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Volume 97, Issue 42

March 17, 2008

THE

McGill

DAILY Choosing life since 1911

News

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

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Turner wins presidency by 15 per cent Students vote overwhelmingly to support Daily Publications Society SHANNON KIELY The McGill Daily

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urrent SSMU VP Internal Kay Turner won the Students’ Society presidency by a decisive margin Friday night, beating opponent RJ Kelford by 15 per cent.

After sending current President Jake Iztkowitz to get her a Moosehead, Turner expressed her satisfaction with the election results.

“I won the race by a solid margin. Everyone I wanted to win won.

We are a solid team of experienced people who have the students at heart,” Turner said.

Kelford, the current A rts Undergraduate Society President, said he wasn’t convinced that the dismantling of his web site – notanotherstudentpolitician. com – was the decisive element in his defeat. Earlier this week, Elections McGill Chief Returning Officer Corey Shefman forced Kelford to take it down because its value pushed Kelford’s campaign spending over the mandated $150 budget.

Kelford said he doubted his web site could have secured him the approximately 450 votes necessary to close the gap between him and Turner.

“I’m sure it had an impact, but not 450 votes worth of an impact,” he said.

In referendum question results, the Daily Publications Society (DPS) – which publishes The McGill Daily and Le Délit – secured a strong win, with 80.9 per cent of voters choosing to continue financially supporting the newspapers.

The McGill administration forced the DPS to go to referendum for the first time in its history this year. Last year, CKUT-Radio and the Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) were also forced to hold referendum votes to affirm student support.

DPS Board of Directors member Jeremy Delman said he hoped the support for The Daily’s existence evidenced in Friday’s results would convince the administration that a follow-up referendum in five years’ time is unnecessary.

“Hopefully we can go [to the administration] and say: ‘Over 80 per cent of students support us.

Why would you force us to put money, time, and energy into running a Yes campaign every five years?” he said.

In the race for SSMU VP Internal – the most contested position – Julia Webster beat out José Diaz, Kevin Chambers, and Brad Milech.

Webster said she hoped to incorporate Diaz’s ideas for more inclusive social events into her plans for next year’s Frosh, as well as strengthening the sensitivity training Frosh leaders receive through the FirstYear Office.

“The part of José’s platform I really like is about diversifying events,” Webster said.

For VP Clubs & Services, Samantha Cook’s experience at Queer McGill won over Johnson Fung’s vision to revamp SSMU’s web capacities.

“I think my experience helped, and the fact that I’m interested in important issues like opt-outs and the McGill name,” Cook said, adding that she would be interested in working with Fung in the future.

“I know our web site sucks,” she said.

Devin Alfaro beat out longtime student politician Trevor Hannah for the VP External Affairs position.

Alfaro has promised to continue fighting for lower tuition fees, while

Nadja Popovich / The McGill Daily

Kay Turner gets ready to jump after learning that she beat RJ Kelford by 856 votes.

Hannah had argued for a focus on financial aid.

“At this point SSMU is really isolated, and the first step we need to take is to build good working relationships with others student organisations to fight for accessible education,” Alfaro said, adding, “I think it’s a really good team next year and I’m really excited.”

Peter Newhook was acclaimed VP Finance & Operations, while Nadya Wilkinson was acclaimed VP University Affairs.

Wilkinson echoed Alfaro’s excitement for next year’s exec.

“I feel like this exec has a huge advantage over last year’s – we’re going into the year already getting along, which is amazing,” she said after the newly-elected execs went out for dinner together.

The other two major referendum questions – on autonomous online opt-outs and support for student

clubs – also passed with clear support. Trevor Chow-Fraser, Yes committee member for the autonomous online opt-out question, said that autonomous student groups with opt-outs hoped to use the vote to convince the administration to continue negotiating.

“We hope the admin will respect the referendum results, and come back to us with solid, good faith proposals,” Chow-Fraser said.

The crowd of undergraduates strongly applauded Shefman at Gert’s Friday afternoon when he announced that 30.9 per cent of students voted in the SSMU elections this year, nearly matching last year’s record-breaking voter turnout.

– with files from Max Halparin To see further coverage of election night and interviews with the candidates, see TVMcGill.com

2008 election results Voter turnout: 5,729 votes, or 30.9 per cent of undergrads.

SSMU SSMU President Kay Turner 54.5 per cent RJ Kelford 39.5 per cent VP External Defin Alfaro Trevor Hanna

50.9 per cent 39.1 per cent

VP Clubs & Services Samantha Cook 51.4 per cent Johnson Fung 39.3 per cent VP Internal Julia Webster José Diaz Kevin Chambers cent Brad Milech

34.5 per cent 28.9 per cent 13.3 per 13.1 per cent

VP University Affairs Nadya Wilkinson Acclaimed

Acclaimed VP Finance & Operations may resign ERIN HALE The McGill Daily

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eter Newhook, the newly acclaimed SSMU VP Finance & Operations, is considering resigning before his term even begins, and some on SSMU Council are expecting to start the process for appointing a new VP as early as this Thursday’s Council meeting.

Newhook, a newcomer to SSMU politics, said his decision is personal.

Rumours about Newhook’s resignation have been circulating around SSMU and the Management Faculty for at least a week and a half.

The weekend before candidates began campaigning, Newhook told The Daily that he had changed his mind and was no longer running for the position. However, Newhook

participated in the SSMU executive debates two days later and denied ever dropping out.

Although no public announcement has been made, Elections McGill Chief Returning Officer Corey Shefman said several students have contacted him about filling the potential vacancy.

Newhook said that he has tried to keep the situation quiet, fearing the rumours might tarnish his reputation should he decide to stay at SSMU. “I don’t want it to be perceived the wrong way.... I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot before it’s started,” Newhook said, shortly after the election results were announced Friday.

What would happen if Newhook no longer wants the job is unclear.

According to SSMU by-laws, a candidate may only withdraw before vot-

ing has commenced, and is officially elected the business day after the election – today.

And while the Constitution states SSMU Council shall elect a replacement from within Council upon the resignation of a VP, since SSMU executives only assume office on June 1, Newhook may not be able to “resign” until he actually holds office, as there seems to be no provision for it. Other seemingly missing provisions include whether there would be a by-election, an appointment, or another procedure if a VP resigns after being elected but before assuming office.

This brings intense pressure on Council, some of whose members were told of the possible resignation and the importance of keeping it under wraps.

Yahel Carmon, SSMU Speaker and close friend of Newhook’s, is a likely nominee should Newhook drop out, according to a councillor who spoke on condition of anonymity. Carmon, who worked on Newhook’s campaign, admitted that he had been interested in running for VP Finance & Operations, but ultimately chose not to for family reasons.

Carmon, who presides over Council and only holds his appointed office until May 31 – before the new Executive takes office – was shocked about his association with the controversy when approached

by The Daily.

“I felt confidence Peter was a competent candidate. If I’d had doubts, I would’ve run,” Carmon said.

– with files from Jennifer Markowitz and Nicholas Smith

VP Finance & Operations Peter Newhook Acclaimed

Referendum Questions Daily Publications Society Yes 80.9 per cent No 17.0 per cent Online Opt-Outs Yes 65.6 per cent No 27.5 per cent Clubs & Services Yes 81.3 per cent No 11.5 per cent CRO to CEO Name Change Yes 72.2 per cent No 16.4 per cent Nomination of Auditors Yes 68.8 per cent No 14.9 per cent

News

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

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Lack of sex education takes its toll in Quebec SHANNON KIELY The McGill Daily

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ince the Quebec government’s 2005 cancellation of formal sexual education in the province’s high schools, the subject has all but disappeared.

When it implemented the reform, the province encouraged teachers to integrate sex education into core subjects rather than address it separately. But more than two years later, the government has yet to evaluate the success of the change. Without statistics, it is difficult to determine what, if any, sex education high school students receive.

Jerome Ramcharitar, a student at Montreal’s Westmount High School, said that since the reforms were implemented, his teachers have never addressed sex.

“I had [sex ed] in grade seven and eight, but then I didn’t have it at all,” Ramcharitar said.

The government education reforms privilege core subjects, like language, math, and history, at the expense of those considered peripheral, like sex ed, which fall under the Personal and Social Development (FPS) subjects.

Stéphanie Tremblay, the communications officer for the Quebec Ministry of Education, explained that before the reforms, FPS classes had allocated only five hours annually for sex ed. She was confident that schools could maintain this level of sexual education if teachers integrated sexual discussions into their lesson plans.

“All notions relating to the biology of sex, the reproductive system, pregnancy, contraception, and [Sexually Transmitted Infections] are covered in the science and technology classes.

The notions are looked at, but not in a class dedicated specifically to sex,” Tremblay said.

Quebec is now the only province in Canada that does not mandate sexual education.

Uninformed and unhappy The reforms have left some unsatisfied. Mary Sanner, a mother with

children in NDG’s Loyola High School, said the current system neglects sexual education, depriving children about issues like HIV and AIDS. “You will not convince me that cutting funding and ad hoc conversation about sex is going to do any educating,” Sanner said.

While Tremblay asserted that the reforms were not introduced to save money or in response to budgetary constraints, since 2005 schools have received virtually no financial resources for sexual education.

Upon learning that a teenaged girl in her neighbourhood had been diagnosed with AIDS, Sanner tried to bring an alternative informational source to students. She suggested that Dr. Sharon Walmey, a pre-eminent HIV/AIDS specialist who offered to visit Loyola High School free of charge, talk to the student body about sexually transmitted diseases.

“The message is not getting through, and I think it’s due to a total lack of education about safe sex,” Sanner said, explaining that sex education could diminish the prevalence of AIDS among young adults.

Sanner brought the offer to the Loyola parents’ committee’s attention in 2005, but it rejected her proposal, deeming it inappropriate.

Let’s talk about sex, baby With more control over their finances than public schools, private schools can afford to be flexible in their approach to sex ed.

Villa Maria, a private Montreal Anglophone Catholic high school for girls, kept its sex educator Desire Brenner on staff despite the reform guidelines.

