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Weekly Student Activities Two Morning Services: 9:30 am and 11:05 am every Sunday, and Bible Studies; Evening Service 6:30 pm.

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News

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

3

Munroe-Blum presents plans for tuition hikes Principal clashes with National Assembly over University operations Eric Andrew-Gee The McGill Daily

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cGill administrators faced a barrage of questions from members of a parliamentary commission in Quebec City Tuesday. University officials presented Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) with a barrel of apples from MacDonald campus along with their case for raising student tuition.

Principal Heather Munroe-Blum led the four-person McGill contingent that appeared before the National Assembly’s 12-member Commission de la culture et de l’education, which hosts Quebec university officials every three years.

Parti Québécois MNA Marie Malavoy mounted the most intense line of questioning, challenging some of the basic premises of Munroe-Blum’s argument for increased tuition. “I think it’s hard to say that if students paid more for education they would succeed as well,” Malavoy said in French.

In her opening remarks, Malavoy said that there was a “breach” in the administration’s logic on tuition, and that she felt “anxiety” at the direction McGill was taking with regard to tuition.

She worried, she said, “that you [McGill] are moving toward a North American model, not a Québécois model, where the richest schools can attract the best students…and where the poorest remain in the periphery.”

Munroe-Blum immediately deflected the criticism, saying “we don’t want a North American model, not at all.”

Throughout the nearly three hours of hearings, the principal repeatedly outlined specific plans to increase tuition for certain McGill students. Undergraduates are likely to be among those targeted by tuition hikes, Munroe-Blum made clear.

“The evidence from other regions is that if you’re going to raise tuition, do it on undergrads, not on grads,” she said, calling higher tuition for graduate students “counterproductive and certainly not competitive.”

Munroe-Blum also countered Malavoy’s concerns, saying that she favours an incremental tuition model. The principal scorned Quebec’s current tuition model, saying a system in which tuition is the same for all students regardless of family income “makes no sense.”

“Poor families are supporting families of greater means,” she said.

SSMU VP External Myriam Zaidi later questioned Munroe-Blum’s plans, saying that middle-class students will find themselves stuck in limbo, “too rich to benefit from

financial aid, but too poor to pay the tuition.”

Student politicians across Quebec have spoken against Munroe-Blum’s views on tuition.

François Carbonneau, a board member of the Table de concentration etudiant du Québec (TaCEQ), of which SSMU is a founding member, said he did not know how high tuition might rise if it was deregulated by the government when the long-standing tuition freeze ends in 2012. In the University’s submission to the Commission, Munroe-Blum supports Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s plan to deregulate tuition in 2012.

In an interview with the Daily, Carbonneau, a Laval student and one of a handful of student politicians to attend the Commission, said in French “I really fear for the wallets of Quebec students…. If there are no rules, we might end up like the American universities, which I don’t think is what we want to see.”

Michal Rozworski, VP External of the McGill graduate studentemployee union AGSEM, who also attended the Commission, said that he opposed tuition hikes, even if to support graduate students.

“We see this as part of just a general issue of access…. We’re not going to let ourselves be divided off and conquered,” he continued. “We see solidarity as an important value across campus.”

MBA tuition jeapordizes NGOs Professional schools like the law and medical schools are the “groups” that McGill intends to focus on most in the next five years, according to the University’s submission to the Commission, which previews the administration’s upcoming five-year strategic plan, to be released in the winter of 2011.

This explicit shift in priorities was not mentioned by either the administration or members of the Commission on Tuesday, but one professional program, the Management faculty’s Masters of Business (MBA), was discussed at length.

Speaking to the Daily immediately following the hearings, Munroe-Blum defended the deregulation of MBA tuition that began this semester, which saw in-province tuition skyrocket from $1,700 to $32,500.

“An MBA is not a God given right,” Munroe-Blum said. She argued before the Commission that average students were paying for a large portion of what is often a very lucrative degree, repeating administration talking points from last year.

“We are completely paying for this program…on the

backs of our undergraduate students,” Munroe-Blum told the Commission. “It just wasn’t fair… it wasn’t equitable.”

Munroe-Blum also pointed out to the Commission that the average MBA program graduate makes just over $100,000 a year in their first three years in the workforce.

