looking around, Semantikov found the remains

Questions I had about pop culture in 2015 Milhouse Manybells | The McGall Weekly

1

When people have “squad goals” as the captions for photos of them and their friends, do they mean that they have achieved their squad goals? Or that our goal, as the viewer, should be for our squad to be as cool as their squad? Or that their squad still has a long way to go to attain its goals? In the words of Justin Bieber, what do u mean?

2 3 4

Who is Meek Mill? Why does Norm Kelly care?

5 6

What is a ‘fetty wap’?

7 8

Why did we ever doubt Justin Bieber?

9

Why can’t The Weeknd feel his face? How much cocaine does one have to take to not feel one’s face?

10

Re: that Instagram star who ‘exposed’ Instagram as fake – did anyone really think Instagram profiles were real? Was Snapchat just paying her to make Instagram look bad?

11

Does everyone use a ghostwriter? Is it all just a lie?

Whatever happened to Lady Gaga?

of Pulls’ pen on the floor. When he put the pen back together, Pulls immediately appeared next to him, putting an end to that particular mystery.

Speaking to Semantikov, Pulls said, “I don’t fucking know man. Aliens.”

In response, Semantikov said, “Get a grip Pulls, we need to solve this other mystery.”

Working together harmoniously, Semantikov and Pulls reportedly realized that the re-runs of the renowned TV show Ice Road Truckers were all made in 2015.

Because she was not able to move into the new year in her binge-watching marathon, Forte was not able to enter the new year in real life either.

The next day, Pulls and Semantikov took their findings to the mysterious cultish group known as the McGall Board of Guv’nors (BoG’n).

Speaking at the BoG’n at the same time, Pulls and Semantikov explained the situation.

“This is why you must invest in this TV show, so that Forte can watch the truckers of the icy road one more year and enter the new year,” they said in unison.

Responding to The Weekly’s reporters, Abraham Kream, King of SHMU, Lord of the Twelve Faculties, Protector of Social Justice, Lord Paramount of Arts, Eternal Sovereign of la Nouvelle Résidence, the Advisor on Matters of Social Responsibility, Conqueror of Climate Change, Great Restructurer, General Assembler, and former Interim Carer of the SHMU Babies and Chairperson of the

New Me

McGall to fund next season of Ice Road Truckers.

Council of Students’ Commissars of the Students’ Union, recognized the need to follow the advice of The Weekly’s reporters. As such, Kream moved to pass a new year’s resolution to invest in the Discovery Channel.

At press time, Forte was still sitting at her chair, as the shooting of the new season of Ice Road Truckers had just started. Only time will tell whether Forte will ever be able to enter 2016.

Add/Drop

How many keys to success are there in total? How many of these keys do I have to follow before I am DJ Khaled?

Why did “Bad Blood” win video of the year at the VMAs? Was it not just a really long credit reel?

Who is the ultimate white feminist – Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, or Lena Dunham?

12 13

Where is Rihanna’s eighth album? Was that all just a lie?

14 15

Are Jaden and Willow Smith always on LSD, or just sometimes?

If Kanye is God, and his son is Saint, what does that make Kim? Is she Mary? How does North feel about all of this?

Did Drake actually think he was dancing well?

Nick Yeretsian | The McGall Weekly

Editorial

volume 105 number 15

editorial board 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9

January 11, 2016 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Misguided incentives punish welfare recipients

phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com

The McGill Daily is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. coordinating editor

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coordinating@mcgilldaily.com coordinating news editor

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rec@delitfrancais.com cover design Sarah Megan Mah contributors David Benjamin, Chelsea Cavanagh, Young Jin Cho, Ellen Cools, Rosie Long Decter, Paniz Khosroshahy, Sarah Megan Mah, Alice Shen, Aishwarya Singh, Daniel Vosberg, Andy Wei, Rahma Wiryomartono, Constantinos Yanniris, Nick Yeretsian

Saima Desai | The McGill Daily

T

he alarming change to Quebec’s welfare system proposed by the provincial government last year will be subject to public consultations at the National Assembly next month. If passed, Bill 70 would oblige first-time welfare applicants to participate in a work placement program and accept any job the government judges to be suitable if the participant is deemed able to work. Those who don’t participate would face increasingly punitive measures as drastic as having their welfare cheques cut in half. While the bill supposedly aims to “break the cycle of poverty,” if passed, it would further disadvantage those it claims to be helping. Failing to address the causes of poverty, this bill proposes to do exactly what a welfare program shouldn’t: exacerbate the cycle of poverty by punishing welfare recipients instead of supporting them.

The program requires participants to “accept any offer of suitable employment,” and those enrolled for at least one year would receive up to $250 per month additional to the basic welfare sum of $616. However, new welfare applicants who do not participate could lose up to half their benefit. “Suitable employment” could be defined at the discretion of a government agent who would oversee the participant’s job search and trainings. There is nothing in the bill that limits the distance a person would have to travel to their job; a participant could then be forced to take a job that would require long commutes or even moving. The vague language of the bill thus gives individual

government employees the discretion to compel participants to take jobs that could negatively impact, for example, their families or their mental or physical health.

Minister of Labour Sam Hamad’s framing of welfare as an “act of generosity” from Quebec taxpayers, and his call for coercive measures to push welfare recipients to “make an effort” in return, perpetuates the harmful idea that welfare recipients are lazy. In fact, the focus on incentivization is misguided: those who can find suitable employment generally seek to do so without prompting.

Hamad himself has even said that other incentive programs haven’t worked. This program would then merely penalize those who aren’t able to find employment that they themselves deem suitable. As such, the fictional necessity of incentivization only serves to justify harmful austerity measures that disproportionately affect those already in precarious situations.

Instead of alleviating poverty, Bill 70 would push people who don’t comply to its regulations deeper into poverty. It would only worsen the effects of this government’s ongoing austerity measures that have resulted in cuts to social programs and jobs, in turn causing many people to be unemployed or require benefits in the first place. Welfare is a basic and necessary social service, and the lives of welfare recipients should not be toyed with in pursuit of a misguided agenda. ­—The McGill Daily editorial board

3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-26 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6790 fax 514.398.8318 advertising & general manager Boris Shedov sales representative Letty Matteo ad layout & design Geneviève Robert

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dps board of directors Zapaer Alip, Niyousha Bastani, Joseph Boju, Hannah Besseau, Deeva Bowry, Julia Denis, Ralph Haddad, Igor Sadikov, Alice Shen, Tamim Sujat, Dana Wray All contents © 2016 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

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