Brenner wondered how teachers without training in sex ed would negotiate the challenging situations that often arise during frank discussions about sex. With a BA in Sexuality from Concordia and 22 years of experience, Brenner felt her background helps her stay composed when confronted with shocking questions from students. “[Teachers] say, ‘I’m not qualified and I’m not comfortable.’ They haven’t

Courtesy of Head and Hands

A volunteer for Head and Hands teaches students sex education, filling in for insufficient school curriculum. been informed yet – when you give someone a book to read, that doesn’t mean they’ll know about it and feel comfortable,” Brenner said.

Christina Foisy, an employee at NDG community centre Head and Hands, worried that teachers without formal training in sex ed would pass on out-of-date knowledge to students.

“Some teachers still think that oral sex there is not risky, they don’t know what a dental dam is, or are not transsensitive. As time goes on we need to educate the educators,” she said.

A helping hand Foisy and Head and Hands launched a program called the Sense Project to provide supplementary education to students following the educational-reform implementation.

Foisy, who coordinates and acts as a funds researcher for the Sense Project, explained that many teachers are uncomfortable with sex ed material and do not prioritize it over

other subjects in their classes.

“Teachers say, ‘How is this relevant to my learning objectives?’ There are no concrete learning objectives associated with sexual health,” Foisy said.

Serving six Montreal schools, the Sense Project offers non-judgmental, harm-reductive, and holistic workshops on sexuality led by young adult volunteers.

According to Foisy, the Sense Project often has difficulty scheduling workshops because teachers resist compromising their lesson plans.

“Before, with FPS, that class in itself had a built-in section for sex-education, and there were no scheduling issues.

[Now] there is no time so we need to make time; an hour in History or an hour in English. It’s interesting how much of a challenge that is. Teachers get upset,” Foisy said.

In tandem with the workshops, the Sense Project recruits and trains students as peer educators. In a 30-hour training session, Head and Hands teaches volunteers about confidenti-

ality, referrals, trans issues, and gender identity. The peer educators then produce projects, like a radio show or poster campaign, to enrich sexual education at their school.

Since the government cutbacks, much sexual education actually happens outside of the classroom in conversations between teens, Foisy said, making peer educators a valuable resource to the Sense Project.

“Peer education is free and it’s sustainable,” she said. “We try to tap into school culture. School yards and cafeteria spaces are part of the school and they can be educational.”

Remembering his experiences with sex ed in his early years of high school, Ramcharitar suspected students would feel uncomfortable talking about sex with teachers they see every day.

“You already know your teachers, and don’t want to ask something personal... People from outside are better because you’re not affiliated with them from before and there are no pretenses.”

Adoption may do more harm than good: speaker SARA CONSTANTINEAU The McGill Daily

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ctivist and mother Jessica DelBalzo believes adoption is motivated by greed and must be prevented at all costs, because it destroys families and harms the children it is supposed to protect.

Speaking Monday at McGill as part of Human Rights Awareness Month, DelBalzo said separating children from the only people they’ve known is psychologically damaging. After adoption they will experience attachment disorders, identity conflicts, distrust of authority, and feelings of abandonment.

“Adopted people are overrepresented in psychological treatment facilities…in juvenile courts, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres,” she said. “Being adopted and taken away from one’s family puts children at an unnecessary risk of future problems.”

DelBalzo started researching adoption in high school and came to the opinion that its negative effects were too strong to be ignored. Ten years ago she founded the group Adoption: Legalized Lies, to help young parents keep their children and educate people about the anti-adoption viewpoint.

According to DelBalzo, people are manipulated by the government and the media to believe adoption is a beneficial system because it gen-

erates profit. She said large adoption agencies can make upwards of $10-million a year, so helping children is not their first priority.

“When big agencies are cutting these [profits], there’s really no incentive to keep families with their children,” she said.

Adoption agencies often claim that the choice to put a newborn up for adoption is made by expectant parents, but DeBalzo argued that the agencies force parents to give them up by misleading and pressuring them.

“I’ve yet to see a mother who has chosen to give up her child,” she said.

“I’ve met a lot who’ve felt…they really had no choice and they surrendered.”

One misleading tactic is the prom-

ise of an open adoption, where parents are supposedly allowed to remain in their child’s life while he or she is raised by someone else. DelBalzo said these promises are rarely kept.

“The majority of open adoptions do end up closed by the adopters,” she said. “Open adoption is not generally enforced by law.”

She argued that adoption is almost never necessary, because no child is truly unwanted. The biological bond established in pregnancy often overcomes an expectant mother’s initial desire to give up her baby.

“Most people who don’t want to have children do have an abortion,” she said. “[A mother] might start out thinking that [she doesn’t] want

a baby, but by the time the baby is born, that usually changes.”

If the biological parents are absolutely unable to care for their child, DelBalzo suggested “guardianship” as a last-resort alternative to adoption. Guardianship is a permanent arrangement gives more rights to the biological parents and does not create a false parent-child relationship.

“With adoption these people are legally bound to feeling as though their adopters are [their] parents and that’s where a lot of the identity conflicts come from,” she said. “Not having this pretense that they are born to their new caregivers is going to make a difference in how they feel accepted and respected.”

News

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

SSMU mandate to defend student parents remains on backburner TOM CULLEN The McGill Daily

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espite a strong mandate for action at the fall General Assembly, the issues facing student parents remain on the backburner of political discourse at McGill.

Last fall, undergraduates voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion calling on SSMU to lobby the National Assembly for a special academic status for student parents, which would allow student parents to take fewer classes without losing full-time student classification, go on paid parental leave, and obtain priority access to daycare.

The GA motion was drafted in response to the difficulties of balancing the time demands of being a parent and a McGill student.

“Sudden changes in exam and class scheduling can wreak havoc for student-parents,” said Elizabeth Punnet, a Master’s student at McGill with a three-year-old daughter.

Elena Lonero, a mother and graduate student in Nursing, emphasized that the McGill Administration’s

apparent indifference to the needs of student parents is a major barrier to involvement in campus life. “[Raising a child is a] full-time job on its own,” Lonero said, adding that the competitive attitude at McGill can make parents feel unwelcome.

Agathe Streiff, Director of the McGill Student Parents’ Network (MSPN) – which organizes services for parents such as volunteer babysitting and Saturday get-togethers for children – echoed Punnet and Lonero’s concerns.

“Their study time is really difficult to manage with a family life at the same time,” Streiff said of student parents.

Punnet thought that some of these time stresses would be reduced if parents could alleviate their course load without losing full time status.

“The MSPN has been a godsend,” Punnet said, but added that more needs to be done to facilitate student parents’ participation in campus life.

Despite being intimately connected to large numbers of McGill’s student-parent community, the MSPN was unaware of the student-parent GA motion.

Max Silverman, SSMU VP External Affairs, said that SSMU has take

many steps to address student-parents’ concerns.

“In all of our mobilizations that we do, we’ve started making the student parents demands one of our central demands,” he said.

According to Silverman, this includes pushing for flexible daycare and accessibility for student parents in the literature for events like the Day of Action in Quebec City on February 21.

In addition, SSMU executives included a statement of support for flexible daycare in their January meeting with the Minister for Education – but Silverman admitted this produced “no real concrete response” from the Minister.

None of the measures he cited addressed setting up a special status for student parents.

However, Silverman pointed out that the SSMU Daycare is the only daycare on campus that primarily caters to student parents, and that SSMU accommodates all undergraduates who seek daycare services.

“There are no undergraduates on the waiting list [for SSMU Daycare],” he said.

But Streiff’s perception of the SSMU Daycare differed strongly from Silverman’s. She explained that some student parents explored using SSMU’s daycare service, but balked at the waiting times – which she said could total up to three years.

“There’s definitely a need for the current daycare to be expanded,” Streiff said. “There is a significant population of undergrads who join the MSPN because there’s no room [in SSMU’s daycare].”

The McGill Daily

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dministrators, student union representatives, facilities managers, and government officials will gather for the first-ever Student Parent Forum this May, to finally address the needs of student parents at McGill.

The McGill Student Parents’ Network (MSPN), a small support group run out of McGill Chaplaincy, is planning the forum with backing from the Senate Subcommittee on Women. It aims to accomodate the personal and institutional needs of student parents at McGill and in Quebec – the primary concerns of which are access to daycare services, problems with flexibility, and isolation of student and staff parents.

Rosemary Thomas, an international Social Work student with three children, said that student parents often faced psychological isolation in an academic environment.

“Once you get into a safe space, you begin to talk about it – the self esteem, the guilt, the high pressures at school,” Thomas said. “You cry at night and pull down the shutters and then you have to go to school and try to smile.”

Pamela Lilrio, a PhD student in Organizational Behaviour and a single parent, said that the University must do more to provide support structures for students taking classes at McGill.

“Sometimes it feels like you’re trying to do schoolwork with one hand tied behind your back,” Lirio

said. “If the administration and faculty knew that, you’d have more professors that understand their needs.

It’s about starting that awareness.”

Gwenda Wells, Ecumenical Reverend and former director of McGill Chaplaincy Service, has worked with the MSPN since its inception in 2001.

Wells said there was a need for more structured support for student parents at McGill, pointing to issues like access to daycare, a need for more structured flexibility for student parents, guidance for international students with children, access to baby-changing stations and lactation sites, and addressing problems of isolation of student parents.

“We’ve really been penalizing people who want to make the best choices as parents,” Wells said. She called for McGill to integrate its childcare services with research on child development to create a more holistic student parent centre, complete with a full-time staff.

“There’s so much more we could be doing to be a leader on family services and research,” Wells said, adding that the student parent organization at McGill is where disability issues were at 20 years ago.

Abby Lippman, Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Women, said that McGill needs to take a more proactive stance to providing structural support for women and parents who want to enter the workforce with children.

“We need a society that allows women and parents to continue their work and studies, and are not jeopar-

dized because there are not enough daycares,” she said.

“Is the University really prepared to have parents in its student body and its work staff?”

Lippman questioned.

The McGill Daycare Centre has 106 spots, and prioritizes staff children. The SSMU Daycare gives priority to undergraduate students, but can accommodate fewer than three dozen children.

At other schools, such as the University of Alberta and the University of Victoria, there are many more childcare service options for students. The University of Alberta has five daycares, and the University of Victoria provides services for children up to 12.

At McGill, students have found that daycare and support networks – provided for those four months to four years old – are almost nonexistent.

Jay Ploss, a Master’s student in herpetology and Daily contributor, couldn’t bring his child to the McGill daycare because the waiting list is three years, and takes priority for McGill staff over its students.