Zaidi denies that this is reason to increase tuition for the program. “First, I think the University should always fight to have more funding from the government to pay for these programs,” she said in an interview before the Commission hearings.

Zaidi also cited concern about the increase’s effect on the nonprofit sector.

“People coming out of the MBA with $60,000 in debt who want to work for an NGO are pretty much forced to go into those high-paying jobs,” she said.

Speaking with the Daily after the hearing, Provost Anthony Masi, who sat next to MunroeBlum in the committee room, said the Management faculty was considering a program of retroactive student aid, which would give financial support to MBA graduates who do not enter the for-profit sector. No such program is yet in place. Thirty per cent of the increase in MBA tuition revenue is being put towards traditional student aid this year.

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

McGill administrators L to R: Munroe-Blum, Masi, Cobbett.

Quebec, McGill not pulling weight Administration representative Pierre Moreau, Executive Director of Planning and Institutional Analysis at McGill, told the Commission at length in French that McGill is grievously underfunded by the provincial government.

Moreau tied the administration’s desire to raise tuition to the slide in government funding. “It used to be that the lack of tuition revenue was made up by a higher government subsidy per student: that’s no longer the case.”

Moreau went on to criticize the government for a lack of commitment to graduate research, a top administration priority. He noted that from 2003 to 2008, the government of Quebec reduced its investment in research by 32 per cent, while McGill has increased its investment in research by 22 per cent between 2005 and 2008.

Zaidi pointed to questions of priorities, rather than just provincial help. “Yes, they should get more funding, but the question is what will they do with this funding,” she said. “I don’t think the priority would be student life, but rather [graduate] research, which doesn’t affect undergrads.”

Michel Pigeon, a Liberal MNA and member of the Commission,

had similar concerns about McGill’s funding priorities Tuesday. “If the University was better financed, what would be your first priority, the most clear and urgent?” Pigeon asked in French.

Alternating between French and English, Munroe-Blum answered that the administration’s funding priorities were centered on more support for graduate students and help in settling non-Quebec students in the province.

Munroe-Blum told the Commission that increases in tuition would primarily affect undergraduates, and that such increases were needed to support graduate research.

Graduate research funded at expense of graduate students McGill’s Commission submission shows their plan to invest in the construction of two new graduate research centres in coming years.

A research centre for neuroscience, pain, and immunology is intended to open in the Lyman Duff building at a cost of $26.8 million, of which McGill has agreed to pay $10.5 million.

Further, under the heading “Maintaining Academic Priorities,” the submission reveals

plans for a biomedical research centre, to develop pharmaceutical and medical technologies, which will cost $120 million.

McGill has $650 million in outstanding deferred maintenance, but Masi wrote in an email that new construction still takes priority because it’s cheaper.

“The costs of new construction [are] most often less than attempting to retrofit older structures,” he said.

Despite this support of graduate research, Rozworski complains that the University does not provide basic support services for graduate students. “There are fewer and fewer teacher assistantships, so students are not getting the support they need to become educators,” he said shortly after the Commission hearings. “Graduate students themselves, members [of AGSEM] are coming to us and complaining that they are not getting trained…. We find that many departments do not have TA orientation sessions.”

“There is more graduate funding but it’s going into very specific [areas],” he continued. “There is more funding going into profit making areas.”

In 2008 McGill received $30.3 million in research funding from industries, an increase of nearly 73 per cent since 2003.

4 News

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

Humanistic studies cancelled Refashioned program in works in consultation with students Adam Winer News Writer

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cGill’s Humanistic Studies program, offered through the Faculty of Arts, has been cancelled. The major and minor concentrations are now closed to new students, though those already enrolled will be able to finish their degrees.

There are currently 82 students registered in the major, and 18 in the minor. The core courses of the program, HMST 296 and 297, are no longer being offered.

Created in the 1970’s, Humanistic Studies allowed students to build their own liberal arts program out of humanities and social sciences offerings.

Students could focus on a theme of their choosing. Through an

interdisciplinary lens, the two core courses address the question of what it means to be human.

Each student, aside from general area requirements, formed their own “collateral concentration” of three classes in their desired programs at the 300 level or above, in consultation with an adviser.

Philosophy professor James McGilvray, who administers the program, said “the program’s advantages have been the degree of flexibility it offers and the opportunity to explore. The cost was sometimes a lack of focus and depth.”

The program had been reviewed frequently by the administration the past few years, and it finally decided to pull the plug at the end of the 2009 fall semester. Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi stated that, “the Humanistic Studies program was retired because it was

no longer serving the purposes for which it had been established in the early 70s. The decision to retire it was made after extensive consultation with faculty and students connected with the program, and after following all of the formal procedures within the Faculty and University.”

Student representatives selected from the Humanistic Studies Students Association were involved not only in the process of reviewing the old program, but in making recommendations for a new liberal arts program that will replace it.

“A department is being cancelled, so to have any student voice or involvement is pretty spectacular. I felt that, as a student ambassador on the committee, my opinions weren’t just tolerated, but actually taken into consideration,” said Liz English, one of the students who

“A department is being cancelled, so to have any student voice or involvement is pretty spectacular.”

Liz English, Humanistics student took part in this process.

Manfredi confirmed that a new interdisciplinary program is being crafted by a committee led by political science professor Jacob Levy, and is tentatively slated to open next fall if approved by the faculty and administration. According to English, the program in the works may offer honours and joint hon-

ours concentrations in addition to the major and minor. The program will also feature a language requirement.

“Undoubtedly, the new program is a step up from Humanistic Studies, if only just because there is more structure and legitimacy to the program as a whole,” said English.

PGSS hosts Green Night

Plateau bans billboards

Sustainability project funds put to use

Samuel Appel

Mari Galloway The McGill Daily

T

he PGSS Environmental Committee kicked off its year on Tuesday with “Green Night,” an event showcasing recent environmental initiatives at McGill, including the work of the recently created, studentrun Macdonald Ecological Garden at Macdonald campus, one of 13 new initiatives funded by the Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF).

The result of a movement spearheaded by McGill students, the SPF is a parity committee created to support environmental initiatives by McGill students and faculty members. The SPF has a budget of about $2 million over three years.

“It is a wildly genuine part-

nership of students and administration, not just because of the way the funds are set up but also because the committee itself is made up of four students and four members of the university administration,” said SPF coordinator Lilith Wyatt.

Emily McGill, a staff member of the Macdonald Ecological Garden, described how some of the money is being spent. She said the garden improves the local community’s access to locally grown food, and increases academic agricultural knowledge throughout the community by emphasizing research projects and holding various workshops, lectures, and tours of the garden.

In addition to the SPF, the administration recently embarked on a number of other initiatives aimed at making campus more environmentally sustainable, including making

News Writer

McTavish a pedestrian-only zone.

Chris Wrobel, a coordinator with the McGill Post Graduate Environment Committee, said that some practical elements in the University’s approach to sustainability are missing, however.

“I think it is a bit of a show. They have some showcase projects like the closing McTavish, but there are a lot more basic things they still have to tackle, like improving recycling efficiency,” he said.

According to Wrobel, McGill needs to become a lot more aggressive in incorporating more sustainable forms of energy and educating students and staff on how to reduce their energy use.

“Students need to be consulted a lot more on projects going on at both campuses. We don’t know…what they are doing and we certainly would like to have more input.”

S

even weeks after banning the construction of new billboards in the borough of Plateau-Mont-Royal, the neighbourhood’s council voted to pull down all 45 remaining billboards.

The costs of removal will fall on their owners.

Projet Montréal authored the ban on the grounds that they only benefit corporate advertisers and detract from the beauty of the city.

Project Montréal – inaugurated as a municipal party in 2004 on a platform of urban sustainability – swept the elections for borough council in Plateau-Mont-Royal last year.

Alex Norris, Projet Montréal’s councillor, summarized the party’s position in a September 7 press release.

“The main beneficiaries of this advertising are a handful of powerful companies,” he said. “The losers are the citizens exposed to their ugliness day after day after day. It’s

a very bad deal for Montrealers.”

Projet Montréal contends that lost tax revenue from the billboards will be marginal.