“At McGill, daycare is almost irrelevant,” Ploss said. “Right now you have to sign up almost before your child is even born.”

Other services required by student parents include diaper changing stations and lactation areas, as well scheduling flexibility for student parents – including a special “student parent” designation, so student parents can have first choice for

Photos and panel Monday, March 17 Photos at 12 p.m., panel at 4 p.m.

Lev Bukhman Room, Shatner Building, 3480 McTavish McGill’s Journalists for Human Rights hosts a photo journalism and panel discussion on media, development, and human rights.

Talk up the environment Monday, March 17 6 p.m.

Thomson House Restaurant, 3650 McTavish PGSS is hosting two enviro-related talks: “The West Nile Virus in Quebec: What You Need to Know” and “Green Lessons from Ghana.”

Fokus Film Festival Wednesday, March 19, 6 p.m.

Cinema du Parc, 3575 Parc Hit up McGill’s second annual student film festival.

Categories include: fiction, non-fiction, short/experimental, animation, and a 72-hour filmmaking competition.

Tickets are $5.

Resolution, but no violence Wednesday, March 19, 4:30 p.m.

Newman Center, 3484 Peel St. A coordinator for Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service will host the workshop, which introduces participants to the principles of nonviolent intervention and demonstrate how nonviolence is a viable alternative to the predicament of violence.

McGill to host forum on student parents in May KELLY EBBELS

WHAT’S THE HAPS

Student parents struggle to balance school, kids

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Grannies and fannies Thursday, March 20, 2:30 p.m.

Lev Bukhman Room Enjoy the Raging Grannies, a group devoted to activism through song, as they groove about peace, justice, and environmental issues.

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

labs or tutorials. But above all, Wells called for a broader recognition of the needs of student parents at McGill.

Student parents also expressed a need for greater flexibility for parents at McGill. Wells said that a more formal structure – such as a downloadable form, similar to one for religious observances or disability leaves – should be available for student parents who must postpone handing in a paper due to parental obligations.

“It would be brilliant, if we had a form that was consistent, where there are no questions asked,” Wells said. “I would hope that we can get enough of a profile, so that caring staff will interpret this into thinking about best practices in their area of the University.”

Lirio echoed this need.

“I’m doing as much as I can as fast as I can.... If they had some understanding of how the studentparent track might differ, that would be helpful to me,” Lirio said.

“I think it behooves McGill to have me graduate.”

The Student Parent Forum will run in early May, with the date to be determined.

Accommodate This!

Thursday, March 20, 6 p.m.

L’Alize, 900 Ontario E The Accommodate This!

Report is a collection of testimonies, articles, analysis, letters, discussions, narratives recording the voices of migrant and racialized communities speaking out against marginalization.

Come for dinner, presentations, and live performances.

Pay what you can.

‘80s Homo Hop Thursday, March 20, 11 p.m.

Redpath Hall, 861 Sherbrooke O. Queer McGill presents a dance to conclude this year’s Pride Week. Money raised will go to the Montreal Youth Coalition Against Homophobia’s Secure Space for Youth Project.

Do you have a not-forprofit event that you want to advertise? Send an email to news@mcgilldaily.com with “haps” in the subject line with the five w’s, and it may appear here next week.

News

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

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Daycare collective provides radical child care Volunteers argue free collective childcare is a method of political organizing rather than a charity KELLY EBBELS The McGill Daily

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taying active in community organizing as a parent is hard, but the Montreal Childcare Collective (MCC) is making life a little easier for the city’s politicallyminded moms and dads.

Formed in 2004, the collective consists of volunteers that provide free childcare for community groups during meetings and demonstrations, explained Leslie Bagg, a former McGill student and volunteer with the MCC. “We provide help for groups that don’t have a huge budget for childcare, but who want to make their organization more accessible for parents,” Bagg said.

The collective works closely with groups working in the social justice field in Montreal that often need childcare – such as the Filipino Women’s Centre, the Immigrant Workers’ Centre, and Solidarity Across Borders.

MCC also runs workshops for groups that want to begin doing their own, autonomous, nonauthoritarian childcare – such as the Montreal Urban Community Sustainment Project’s Free School in NDG, where they held a workshop last Sunday.

The collective functions out of the Concordia chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) as a working group, funded in part by Concordia students. In the past it has also functioned through QPIRG-McGill.

While volunteers acknowledge that their contribution is in part a charitable gesture, they stressed that the childcare network is first

and foremost a form of political action, aimed at allowing more families to get involved in community organizing. It also provides a non-authoritarian approach to childcare.

“It’s kind of a statement, that kids don’t just exist in their houses and in their own families. They exist in the world,” said Selena Roy, a former McGill student and organizer with the MCC. “It’s a more communal approach to child-raising, where the community can get to know the kids.”

Both Bagg and Roy stressed that the very existence of the group allowed activism to become more open to families and women.

“Part of the goal is to get more families involved, and to make meetings more family-friendly,” Bagg said.

“It’s also about making community organizing more accessible to women, especially single moms,” Roy added, saying there is huge demand for the MCC’s services among new immigrants.

“It’s a class struggle. So many people can’t afford babysitters,” Roy said.

Roy explained that a major influence on non-authoritarian childcare was the work of Haim Gibott, whose techniques for conversing with children have been taught for decades. Gibott stressed strong interpersonal skills, an emphasis on communication, isolating problems rather than people, and the importance of play.

But the collective is not all carefree fun and games. The organization faces major ongoing difficulties and questions, many of them ethical ones.

One is a question of money – by

Guy Lifshitz for The McGill Daily

MCC organizer Selena Roy plays with Fiona Hanley, whose mother, Jill, is a McGill professor. offering free childcare, some have questioned whether it lowers the value of childcare as a whole and suggests that childcare is something which should not be paid for. As well, volunteers are often offered money for their services – but the offerings are so random that it is hard to decide on a fair and equitable way of distributing the extra funds.

Another, more pressing issue is whether the volunteers should make themselves available for pri-

vate, free childcare. Roy stressed that she has often personally offered free childcare for recent immigrants, for whom Quebec subsidized daycare may be impossible.

But on the whole, while the volunteers realize that childcare is inaccessible for many, a free, volunteerrun childcare system is at present unsustainable.

“We can’t open ourselves up – there’s just so much need,” Bagg said.

Still, the volunteers stressed that collective childcare serves as a crucial political tool in making organizing more accessible, and making political work a community affair.

“It’s nice to know how many of them can make it, and stay involved – moms, dads, and kids,” Bagg said.

Groups wishing to get organized with the MCC should contact them at childcarecollective@riseup.net.

McGill weighs options for safer bike parking McGill Planning Office asks student cyclists whether they want bike lockers OLGA REDKO The McGill Daily

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he McGill Office of Planning & Institutional Analysis is considering the installation of bike lockers and higher security bike parking across the downtown campus next fall, depending on response from student cyclists.

According to U3 Geography student and Planning Office employee Asa Bergman, McGill plans to study what bicycle security measures other universities

have implemented, as well as conduct a survey to learn whether students would be interested in a more secure form of bike parking on campus.

“The goal of this is to present a few alternatives to the Planning Office and then they can decide what to implement,” Bergman said.

She explained that, according to some early feedback from students and some statistics, bicycle theft remains a problem on campus. Although it is hard to determine exactly how widespread theft is, Bergman said that security concerns were definitely one of the biggest deterrents to student cycling.

Radu Juster of the Office of Planning & Institutional Analysis explained that this project is part of McGill’s agreement with the City of Montreal to pursue sustainable development.

McGill’s commitments includ- edged that security is indeed a ed installing additional bike huge concern for student cyclists. racks through the end of 2009 However, she said that a fee on and improving infrastructure to lockers would not make better encourage the use of bicycles by storage facilities accessible to all students, as well as the introduc- students.

“Personally, I bike to school tion of secure bike lockers and every single day of the year, but I bike shelters.

“We want to be able to accommodate the majority This would be to show that of bikers,” Juster said.

He added that there McGill is encouraging biking by would be some costs providing alternatives.. involved with using a higher security bicycle – Asa Bergman parking facility, whether U3 Geography on a monthly or on a semester basis. Renting a bike don’t have the cash [for a locker],” locker or part of an indoor enclo- Lamb said. “I’d much rather put sure would be similar to buying that money towards a high-secua parking permit, and the McGill rity lock.”

Lamb maintained that bike Parking Office would likely manlockers were not necessarily the age the operation.

The SSMU Bike Collective most practical option in terms of mechanic, Erica Lamb, acknowl- better security since there isn’t

“

enough space on campus to house them.

“I think that adequate bike parking is a bigger issue than security,” she added.

According to Bergman, however, McGill has acknowledged that there is not enough space to install a great number of highsecurity spots, so any lockers would merely be an addition for students interested in more secure bike parking.

The number of lockers installed would reflect student demand, as reflected in the survey Bergman plans to release this week through various student association listservs.

“This would be to show that McGill is encouraging biking by providing alternatives,” Bergman said. “Hopefully we’d be able to expand that program if it’s successful.”

Science+Technology

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

10

Book of life opens PATRICK JANUKAVICIUS Sci+Tech writer

O

n February 26 the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) went online. It was an overwhelming first day, with 18.5 million hits, 13.3 million page views and 940 GB of data transferred. In fact, the web site was so overwhelmed by the visits that it had to shut down for almost four hours. Why the interest? The EOL is a Wikipedia-style web site for species, and will one day have a page for every life form known to science.

Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson is the mastermind behind the project. Shortly after he announced his dream of an encyclopedia of life in 2007, five science foundations donated $50-million to initiate the project. Dr. Wilson anticipates that the encyclopedia will have a catalytic effect on the life sciences.

“The launch of the Encyclopedia of Life will have a profound and creative effect on science,” Dr. Wilson said at a press conference. “It aims not only to summarize all that we know of Earth’s life forms, but also to accelerate the discovery of the vast array that remain unknown.

This great effort promises to lay out new directions for research in every branch of biology.”