Projet Montréal calls for a “return to the public conception of the city.” The party’s other plans include closing off numerous streets to vehicle traffic. The sentiment of favouring the positive experience of public space over economic expediency might well lead to more projects with a broader impact than the billboard resolution.

Alex McGill, a Plateau resident and U2 McGill student, sees beauty as a draw for the popular neighbourhood: “it feels like one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Montreal. Also, being so close to Mount Royal and the park, it’s a great place to walk around.”

Projet Montréal’s plan may face formidable opposition: the Canadian constitution. Julius Grey, a constitutional rights lawyer in Montreal, told the Gazette yesterday that the ban was “obviously illegal” by freedom of speech laws.

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News

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

7

Budget forecasts severe tuition increases Part two of a four-part series: student aid still inaccessible Henry Gass The McGill Daily

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Source: McGill University Budgets FY2007-2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-11

n order to achieve a break-even budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 20102011, McGill has attempted to diversify its revenues beyond government grants this year.

The main source of additional revenue for the University is tuition and other related fees, which are forecast to generate close to $173 million in FY2011, or 27 per cent of McGill’s total revenue. All tuition revenue goes to the unrestricted Operating Fund, and can be put to use anywhere in the University.

Provost Anthony Masi stated in an email to The Daily that while the dollar amount from the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport (MELS) grant is increasing, the percentage amount is decreasing. To compensate for the dip in provincial funding, McGill is taking measures to increase its revenue through tuition hikes as well as raising enrolment in programs from the undergraduate to the PhD level.

Bad news for your pocketbook...

These tuition increases will equal $100 for students taking 30 credits – which only amounts to a $75 increases because $25 is “clawedback” by MELS to support financial aid. Any additional changes will be made when the provincial freeze expires in 2012, at which point the province is expected to raise baselevel tuition.

“We anticipate that the [provincial] government will move to further re-regulation [of tuition] after 2012 that will see some increases in tuition. The CREPUQ [Conférence de recteurs et des principaux des universities du Québec] has also issued a ‘common’ position on getting tuition in Quebec to the national average,” said Masi.

Tuition for in-province students at McGill stands at $2,068. The average in-province tuition at Canada’s other universities is now approximately $5,500. The administration has stated their desire to increase McGill tuition to the national average.

Tuition for “deregulated” international students will increase by ten per cent, eight per cent for those who started in the 2009-2010 school year.

In her November 2009 Economic Letter, principal Heather MunroeBlum described Quebec’s tuition as “a significant problem.”

...and your class-sizes The University has also been boosting its revenue through increased enrollment. This year and next year, undergraduate, graduate, and PhD enrollment are slated to increase by one per cent, 1.5 per cent, and almost four per cent respectively.

Increases in post-graduate enrol-

ment serve a dual purpose for the University by bringing more money into graduate research programs, and increasing the revenue gained from research grants. Bolstering graduate programs also serves the administration’s objective of maintaining McGill’s reputation as a top research-oriented university.

“Most financial means come in the form of research grants, so it’s in the administrations interest to solve underfunding through the expansion of graduate programs,” said SSMU president Zach Newburgh.

track faculty ratio [and] try to reduce average class sizes,” said Masi. “We are also working to alleviate some capacity bottlenecks. For example, constraints on lab space in U0 science courses affect our ability to increase student capacity in engineering and allied health fields.”

Student aid: tough to get, tough to keep Tuition increases have an adverse effect on accessibility, but Masi said McGill is hoping to counteract this

students, with 25 per cent going to undergraduates. Those figures exclude restricted and endowment funds that can be put specifically toward student aid.

But the numbers indicate that undergraduates are not receiving much in return for their increased tuition dollars, at least not in terms of student aid.

“There are unrealistic guidelines [to maintain scholarships],” said Newburgh. “There are more and more barriers.”

Aquil Virani, a U2 Arts stu-

requirements. The renewal process for Virani’s schoarship neglected the effects of extracurricular activities on a student’s GPA. Virani said he tried to consult the Student Aid Office about re-working his scholarship requirements in order to accommodate extracurriculars, but met little success.

“It never went anywhere. I didn’t have any input [on my scholarship].

It was frustrating,” he said.