The 1.8 million known species

on earth present a cataloguing challenge too great for one person to complete alone. The 30,000 pages on the site today – a fraction of the goal – took scientists many months to compile, even with the aid of programs that assembled content on their own. The site is expected to take off later in the year when it is opened up to contributions from anyone. Users will be able to create a page, add information about a species’ ecology, evolution, and cultural relevance, or upload drawings, photos, movies, and even genomes. To manage this information, each page will have a curator that will maintain professional standards of accuracy and clarity. Anyone will be able to apply to become the curator of a page, although expertise will be an advantage.

Jim Edwards, Executive Director of the EOL, sees the Encyclopedia as not only a scientific resource, but an artistic, educational, and cultural one as well. “It is exciting to anticipate the scientific chords we might hear once 1.8 million notes are brought together through this instrument,” he said in a press release. “Potential EOL users are professional and citizen scientists, teachers, students, media, environmental managers, families and artists. The site will link the public and scientific community in a collaborative way that’s without

David Pullmer / The McGill Daily

Every known species on earth will be a mouse click away, and the life sciences will undergo a revolution.

precedent in scale.”

But people who want every known species at their fingertips will have to wait until 2017. Why such a long time? As of today, knowledge about species is scattered across innumerable books, databases and journals. Tracking those species down will be one of the EOL’s biggest challenges. But it will also be one of its biggest contributions. Dr. Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, said in a

press release that when the species are properly catalogued, scientists will be able to sift through them to find new patterns and meaning.

“Just as a microscope reveals and helps us better understand the small and particular, the EOL will allow us to discern patterns previously unseen, illuminating relationships, identifying gaps in our knowledge, and suggesting opportunities for new avenues of inquiry.”

Students may wonder whether

they will be able to use the site as a valid reference for papers. The EOL will be more reliable than Wikipedia, in part because the curators will usually amend incorrect edits. But there may be the odd attempt to give the unicorn or jackalope its own page, and whether the EOL becomes a quotable resource remains to be seen.

The Encyclopedia of Life can be found online at eol.org

Pedal to the metal for human evolution Mass migrations, the population explosion, and city living fuel rapid rate of genetic change LINDSAY WATERMAN The McGill Daily

W

e can’t see it in our short lifetimes, but human evolution is going faster than ever before. Today, the rate of our evolution is over 100 times faster than it was in the depths of time, according to a paper published in PNAS called “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.”

Dr. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and co-author of the paper, says that the findings have come as a jolt to the scientific community.

“Everyone has been so surprised that no one has broken down the implications yet,” he said.

Our accelerated evolution is powered in part by population. Over the past 80 millennia, human popula-

tion has increased steadily, and with it the pool of mutated genes we carry. Most mutations are not beneficial, leading to weaker or less “fit” individuals who don’t have as many offspring. But when a mutation is helpful, it gets passed on to the next generation, mixed into the greater population, and can become common. The more people, the more helpful mutations appear, and evolution moves faster – from a crawl to a creep.

Aside from population, our environment has caused accelerated evolution as well. When human beings first expanded out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, they were faced with new environments and new challenges. Habitats like tundra or mountainous regions changed the terms of human life, and therefore impacted the content of human DNA. For instance, whereas in Africa

people who could brave the noonday sun survived, in Siberia, survival depended on weathering the cold.

Such differences caused different mutations to be favoured, and different traits to evolve.

Yet perhaps the most radical new environment was the city, made possible by agriculture. With cities came high population densities, and with high densities came deadly epidemics. In turn, those who survived the epidemics became resistant to the disease, and this was sometimes conferred by new mutations. The paper in PNAS found that, of the 1,800 genes changed during the last 80,000 years, many were related to fighting off illness.

Dr. Bisson, Department Chair of Anthropology at McGill, says that while it’s true that there have been huge changes in where and how humans live, some might still debate

whether the evolutionary acceleration is as recent as the paper suggests.

“Humans as biological entities have responded through evolution to particular ecological circumstances, which have indeed changed in the past 80,000 years…but some paleontologists might disagree and argue for a longer time span,” he said.

The paper’s results were obtained by a simple method called linkage disequilibrium. Human DNA doesn’t occur as a single long strand, but a set of shorter strands called chromosomes. Everybody has two sets of chromosomes: one from the father’s side and one from the mother’s side.

When a sperm or egg is generated, chromosomes from both parents line up and swap small chunks of DNA. The swapped chunks may contain identical genes, or different ver-

sions of the same genes.

A new version of a gene created by a mutation has specific neighbouring genes. When it’s swapped, it gets new neighbours on the new chromosome. If the mutation is old, then enough swapping will have happened that the gene appears with all sorts of neighbours. If the mutation is new, then the gene will always be found with the same neighbors, because not much swapping has happened. By this method, young genes can be tracked down.

The investigators found far more young genes than they had expected to find, and concluded that the rate of human evolution is accelerating.

Compared to our near evolutionary cousins, such as chimpanzees, we are evolving very rapidly. Where our fast evolution will take us is something that remains to be seen – in a hundred thousand years or so.

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14

Features

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

15

“

Hormonal birth control is no longer an option, and never will be again in my life.

– Laura McMahon, U3 Philosophy and English

Ming Lin / The McGill Daily

The new

pill politics “A

lesse made me stop wanting sex.”

This is scrawled in black Sharpie on an advertisement for the popular brand of birth control, in a stall of a women’s washroom in Redpath Library. Simple and shocking, it hints at the contradictions that surround women’s attempts to control their fertility. Why does a drug that allows women to have sex without fear of pregnancy also potentially inhibit their desire to do so?

Laura McMahon, a U3 Philosophy and English major, has a horror story about Alesse.

She credits this pill with what she calls a “completely, all-consuming bout of depression” which lasted for an entire year of high school.

“It never occurred to anyone – not my mom, my boyfriend, my friends, or even my therapist – that there was a link between my taking the Pill and my depression,” she says.

The malaise temporarily ended McMahon’s

relationship, caused problems with her friends, and left her feeling somehow inadequate.

Only through a combination of travel, new circumstances, and, most significantly, using a different form of contraception, did McMahon manage to fight the depression and get back on her feet.

Today, McMahon resolutely says that “[hormonal] birth control is no longer an option, and never will be again in my life.”

Yet McMahon’s story, as well as that of the anonymous bathroom scribe, are just two among many. Birth control is intrinsically linked with the “free love” movement of the sixties, second-wave feminism, and women’s liberation. While some women rely on chemical or hormonal forms of birth control, such as the Pill or the patch, others rely primarily on barrier methods, namely condoms or diaphragms.

Naomi Lightman examines the troubling past and alarming side effects of the contraceptive that changed the world

Many women experience only positive benefits from hormonal forms of fertility control.

However, a growing minority of women and men are now emphasizing the need for more vigorous debate surrounding the Pill’s safety, distribution, and efficacy.

Underlying this is an understandable fear that criticism of the Pill necessarily labels one as anti-sex, anti-feminist, or paternalistic. But this concern only contributes to the lack of critical analysis and discussion. Birth control options must be located within their broader social and political context, where misogyny, heteronormism, and corporate interests often outweigh the needs of individual women.

A troubling genesis “The Pill has a really deplorable history in terms of eugenics,” says Jocelyn Porter,

who works as a Health Animator at Head and Hands, a not-for-profit organization in NDG that promotes the physical and mental wellbeing of youth.

Porter emphasizes that birth control has been tested primarily on marginalized populations, who had very little control over the process. Significantly, most trials for contraception drugs were done in poor, “underdeveloped” nations in the global South. The Pill, for example, was tested most extensively on thousands of poor women in Puerto Rico in 1956 before it was approved for use in the United States in 1960.

Norplant, a long-lasting birth control implant (which was discontinued in the U.S. and Canada in 2002) was tested on women in Chile in 1972. Depo-Provera, which uses trimonthly injections of progesterone, was tested for decades on Mexican and Thai women to

establish whether it was acceptable for use by North Americans. Native American women, especially those with mental disabilities, were also used as test subjects by Depo-Provera.

“Not only were impoverished women in developing nations used as guinea pigs, but if we look at where it’s been given out for free or for really cheap, it’s also tinged with racism,” says Porter, adding that sometimes injections of Norplant were tied to welfare benefits in poor, primarily black areas of the U.S. Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood), is often considered the original spokesperson for birth control. While Sanger’s goal of introducing a simple, widely accessible, and cost-effective pill form of birth control was admirable, she was also a eugenics proponent. This movement aimed to decrease the fertility rate among genetically “disadvantaged” populations.

“Birth control was marketed as a way of controlling the ‘population of the unfit,’ like poor ethnic populations,” Porter says.

Sanger fed off white, upper-middle class fears about a “race suicide” of the “fit,” and uncontrollable population growth of the “unfit.” Those who promoted the Pill and other hormonal methods of contraception used them to curtail specific populations.

Today, this history is not common knowledge. While it is unlikely to affect women’s present-day fertility choices, it is important to acknowledge the racist and classist origins of birth control drugs.

Where are the teachers?

Many women recall going to the doctor to discuss birth control for the first time, feeling rushed and uncomfortable, as if taking the Pill was really the only viable option.

“You go in there, you’re young, and you’re usually scared because something is wrong,” says Anna Feigenbaum, a McGill graduate student and an instructor in Communication Studies.

“They [doctors] think you’re stupid and incapable of using any form of birth control that is non-chemical, and you don’t think to question it unless you start feeling sick.”

Feigenbaum herself recalls lasting on the Pill for only six months until she became ill, and says that “the whole time I was on it I was a total nutcase.”

Optimally, women would learn in high school – in a relatively neutral, non-judgemental manner – about the array of birth control options and then make informed decisions for themselves. However, according to recent McGill Arts graduate Theresa Howard, sex education in North American schools often falls short.

Howard’s undergraduate thesis was entitled

“Learning About Birth Control: The Challenges and Opportunities.” In it, she interviewed 12 McGill students about how they had learned about birth control.

“A lot of women felt like their doctor and teachers didn’t have enough time, or weren’t willing to give them enough time, to sit down and really go through the different options,” Howard says. As a result, she found that women often value information from their peers over that of medical professionals or educators.

Formal sexual health education in Canadian schools began in the early 20th century due to anxieties about venereal disease. In the 1960s, curriculums adjusted to address the rising rates of unplanned pregnancies, while in the 1980s they began to concentrate on the growing AIDS crisis.