Virani further explained that his entrance scholarship rewarded extracurricular activities, but renewal of the scholarship was only based on GPA. “To have a 3.4 and do activities should be good enough for renewal,” he said.

Students paying for improvements to student life

Source: McGill University Budget FY2010-2011

Research grants constitute 23.8 per cent of total annual revenue.

Problems arise with increases in tuition and student enrollment, however. The latter leads to larger class sizes and less student access to faculty. The administration hopes to avoid this scenario by increasing enrolment only in “programs with the capacity to receive” more students. Masi identified information technology, and agricultural and environmental sciences as programs with such capacity.

“We want to keep a relatively low undergraduate to tenure-

effect by partnering tuition increases with increases in financial aid.

Masi has stated that he and principal Heather Munroe-Blum are “committed… to ensuring that 30 cents of every net new dollar in tuition revenues will go to student aid.”

In the 2010-2011 budget, the 30 per cent of net new tuition revenue dedicated to student financial aid amounts to $2.9 million, or about 1.5 per cent of total tuition revenue.

The budget also states that 75 per cent of total student aid from the operating fund will go to graduate

dent and Daily staffer, received an entrance scholarship of $2,500 per semester upon starting at McGill in 2008. To qualify for the scholarship he needed to have a 95 average in grades ten, 11, and 12 in high school, and then needed to maintain a 3.7 GPA in order to renew his scholarship each year.

“You can either go for it and get the 3.7, but not do much else, or actually have fun at university,” said Virani. “Holding someone to a 3.7 at McGill is restricting them.”

Virani noted a lack of transparency and flexibility in scholarship

The budget also states a commitment to “provide [the] highest quality support services to students and faculty.” How this will be achieved remains unspecified.

According to Executive Director of Student Services Jana Luker, 70 per cent of the student services budget is paid by the students themselves as part of their ancillary fees, with full time undergraduate students paying $133 per term and full time graduate students paying $125.50 per term. Roughly 15 per cent of the student services budget comes from the University’s operating fund.

“Students have to pay out of their own pocket for student services. The University is finding more and more ways to avoid footing the bill,” said Newburgh.

Commentary

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

8

Raising tuition, really?

Why principal Heather Munroe-Blum needs to look beyond higher fees Adrian Kaats Hyde Park

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’ m sure that somehow my academic career will mysteriously begin to suffer because of this article, but here goes nevertheless. There is an obvious and well-documented policy of transforming our post-secondary education (PSE) system into a system of private businesses that sell “education” and all the trappings of student life. In particular, I’d like to focus on what has happened at McGill since the installation of Heather MunroeBlum as principal.

Perhaps to my discredit, I’ve been a student and employee at McGill almost continuously since the year 2000. At that time, principal Bernard Shapiro was the boss.

Although no principal goes without criticism – it is the nature of the position – times were certainly different. The drive toward saleable research did not dominate academic pursuit; building doors were open all night; and security guards, knitting in their laps, slept at their posts. The occasional high school kid from could be found guzzling a beer at the OAP before being turfed; the lower field was mostly brown, muddy, and constantly in use; and faculty were more quirky and boisterous, and far less fearful of the administration.

Was it perfect? No, but it was more open, more fun, more academic, and more educational. What has changed?

There have been some decided improvements at McGill since Shapiro: health services and infrastructure have been improved; efforts at greening and streamlining bureaucracy introduced; et cetera.

However, McGill is paying a very dear price for this facelift: its academic traditions, community, and very purpose are being transformed.

The commercial potential of academic enquiry has become a dominant factor in prioritizing research.

Undergraduates are explicitly viewed as cash-cows to support research.

Public and community-run spaces have been handed over to business-

Clara Symes for The McGill Daily

es. The recommendations generated by risk audits now trump community interests in guiding administrative decisions. Security has been severely tightened. Faculty, staff, and employee and student unions fear draconian reprisal should they butt heads with administrators.