While many Canadian schools currently do offer comprehensive sexual health education, including instruction on different birth control methods, studies consistently report that these programs are deficient. One study discovered that only 15.5 per cent of Bachelor of Education programs at Canadian universities had mandatory sex-ed training, and 26.2 per cent had optional sex-ed courses.

Additionally, due to severe cuts to social programs and education budgets, the quality – as well as the very survival – of sexual health programs is threatened across Canada.

In Quebec, sex education was essentially cut from high schools in 2005. This came at a time when the rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were – and remain – alarmingly high among Canadian youth.

Overall, Feigenbaum says that, even among university-aged people, there is an information gap concerning non-hormonal birth control options. This is coupled with what she calls a “complaining discourse” surrounding condoms, forcing a heteronormative focus on penetrative sex.

“There are limited alternative information sources, particularly ones that have funding and infrastructure,” she laments. “It’s time to expand our definitions of sex.”

Medicalizing bodies Despite these misgivings, the Pill remains the most widely-used method of birth control for women under 30. Just the fact that we refer to this hormonal contraceptive as “the Pill,” when there are countless other tablets and capsules, is indicative of its dominance in public discourse about contraception.

The known list of hormonal birth control’s potential side effects range from minor to fatal, including depression, weight fluctuations, decreased libido, and a risk of blood clots for smokers. However, as a relatively new drug, long-term side effects of the Pill are dif-

ficult to determine. They will only begin to be revealed as the first generation of users develop symptoms. Troublingly, there have been almost no long-term controlled research trials on the Pill.

Hormonal oral contraceptives put the entire onus of birth control on women. While this is reassuring for many, it also completely eliminates any male accountability. As a consequence, it becomes women’s sole responsibility to obtain, pay for, and take the Pill – as well as to suffer its physical or emotional side effects.

Sam Mackenzie, a researcher at Douglas Hospital and a McGill Neuroscience graduate, says he has “serious reservations” about hormonal forms of birth control.

Mackenzie’s concerns began during a course on endocrinology, the study of hormones in the brain. He learned that levels of estrogen naturally fluctuate in a woman’s body, but that hormonal birth control eliminates these fluctuations.

“It can lead to really elevated levels of estrogen across the entire cycle,” he says, explaining that estrogen plays a role in the serotonin level and in memory. “So if there’s a natural cycle, it gives me pause to tinker with that....

I’m not convinced that the Pill has no effect on the long-term health of those systems.”

However, Howard says she hesitates to use the word “natural” in discussions on birth control. “That word gets thrown around a lot.

People will say that something is ‘natural’ and therefore it’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Yet Howard also admits to having doubts about chemically controlling women’s menstrual cycles. “I do think [hormonal birth control] is not the right choice for everyone,” she says.

Conflicts of interest For those hoping for better choices in the future, research and development (R&D) on alternative, safer oral contraceptives has been lacking. This is likely because of cost and potential liabilities. Many pharmaceutical companies have completely withdrawn from R&D in pregnancy prevention, focusing instead on marketing.

As a result, most recent industry-funded research only focuses on improving existing methods. For example, the patch and the ring both release the same hormones as the Pill into the bloodstream, via the skin, or in the case of the latter, the vaginal wall.

“It seems like they’re always coming up with something new, but it’s always a variation on the same thing,” says Porter. She also notes that non-contraceptive benefits of hormonal birth control, such as acne treatment or relief of menstrual cramps, are also often used to lure younger users.

Additionally, birth control pamphlets and guides for selecting the right contraception are often sponsored by Pill manufacturers, who have a vested interest in women “choosing” what they sell. These guides also often frame the Pill as “the” contraceptive.

“These supposed information pamphlets are actually advertisements,” says Howard.

“And birth control pills are also sometimes given free to doctors by pharmaceutical companies as a promotion. This can influence what doctors prescribe, either because the product has been really sold to them by the company, or because that’s just what they happen to have on hand.”

Feigenbaum notes that sometimes doctors who are quoted in these information sources are also on the boards of the pharmaceutical companies that make the product, or in some way connected to their payroll, as a type of conflict-of-interest.

“Of course, it won’t say that when you open up your web page,” she says. “It’ll just say, ‘Great new drug for you,’ with doctor recommendations. Then, it turns out – through usually not too many clicks – that the doctor works for the lab.”

Overall, critics argue that pharmaceutical companies are consciously drawing attention away from non-medical methods of contraception. “It takes attention away from barrier methods which have the highest efficacy-tosafety ratio, and I think are really fantastic,” says Porter.

Healthy skepticism It’s clear that every woman ought to have the option of using oral contraceptives and other hormonal forms of birth control if she so desires, and at reasonable cost.

However, the consensus seems to be that a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted concerning safety, and there need to be unbiased information sources readily available about alternative methods.

McMahon argues that we can no longer pass the Pill off “as something totally normal and benign.” For herself, she says she has learned over time which condoms work best for her and afford the maximum pleasure and safety.

“I’d way rather take real, visible, and exterior precautions on principle,” she says.

However, Avital Oretsky, U0 Arts, has been on the Pill for almost two years and has not experienced any negative side effects, besides initial nausea. Oretsky says she is happy with the Pill, and plans to stay on it for the foreseeable future. However, she too admits to a certain degree of uncertainty.

“I’m still kind of unsure about how I feel about it,” she says, “even though all doctors reassure you that it’s totally safe and fine for your body.”

Old editors and new conspiracy theories Congratulations to the Daily Yes committee for a successful campaign and to this year’s editorial board for a great year. There are many old Dailyites cheering you.

Letters

Rishi Hargovan BA 2007 Daily Coordinating editor, 2006-07

Former Daily editor expresses support for Daily

More Daily conspiracy theories

Thank you McGill undergraduate students for reaffirming your support for The Daily. For almost a hundred years, McGill students have had The Daily to call their own. Your continued commitment to an independent student press is a great gift to students both future and past. Thanks to you, some awkward high schooler or CEGEP kid will have the chance, like so many students prior, to pick up a copy of the paper and mutter aloud, “That’s not how you spell schadenfreud, is it?” And those of us who have moved on from McGill will still have somewhere to turn when we want to see what outrageous shenanigans you all get up to.

Re: “Manosij Majumdar floods Daily’s letters section while editors hastily assemble ark”| Letters | March 13, 2008 Sirs, First, I’d like to applaud Manosij Majumdar for beginning his three letters in the March 13 issue of the Daily with “Sirs.”

Secondly and most importantly, my colleagues and I have made an alarming discovery. While walking down the street (any old street) one might ask themselves, “Is my mind currently being controlled by invisible extra-terrestrial energy beams, directed into my brain via satellites controlled and owned by some secret-lizard society?” The

truth of this matter is up for debate.

However, how can this debate actually occur, if in fact the hypothesis is correct? Any debate would surely be no more than the equivalent of a second-rate and unacceptably lewd amateur puppet show. My suspicion is that The Daily has been sitting on FILES! DOCUMENTS! FILMS! COLLAGES! All which point to the undeniable truth of this mind-bending (mind-controlling?) reality. The Matrix? Think again. Think worse.

This time, The Daily’s to blame.

Thirdly, I suggest some sort of uprising, although the details of such an uprising are vague and unlikely to actually occur. Criticize someone! Exercise the freedom given to you in small portions by the alien energy waves!

P.S. Please begin including more military recruitment ads in your pages. The army always needs more people to fire weapons, and anything to being able to say to Scanlan: “There’s no more room for your incomprehensible fiction!!!!”

Devon Welsh U1 Religious Studies Send letters to letters@mcgilldaily.com.

300 words or less, please.

Mental health and Norman Cornett JESSE GUTMAN

HYDE PARK

E

veryone agrees there is a crisis in education, but what does that mean? Buzz words abound – reform, underfunding, corporatization, privatization, secularization, dogmatism – while we debate ad nauseum.

My context is personal, working on the front lines at a public high school. But before pondering all of the big questions, let’s take a look at the the basic educational relationship: the teacher and the student. Teachers are exhausted and students are depressed.

Nearly a month ago, The Gazette ran an article on the Mental Health crisis at McGill (“Our Students are Hurting,” Feb. 9). Characterizing students as “angry, anxious, fragile,” McGill University psychiatrist Norman Hoffman noted an astronomical increase in students seeking help within the past decade, counting over 2,300 visits in 2007.

The 300 per cent increase was numbed only by a clarification; that one in 10 turned to self-mutilation with razor blades or glass, usually choosing to slice open their arms or legs. Venues ranged from showers to secret locations to cutting parties, he explained. Why are we hurting so badly? What is being done to solve this problem?

Professor Norman Cornett was a McGill professor who tried to imagine a classroom that would challenge students without breaking them down. As a reward for his efforts, the Religious Studies instructor was

17 Rights for student parents Commentary

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

In this campus’s efforts at inclusion, it seems we have missed a step. In our chemistry labs, in our PhD seminars, in our cafeterias, there are student parents who aren’t getting the support they need.

For parents, the academic world remains less than accessible, meaning those who do succeed as student parents deserve not just help but admiration. Student parents are perpetually on the backburner of our political thinking at universities – it’s time for McGill to step up and provide some real structure and support for them.

McGill’s Student Services have begun to respond to the needs of student parents, who over the past decade have organized their own support network and put more pressure on the University. And the movement is growing: PGSS has provided advertising for the McGill Student Parents’ Network, and a SSMU General Assembly passed a motion this year in support of student parents. This spring, for the first time, the McGill Student Parents’ Network will host a forum on student parenting.

But the lack of support for student parents far outweighs these small victories. Student parents tell us that some professors will not accommodate a late paper from a parent whose child has been up sick at night, and bus drivers refuse to allow parents to take the Macdonald bus with their children.

These are just a few examples of the hardships student parents have told us they face, and more must be done.

McGill must expand its daycare system, and look to other universities for methods and guidance. Principal Heather Munroe-Blum is dedicated to raising money through the capital campaign. If McGill’s neglect of student parents is a matter of limited resources, we suggest that some money be set aside specifically for initiatives designed to make student parents’ lives easier. For instance, McGill and SSMU both ought to find ways to reduce the lengthy waiting lists for their daycare programs.

McGill must also work to institutionalize flexibility for student parents who need to hand in papers late or take fewer classes. Looking into designating a special “student parent” status would be worthwhile, so students with children would get priority for scheduling conferences or lab work. As well, McGill should make its spaces more accessible and inclusive for parents by providing baby-changing stations and lactation spaces where needed.