This transformation has gone without significant protest. The benefit of the doubt is often given to those who turn out not to have deserved it. Munroe-Blum is one of those people. Our faculty’s widespread uneasiness, coupled with

their silence, is testament to the current climate. I hope that the concerned among McGill’s illustrious faculty, emboldened by our student and employee unions’ impending activism, will emerge with vocal criticism. What worries me, however, is the accrued damage incurred by the public statement of McGill’s so-called “positions” regarding our social system and public financing, as pronounced by our fearless leader. The public at large does not know that Munroe-Blum speaks for herself and perhaps a few backroom opera-

tors – not the McGill community.

No democratically elected body – or one that generates policies and positions democratically – representing students, staff, or faculty within the McGill community, supports “McGill’s” positions regarding public financing and our social systems as pronounced by MunroeBlum. In particular, there is no popular support at McGill for her tuition model. Worse, the principal’s rhetoric regarding the financing of our public PSE system is based on absolutely faulty logic and analyses

that make any academically-minded person cringe.

Essentially, HMB argues that the statistics provided by Quebec’s Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport indicate that our province’s policy of tuition regulation, which has maintained Quebec’s tuition rates at levels significantly lower than the national average, has not yielded its promised benefits (increased number of degrees granted), while it has caused a chronic underfunding of the PSE system. In contrast, she argues that where tuition is higher, there is a higher rate of degree completion, and, in some cases, in a more timely, and thus economical fashion. The benefits to PSE financing, according to Munroe-Blum and her cronies, are obvious. On the surface, this seems reasonable. In fact, it is just plain wrong.

If we were to limit PSE access to people who can afford to pay “user fees,” we would necessarily be limiting admission into the system to people who have the wealth and family and community histories of education that make them more motivated to begin and complete their schooling. In contrast, when admitting those who don’t have this impetus of lineage or the culture of PSE – most often people with low incomes – a number of socioeconomic factors contribute to lower success rates. Cost alone cannot capture those cultural factors.

Tuition fees are indeed a piece of the puzzle, but to suggest that raising tuition will provide the liquidity to change all of those other pieces of the puzzle is ridiculous. Raising tuition, as evidenced by its utter lack of support by all representative bodies in our community, is the last and most unimaginative thing you could suggest for improving the PSE system and its financing.

Adrian Kaats is a PhD II engineering student, and he sits on the external affairs committee and the judicial advisory board of PGSS, but the views expressed here are his own. Write him at adrian.kaats@ mail.mcgill.ca.

The Daily needs four columnists & a readers’ advocate.

The application deadlines are September 17 & 25, respectively.

Write to commentary@mcgilldaily.com for more info.

Commentary

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

9

Bureaucracy kills Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women need justice Irkar Beljaars Hyde Park

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n 2007, Robert Willie Pickton, a former pig farm owner outside of Vancouver, was sentenced to life in prison for the second-degree murder of six women. Over many years, he is thought to have murdered between 20 and 43 more, many of them of indigenous descent. This serial killer was not stopped earlier for many reasons – among which is the lack of action from the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP. Recent developments in the Pickton case have demonstrated the need for an all-out inquiry into why the police didn’t do their job and why well over a dozen women lost their lives at the hands of this murderer. An internal Vancouver police investigation has concluded that police could have caught Pickton years earlier and prevented those deaths.

The report has remained under wraps for more than a year because of court proceedings and publication bans, and now because the government of British Columbia wants time to study its findings.

The report is over 400 pages long, and while it places considerable blame on the Vancouver police, it also points the finger at the RCMP, who could have arrested Pickton much earlier on various charges, but chose not to.

The victims’ families have been calling for an inquiry for years, but the B.C. government has been reluc-

tant to hold one. Now, the Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, the Vancouver police, the RCMP, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, and Amnesty International Canada are pressuring the province to hold an inquiry. If the province does opt for one, it might lead to a national database for missing and murdered native women across Canada – which is sorely needed to turn the tide against abusers.

Many cases of missing native women remain unsolved. And the problem is clearly systemic: in 1996 a Canadian government statistic revealed that indigenous women between the ages of 25 and 44 with status under the Indian Act were five times more likely to die as the result of violence than all other Canadian women of the same age.

In March 2004, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) launched the Sisters in Spirit campaign in response to alarmingly high levels of violence against aboriginal women in Canada. Today, the NWAC estimates that approximately 582 aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in the last 20 years.