Most importantly, McGill needs to invest in a permanent space for student parents – an Office for Student Parents with full-time staff, backed by the expertise of the McGill Student Parents’ Network and the wealth of research on child care and paediatrics from the University’s Education and Nursing programs. This could grow into a centre for advocacy and support, a base from which student parents could lobby the administration and the government, and share resources. Student parents have to balance responsibilities that would be hard for anybody. It’s time the University gave them the support they deserve.

Editorials

The Daily thanks you David Pullmer / The McGill Daily

Norman Cornett, a study in Crayola ignominiously canned in 2007 after 15 years on the job. As a former student, I can attest to the weirdness, as well as the brillance, of his unorthodox teaching style. His class had a theme song. Marks were determined by attendance and participation; required materials included blindfold, pen, earplugs, and lots of paper. Participation entailed listening, watching, reading and reflection. The class was renamed according to theme (mine was “Live Poets Society”) and students crafted new names for themselves.

In conversation, Cornett still calls me by my classroom appellation.

But the guiding philosophy of the class was dialogue and understanding. Cornett stressed personal relationships and raw data, a far cry from student numbers and Google Scholar. Instead of writing final exams, students confronted the artists, politicians, documentarians, and writers. Cornett turned to this method of classroom community

after witnessing a student break down in front of him. He found that allowing people to write, no rules attached, brought insight and inspiration.

McGill fired Cornett last summer.

In contemporary higher education a purge is taking place, and students are suffering because of it. The bureaucratization of education is putting a heavy burden on the shoulders of students.

Humans, social animals, require dialogue, feedback, and affirmation. As changes sweep through this institution, one must reflect on what “history [is] in the making”.

While Cornett and his supporters continue to battle the administration, the reason for his dismissal is still secret. To me, it looks like the slow unmaking of a learning institution. Now that’s something to get depressed about.

Jesse Gutman is a teacher and a former Daily colunist.

Well, it’s a landslide. Eighty-one per cent of undergraduate students who voted wanted to keep The McGill Daily and Le Délit alive. We editors are all a little emotional right now, and to be honest, some of us are a tad drunk. But there are shout-outs to be had.

First, we would like to thank everyone who helped us win this campaign.

Thank you to the Daily Publications Society’s dedicated Board of Directors, who fought tooth and nail to make sure this newspaper’s 97-year history didn’t end now. Thank you to our committed contributors, who showed up in droves to make classroom announcements, hand out flyers, and put up posters. This campaign was a community-building experience, with our writers, artists, and supporters banding together to save a beloved campus institution.

Most of all, thank you to the 4,634 people who voted to keep your independent student newspapers alive. Without our readers, neither The Daily nor Le Délit would exist. You have given us the strength to continue doing what we do: provide you with McGill’s only autonomous, student-run, bilingual press.

The McGill administration ought to recognize this vote for what it is: an unequivocal, overwhelming mandate from students in support of their autonomous media. McGill wants to put the four major independent student groups – that’s the Daily Publications Society, the Quebec Public Interest Research Group, CKUT Radio, and the Legal Information Clinic – through these existence referenda every five years. This constant distraction will divert our editors’ efforts from putting together a newspaper, prevent our Board members from managing a financially-stable not-for-profit, and jeopardize the livelihoods of our full-time business staff. We hope the administration will come to its senses.

But for now, it’s back to work for The Daily. This campaign was about saving this newspaper, but it was also about outreach; making sure that students were reading the newspaper, helping out, and learning about the issues. We hope you keep reading and keep contributing. And thanks again for keeping us around.

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Culture

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

19

The lion, the witch, and the film adaptation Movies can enrich childhood novels, but recent efforts are often more interested in showing off special effects

elements, and made the book all the more significant.

Sandra Chang, a PhD candidate at McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, explained that Quebec’s latest curriculum reform “expanded the notion of text to include not only print texts, but also visual

and aural modes of communication,” so ‘reading’ at elementary school now involves equal doses of print, visual, and aural media. Chang suggests that this significant change in the language arts program “may not be as extreme as it seems. Children usually start out as polysemic interpreters of books anyway – through picture books, in which the story’s narrative is directed through the channels of both print and image.” Thinking back, it was the combined visual and literary experience of Harriet the Spy that enabled my sisters and I to consolidate the spy techniques that kept us occupied for days.

Chang believes that the typical film vs. book comparison is a “pretty short-sighted approach of pitting one mode of literacy against another,” without considering the possibility of “multiple literacies.” She emphasized that “adaptation has to do with how stories travel across different forms of media and with the transformation of signifiers from one medium (i.e.., print/verbal) to another (i.e.., images and sounds)”.

Indeed, different versions of a story can effectively complement each other without being mutually exclusive. Thirteen-year-old Emma McDonald acclaimed the film version of The Golden Compass as a visual masterpiece, yet “felt that something

was missing,” due to the lack of antiChristian imagery central to the original plot. Emma felt that The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, managed to remain true to the book, while “adding something to it” by reinforcing emotions that may not be clear in the wordy original version.

Recent adaptations like The Lord of the Rings have unified special effects and plotlines in a style unique to the digital age. Audiences seem to have outgrown my childhood desire for a film to mimic the book, valuing instead the innovative displays of computer technologies. When I saw the recent adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I wondered how I could possibly have been oblivious to the book’s explicitly Christian imagery as a child.

Nonetheless, the book was incredibly important in my life. The creation of a virtual reality may conceal or enrich the original message of a book, thus altering a child’s understanding of the story. Perhaps this is why U.S. premieres of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears A Who have sparked fanatical anti-abortion rallies this past week. The increased presence of visual culture in children’s education has drawn unprecedented attention to the messages it conveys, exemplifying the potential influence of the stories we know and love.

that ranges from stately to slightly off-kilter, and vocals by Caralee McElroy, Stewart’s cousin and fellow band member since 2004. Her voice adds a note of innocent, sometimes haunting simplicity that contrasts with Stewart’s darker tones.

Xiu Xiu has a knack for taking what’s familiar and making it just skewed enough to be interesting. The album also includes an energetic, danceable song about nihilism, and the most tender, melancholy intoning of the words “master of the bump and master of the hustle” you may ever expect to hear.

Stewart has something of an ambivalent relationship with violence.

It’s a thing that horrifies and draws him at the same time, looking at events going on in the world and being intrigued by the way it manifests itself politically, socially, and sexually.

Political violence comes much more to the fore in this album than previously, with songs like “Guantanamo Canto” and “Child at Arms.”

The songs capture the pathos of politics from the persepective of the bystander – watching the news

without knowing how to change the situation – as much as they comment on the events themselves.

You hear eerie whistling and a military drumbeat, the sounds of people falling in line, trapped in a kind of nightmare carnival. “It’s a funny time right now,” Stewart said of the U.S. political climate. “By that I mean a horrifying, sad clown kind of funny.”

An air raid siren fades into the sounds of traffic leading into a cover of Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure,” a collaborative effort bringing together musicians from outside the band, among them Michael Gira of Swans. The cover provides some relief in the middle of the album, and was originally going to be the 14th song, “like a breath of fresh air at the end of the record,” drummer Ches Smith said.

Xiu Xiu seems to show a lot of consideration for their fans, with a range of side art projects and a frequently-updated blog full of bizarre tidbits and scenes from the road. Leading up to the release of Women as Lovers, Stewart offered

to write haikus for the first several hundred fans who wrote in. He likes to think of things he would’ve liked his favorite artists to do. “If Morissey wrote me a haiku,” he said “I’d probably go out of my mind.”

They’ve also taken to jogging with their fans after shows let out, inviting anyone who’ll go with them to come along. Smith recalled one show in Texas where they ended up with a crowd of over 30 people following them, “kind of like Rocky or something.” He hopes they’ll do it again on the next tour.

While Women as Lovers might not exactly be spilling over with hope, it’s certainly brimming over with something. Maybe it’s the tension that builds between the raw, ugly stuff of life, and the difficult beauty that manages to push through.

As bassist Devin Hoff reminds on Xiu Xiu’s blog, the band comes to Montreal this week on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the U.S. entry into the Iraq war. It should be an interesting show.

JESSICA HOLLOWS The McGill Daily

I

n the early nineties, my sister and I invariably introduced ourselves as Fern and Wilbur. Charlotte’s Web was so much a part of our lives that nothing separated us from the world of the Arable’s farm. While our hardcover copy of the E.B. White classic was torn and threadbare, the animated film version was equally important to our fantasy. The voiceover narration faithfully recited the lines we knew so well, while the animations embellished the original illustrations, leaving us free to adapt them to our own reality.

When I saw the 2003 live-action version of Charlotte’s Web, I had to wonder whether the computer graphics would have sparked our imaginations in quite the same way.

The special effects defined Fern’s pastoral world as unquestionably distinct from my own. I was clearly an outsider looking in; the realism created a parallel world so fully selfsufficient that there was no room in it for me. My imaginary adaptations would have felt worthless compared to the Paramount creation, which was too rigid to accommodate my own games and illustrations on Klutz make-your-own-book templates.

Stacey Wilson for The McGill Daily

Most of the films I loved as a child were narratives closely adapted from my favourite books. Even when they could not reproduce the book verbatim, movies could enrich my reading experience. The lush scenery in the film version of The Secret Garden compensated for any lacking literary

Xiu Xiu as lovers The Oakland trio’s latest album takes what’s familiar and skews it enough to be interesting BRADEN GOYETTE The McGill Daily

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amie Stewart didn’t exactly have an optimistic view of relationships when he started writing the material for Women as Lovers. The album takes its title from a novel by the Austrian feminist Elfriede Jelinek, the one that Stewart – frontman and lyricist behind Xiu Xiu – was reading at the time. The novel presents a fairly bleak picture of human beings. It spoke to his view that every romantic relationship has a necessarily horrible side, even though society constantly pressures people to be in one. As the album developed, life took a turn in the opposite direction: he started falling for someone, and the book became, in his own words, “a manuscript to rebel against.”

The album hits the ground running with the opening track “I do what I want, when I want,” a song with play-

ful notes and a sinister undertone that threatens to tip the entire thing over.

Against the brooding, insistent bass line punctuated with upbeat whistling and bursts of frenetic dissonant noise, Stewart comments on the mixed nature of things, the often close relationship of pain and pleasure. There is a sense of calculated restraint at the start of the song, of an underlying emotion bringing pressure to bear just below the surface.

The ambiguous interplay of contradictory emotions seems to be a leitmotif for Xiu Xiu. “Gayle Lynne,” the last song on the album, was inspired by a visit to the burial place of Stewart’s aunt, whose grave had barely been visited since she died as an infant in 1948. It was, he said, a moving experience, seeing the “little headstone as big as an encyclopedia”– and, at the same time, so morbid it was almost funny. The song itself is one of the album’s grander moments, with a trumpet

Xiu Xiu is playing the Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent) on March 19.

From the guys who brought you SCARY MOVIE and THE NAKED GUN Superhero-Movie.net CONCEPTION GRAPHIQUE ©2008 THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY. TOUS DROITS RÉSERVÉS.

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Culture

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

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Kids make noise on FM airwaves Radio-Enfant puts disenfranchised Montreal children in the driver’s seat CAROLINE ZIMMERMAN The McGill Daily

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t’s 8:59 a.m. on Wednesday morning, and the kids are ready to kick off their show on Radio CentreVille, 102.3 FM. Céline Dodel’s fifth and sixth graders at the École Jeanne-Leber in Pointe St. Charles have been prepping for weeks: picking a theme, researching and editing their dispatches, rehearsing on-air techniques, selecting music, recording vox pop segments, practicing for guest interviews. “Technical questions aside, they produce the show from A to Z,” says Marc de Roussan, the coordinator for Radio-Enfant.

The weekly show is part of Radio Centre-Ville’s greater mandate: to give a voice to disenfranchised communities. Before the academic year begins, teachers at schools in impoverished Montreal neighbourhoods are invited to sign their classrooms up for the program. “We pick the names out of a hat,” says de Roussan; the winners get to work with their teacher and two professional producers over five weeks to create a two-hour show broadcast live from their local public library.

Today, the teacher and the two producers are present at the Bibliothèque St. Charles to coach the students through their scripts, but it’s ultimately up to the kids to make sure things run smoothly. The two hosts, Denis St. Pierre

and Francis Gorman, ease right into their roles: they’ve been practicing, and it shows. But today, the show is a little rough; three kids are out sick, and their replacements have never seen the scripts before this morning. The class has chosen to talk about the history of the Pointe, and when Zoe steps up to talk about transportation, she goes completely blank. Luckily, Denis is a gifted adlibber with a keen sense of humour: “Thank-you Zoe, even if you didn’t say anything,” he says.

Rodrigo Ortega, one of the producers, makes sure he doesn’t let these glitches bruise the kids’ confidence.

“The problems we had are problems that the media encounters all the time,” he tells them. But Ortega doesn’t mollycoddle them, either. “Kids learn fast, and I love that sense of freshness that you don’t get with adults,” he tells me.

“But they lose concentration fast too, so I’m friendly, but not too much.”

He also ensures that the kids’ projects conform to Radio Centre-Ville’s principles. “We have to explain that it’s not commercial radio,” he says, “the host isn’t the star.” At the same time, however, the kids are the centre of the show. “On CBC, the kid is the guest, but we want the child to lead.”

Yet despite the social-justice slant of today’s programming – the kids tackle issues like single-parenting, immigration, and gentrification – I’m not sure how much Ortega’s democratic message has sunk in. Denis tells me that his experience hosting the show was “Awesome, I got stage fright at first, but now I’m famous!” he exclaims. The celebrity appeal of getting air time evidently survived despite Ortega’s best efforts – but this shouldn’t be altogether surprising. Kids may exhibit a measure of Rousseauvian innocence, but it’s usually overblown: they’re just as

Courtesy of Marc de Roussan

Fifth and sixth graders at the École Jeanne-Leber in Pointe St. Charles broadcast from their local library. likely as adults to construct a hierarchy where there doesn’t need to be one, and do their best to elbow their way to the top.

Still, I found myself guilty of idealizing the kids on the set. When Étienne Hudon delivered his story on the history of movies filmed in the Pointe with unusual aplomb, I thought: “Wow, that kid’s a natural.” He told me afterwards that he’s thinking of getting a BA in Communications, and then I really couldn’t contain my excitement: “He’s so far beyond his peers, he’s already a blooming cultural critic,” I mused. But then he told

me he wanted to become a hockey commentator and that the main reason he researched films is because someone else had gotten first dibs on sports. I was crushed – but not really on his behalf. The Étienne I had constructed in my mind was nothing more than the kid I would have liked to be: beyond her years, more interested in the arts than in watching cartoons. There may have been times when I stayed up late into the night reading Victorian novels as a 13-year old, but my favourite activities were playing dress-up and riding horses.

Perhaps that’s the toughest part of

being a kid: routinely having to put up with adults projecting their unfulfilled fantasies about themselves on to you.

And yet, while the parents who made it out to the Pointe St. Charles library were beaming, the sense of pride that the children exuded when they wrapped up the show was all their own. “Uncork the champagne!” yelled Étienne as he put down his earphones.

Radio-Enfant broadcasts every Wednesday from 9 to 11 a.m. on Radio Centre-Ville, 102.3 FM.

Child entertainment legend Fred Penner makes a comeback...at Gert’s For all you Canadians who grew up with “The Cat Came Back” and “Happy Feet,” Fred Penner’s Place is a childhood memory that will no doubt bring back that warm fuzzy feeling that you experienced when you listened to his tunes. Fred Penner is a children’s entertainer and educator who first arrived in children’s hearts and homes on television in 1985. After Penner finished singing and talking about his career at Gert’s last Friday afternoon, The Daily asked him a few questions that he was more than happy to answer.

PJ Vogt / The McGill Daily

The McGill Daily: When you talk to university students, what do you expect?

Fred Penner: Well, they’re asking me to come because there was a connection with them as children. These are young adults, and that’s the span of humanity that I connected with in my career, so what I’m expecting is recognition. My job on the stage is to affirm those connections and

take them to the next level. The reason you remember me is because I respected you as a viewer. I did not condescend to you. I spoke to you as a fellow human being.

because it’s the spectrum of life that is displayed within the arts world as well. Economically, they have proven that for every dollar that’s invested in early childhood education in the

MD: Why do you think music should be a standard I’m just a regular guy who’s part of a child’s education? got a really good philosophy FP: That’s a huge quesand some really good songs. tion, and it shouldn’t even be a question. But it is. A – Fred Penner lot of schools put music – generally the arts – on the back burner. The arts in North arts, you realize a $17 return as the American schools are gathering more child reaches adulthood, and that and more momentum, where the mean less residual classes, less speearly childhood education system is cial needs, less of other resources realizing, after numerous studies that that are needed to compensate for have been done on every aspect of the work that wasn’t done earlier. it, that music has value in the learnMD: You must realize, now, the ing process for the child. Ultimately, if you discover that creative ener- extent of the impact that music in gy that comes from the arts, then childhood can have on the adult that makes you a stronger person, later on.

FP: Yes, my philosophy is: never and that strength allows you to be a better student and absorb more, underestimate the difference you

“

can make in the life of a child. I mean it very seriously, and that is the way I have always approached it. To see the completion of this phase is completely overwhelming.

It validates my legacy. [It was overwhelming] many times today. You’ve matured, but there’s always that part, the inner child. Discovering your inner child is a part of that process of maturity.

MD: Would you ever consider writing an autobiography?

FP: I have a couple of people who I have connections with who are really good writers who are prepared to build those experiences into book form. But who would want to read a book about me? I’m just a regular guy. I’m just a regular guy who’s got a really good philosophy and some really good songs and good approach to getting up there and connecting. I love doing this.

– compiled by Anna Graham

Culture

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

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The Fokus Film Festival: beautiful, sublime, peculiar This Wednesday, TVMcGill presents the follow-up to last year’s much- talked-about Fokus Film Festival. The screening will feature a variety of student-made short films, ranging from the charming to the utterly bizarre. This year’s festival also features a venue upgrade.

Films will be screened at Cinema du Parc (3575 arc). Tickets are available at the TVMcGill office (Shatner B-12) for $5, and at the venue box office. Interested? Keep on reading.

Journée de Masse Dir: Alexandre Ruiz de Porras Journée de Masse takes on the timeworn scenario of a totalitarian, dystopian future à la 1984. The main character, identified only by a number, realizes that the system which he is forced to live under – in a stark institutional building populated by white-masked masses – is the antithesis to individual freedom.

Predictably, he takes a stand against this treachery, engaging in a somewhat stilted philosophical argument with one of the militant commanders of the system. Though tightly edited and genuinely chilling at times (the legions of white masks filing down hallways behind the main character are effectively disturbing), Journée de Masse doesn’t take enough risks to be original. The plot is faithful to its inspiration but so much so that it seems trite and predictable. Many of the scenes also bear resemblance to Pink Floyd’s feature-length music video The Wall, but echo the scenes from “Another Brick in the Wall” to the point of mimicry.

– Claire Caldwell

Matthew in Between Dir: Alexander Cowan Obviously a deeply personal film, it is hard to walk away from a screening of Matthew in Between without being touched. It’s incredibly fastpaced and packed with meaning — a poorly timed blink and you’ll miss out on multiple layers of symbol-

Courtesy of Alexander Cowan

Circles within circles in Alexander Cowan’s Matthew in Between. ism. The effect can leave you feeling overwhelmed, but as the credits start to roll and you are released from Cowan’s masterful grip, you just want to hit replay again and again.

I think it was Keanu Reeves who expressed his awe most succinctly: “Whoa.” Cowan is an incredibly talented artist and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with in the years to come.

– Jay Aguera

T.G.I. Forts

of this school. Their film takes the Canadian garrison mentality to new heights in following the efforts of Theodore Zanger – domestic fort architect and preservationist of “our fortified past.” Renaissance man and Daily contributor Duncan Links, who also wrote T.G.I. Forts, plays the obligatory eccentric and is able to highlight the sense of detached reality that characterizes all good mockumentaries. Be ready to laugh as you join his clients in the discovery that Zanger is completely full of shit.

– Joseph Watts

Dir: Tim Reyes and Lucy Satzewich The mockumentary is a fickle genre. It must walk the fine line between realism and absurdity, finding a comedy that inhabits the realm of believable ridiculousness. It invites the viewer to laugh even more when the suspension of disbelief is lifted, revealing the delicately-constructed sham. Because of its precarious operation, few undertake the challenge of the mockumentary; but those that do it well – Christopher Guest among others – tend to do it exclusively. With their entry T.G.I. Forts, directors Tim Reyes and Lucy Satzewich prove to be true students

Sadie’s Lullabye Dir: Faye Patridge The premise of Faye Patridge’s Sadie’s Lullabye is quite a tour-deforce, but it’s too sentimental to live up to its own potential. The short is a cut ‘n’ paste of two parellel scenes, a pregnant girl played by Zoe Speed and her slim-waisted doppelganger, played by The Daily’s own Mariel Capanna. The pregnant character walks around her apartment alone.

She cradles her belly, serves herself a glass of milk, placing her plate of cookies atop her bulging stomach; looks out of her window mournfully.

Her double shadows her actions, but instead of a plate of cookies, she heats up a TV dinner and grabs for the remote. Capanna’s character seems childish and innocent in the face of the weighty responsibility that her pregnant faux-twin carries.

But the final scene is the real getter: while the “pregant” girl grabs a pillow from under her shirt, revealing the illusory nature of her condition, Capanna’s character sits on the toilet waiting for the result of the pregnancy test. It’s positive. It’s a surprising conclusion, yet the sappy acoustic guitar and droppy female voice that provides the soundtrack to the short make the story feel clichéd, even though it’s not. The gentle sunlight, the close-up on the characters shedding tears, may have been effective plot devices if the music hadn’t pushed it over the top.

– Caroline Zimmerman

Split Decisions Dir: Emmett Fraser Split Decisions is a short film about dealing with emotion. It opens with a one-sided argument – Jeremy is on the receiving end of some harsh words. Feeling alone and dejected, he leaves his apartment in the care of his stuffed monkey and walks out into the Montreal winter – cue the snow and the Death Cab for Cutie.

Through the use of an interesting filming technique, we see Jeremy’s persona begin to split, and his emotions pour out as he runs off some steam. Luckily, Jeremy manages to find some happiness in his world, in the trusty form of bubbles, and life starts to look up.

– Jay Aguera

For Mama Dir: Sara Yousefnejad Sara Yousefnejad’s film For Mama is short, sweet, and sexy. The piece offers a revealing truth in the form of a message to a parent. While

the film is only two seconds long, it is repeated three times over – once is simply not long enough.

– Sophie Busby

These Days Dir: Steph Johnson Ice skating, beer drinking. and a traumatic event… Nope, it’s not Slapshot 3, it’s These Days, directed

by Steph Johnson. With a comparatively modest budget, the film is shot entirely on a digital camera to evoke a “home movie” feel. Indeed, the narrative has been pieced together out of footage from Steph’s personal “home movie” collection. With skillful editing, the film displays scenes of a past relationship as they flash before the eyes of a young woman walking through the McGill Ghetto.

The Jackson Browne song “These Days,” performed by Nico of the Velvet Underground, provides the film with a nostalgic emotional tone.

Catch some pleasant wintry scenes of skating at Parc Maisonneuve, wandering through the Ghetto, or drinking at the Milton Gates. And look out for the acting highlight that occurs when Brett smiles in the vanity mirror.

– Cameron Schallenberg

Child Factory Dir: Rosemary Chu Rosemary Chu’s short film starts with the quote “Many grew up in Loving families. While others spent their childhood as Products of their parents.” Without the use of dialogue this film analyzes parent-child relationships. The filmmaker contrasts rebellion with submission and leaves the viewer questioning their own relationships.

The main character’s qualms are interrupted by dance sequences which propel the narrative towards its bittersweet end: “This is what she has to go through Everyday.”

– Sophie Busby

Deconstucting Picasso, delegitimizing Warhol: a look at the FIFA festival MICHAEL MAROTTI Culture Writer

W

earing conversationarousing garments to a FIFA screening is like wearing a Jane’s Addiction t-shirt to Lollapalooza. At Púbol – Dalí De-construction, one middle-aged woman seated to my left proudly sported a shirt depicting René Magritte’s La Grande Famille, her status as a Surrealism fanatic secured by the print on her chest.

Truly, the audience at most of the Festival International du Film sur l’Art screenings resembled the alumni at a fine art school reunion: seemingly every member was itching to proclaim how significant a role art

had played in his or her adult life.

Like any other group of festival goers, FIFA attendees are attracted by the opportunity to view films and discuss both their merits in the company of a like-minded group. At FIFA, the various styles of film serve as a forum for discussion dedicated not only to the art of the films but also the art portrayed by the films.

On a Venn diagram comparing film on art and art film, FIFA resides in the overlapping section. The films aim to please fans of public broadcasting documentary programs who may be in search of something more experimental. In Púbol – Dalí De-construction, director José Ramón da Cruz combines traditional documentary-style interviews with Dali-esque imagery and camera effects. Ants inverted in

color are juxtaposed with a former Púbol housekeepers’ account of Dalí’s behavior. The film presents a conflict between the director’s Dali-inspired creativity and the background of the artist himself. The resulting combination is a Surrealist documentary with an identity crisis.

John Wyver’s The Art of Francis Bacon is a more traditional film on art, reminiscent of an educational video for a high school history class.

However, the focus of this film is not the biography of Bacon, but rather an explanation in his own words of his works and artistic philosophy.

At times, the viewer can even see the camera in the reflection of the panes covering the paintings, but this is part of Bacon’s intent; he preferred to shield his work in glass

and considered the reflection of the observer an essential part of the viewing process. The film embraces simplicity so as to not distract from Bacon’s brilliantly tumultuous and violent images.

Andy Warhol: Denied is a professionally filmed BBC documentary about the workings of the mysterious Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The film argues that the nature of Warhol’s art makes it impossible to determine exactly which pieces are “authentic." Appropriately, the painting in question and focus of the film is an early Warhol self-portrait. Thus the film also questions the authenticity of Andy Warhol as an artist, a controversial debate regarding the Pop art movement that continues to this day. While the documentary portrays Warhol as

an artist who has left a stick in the spokes of the art world, it still leaves the larger concerns unanswered.

FIFA is now in its 26th year and has been expanding since it became an independent organization in 1983. The festival annually includes new subjects to keep up with the ever-expanding realm of fine art. With films like Saving Fallingwater, about the renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, and Steve Reich, a portrait of the contemporary composer coinciding with his 70th birthday, it’s clear that most FIFA films address a specific moment in the life of major contributors to the art world. Next year’s event schedule is well worth a review, for there’s a significant chance that at least one film will motivate a trip to the Goethe-Institute, Moleskine in hand.

Culture

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

Xuan 4 years

Anna 4 years

Mohammed 2 years

Maryam 3 years

These pieces were created by children at the SSMU Day Care.

Deirdre 2 years

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Compendium!

The McGill Daily • Monday, March 17, 2008

Lies, Half Truths, & Hellspawn

Natural disasters, not so bad

KIDS: BIG FUCKING DEAL

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ere’s a thought experiment for you to ponder. Imagine that I moved into your house tomorrow. I’d refuse to pay rent, or work, or cook, or wipe my anus after defecating. Because I’m a moody person, I’d oscillate between hyperactive giddiness and wild temper tantrums. I’d demand the right to suckle at your wife’s teat for a year.

Would you adore me? Probably not.

And yet, we cherish kids, in all their malignant forms. Babies, tod-

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Across 1. __ Francisco 4. Star 8. J. Lo or Britney 13. Projecting part of a rock 15. Gaelic 16. Nitrous __ 17. Chills and fever 18. Length times width 19. Hop aboard 20. The sound of music during a twister?

23. Speech delayer 24. Pollen-bearing part of a stamen 28. Charged atom 29. Iggy Pop’s “__ for Life” 31. Exist 32. Geo-political org. formed in 1967 35. Golfer’s cry 36. Jazz genre be-__ 37. Where to take a family vacation during a mudflow?

41. Encountered 42. Asses 43. Bates had one 44. Once 45. Ova 46. Greaser’s enemy 47. Katmandu’s language 49. “Ready!”

53. Spaceballs protagonist during a hurricane?

56. North American mainland discoverer John 59. Small buffalo 60. Utopia 61. Sound of movement 62. Manure or mud 63. Madrid days 64. Food miraculously provided during Exodus 65. Wan Down 1. Jazzy vocal improvisations 2. Specialized idiom 3. Only republican state in the world without an official capital 4. Heavy 5. Mistake

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dlers, tweens, pre-teens, adolescents: our sick culture loves them all. Frankly, this is disgusting. Kids are like stomach tumours that grow in ladies’ stomachs for nine months, then fall out and immediately start making hostile demands.

You might think you can avoid the kinder-plague by choosing not to reproduce. You’re wrong. Kids don’t just ruin it for everybody in their familes, they ruin it for everybody in our society. Every time a conservative demands that we sanitize or dumb down our popular culture, they do it in the name of the children. Our movies are sexless, our books are boring, and our newspapers are censored, all to avoid traumatizing these pint-sized

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

freeloaders. The funny thing is, they’re probably too busy crapping their pants and crying to notice if, say, your city’s daily paper decides to print the “F word.”

Fuck kids.

President-elect Turner’s sandal scandal

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6. Riding the waves 7. George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the __ 8. Clear 9. Put forth effort 10. Wasted, slangily 11. Tokyo, once 12. Big follower?

14. Tonic plant genus 21. Make amends for a sin 22. Relaxed 25. Routine 26. Eat away 27. Drive away 29. Bread amounts 30. Vases 32. Commerical maker, for short 33. Attack 34. Hinder, in law 35. Mark as unreliable, maybe 38. Of yuppy exercise 39. Pollutions 40. Found 45. Hardened forewings of an insect 46. Furtive 48. Oak fruit 49. Cain’s boy 50. Queen track “__ Ga Ga” 51. Dismal, especial the weather 52. Dadaist Max 54. Dali __ 55. Burden 56. cirque 57. “I get it!”

58. Osama __ Laden “Whiz Kids” solution S O L A R

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Top two photos courtesy of T-Chow Frase for The McGill Daily