The B.C. government has said that they will render a decision on a public inquiry into the Pickton case sometime this fall. We have been asking for years for a public inquiry into missing women, but our pleas have fallen on deaf ears. The international community has taken notice, too: in October 2008, the

Nicole Stradiotto for The McGill Daily

The nearly 600 cases of murdered or missing indigenous women have faced systemic neglect.

U.N. Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women called on Canada to “take the necessary steps to remedy the deficiencies in the system” with respect to murdered or missing indigenous women.

Yet Canada continues to perpetuate its deficient system. Earlier this year the Harper government made available $10 million to combat violence against native women. We still don’t know where that money’s

going. Subsequently, funding was cut to the Native Healing Foundation and the Montreal Native Women’s shelter. Native women need both institutions to protect themselves against abusers. Contradictions like these continue to define Canada’s treatment of missing and murdered native women.

Only when there is a national task force and database on missing and murdered native women will we be able to stem the tide of

Alumni to the rescue!

Hyde Park

T

here is nothing sadder than seeing a fondly remembered place destroyed.

Especially when that place, like the Architecture Café, is the product of so much hard work and so many battles. As an alumna, I was very upset to hear that the administration is once again trying to close the café, but I can’t say I was surprised.

Student-run food services on campus have been steadily consolidated under Ancillary Services since 2000 through a combination of payouts, strong-arm tactics, and dirty tricks. Before 2000, the Redpath and Bronfman cafeterias, as well as those in the Arts, Strathcona Music, Education, and Chancellor Day Hall buildings were all run by student associations. The full story of how they came under the control of Ancillary Services is too long for this article, but here are some highlights:

•

•

•

In 2000, the administration simply took over the Redpath library cafeteria, forcing SSMU to sell its equipment for minimal prices.

In 2001, McGill refused to pay AUS and SUS their student fees until they agreed to new Memorandums of Agreement assigning control of their cafeterias to the University – exactly the tactic the admin used to force CKUT to change its name in 2007.

In 2003, the McGill Society of Physics Students was told by admin that they no longer had a right to the revenue from the sale of beverages in the Rutherford building.

Why go to all this trouble? To quote the Coalition for Action on Food Services, a student group that successfully fought the administration’s 2004 plan to sell Chartwells a monopoly on food services at McGill: “Due to the lack of dining options in the McGill area, the students and staff of McGill represent a lucrative

and reasonably captive market.”

This sort of robber baron tactic would make more sense if McGill was a corporation, as Principal Heather Munroe-Blum thinks. But why should students and parents choose a university that regards a student’s basic need to eat as nothing more than a coveted revenue stream?

I could talk about the value of nutritious, sustainable food to the well-being of students and staff. I could talk about the importance of student-run spaces to the campus community as a place to gather and exchange ideas among peers. But I went to McGill for four years, and I know better than to think that quoting the administration’s own “Principal’s Task Force” public-relations material on “student life and learning” at them is going to make any impact.

The McGill administration does care about their alumni fundraising machine, and it’s time alumni start demanding a genuine say in the University when we hand over our cash. Alumni are traditionally supposed to be involved in the governance of universities. Three rep-

Irkar Beljaars is the producer of Native Solidarity News on CKUT, which airs every Tuesday night at 6 p.m. on 90.3FM. Write him at irkar1@gmail.com.

September 9, 2010 B-24, Montreal

Grads should band together to save beloved Arch Café Holly Nazar

violence. And only when our government begins to respect aboriginal people will we ever be able to break down the stereotypes that keep the First Nations where they are and to bring visibility to their communities.

resentatives of the McGill Alumni Association sit on the Board of Governors, but the group is kept on a tight leash by Development and Alumni Relations. There’s a lot on their website about “perks” and “networking,” and many ways to hear bland, chipper news about McGill, but nothing about having a say in the actual direction the University takes.

Let’s act as responsible alumni and say that we will not donate any money to McGill until the administration changes its breathtakingly contemptuous treatment of students. Otherwise, what exactly are we donating to support?

Universities don’t exist without students, they don’t exist without alumni, and they certainly don’t exist to profit off either of them.

The people running McGill are hoping that we’ve forgotten that.

Holly Nazar holds a BA ’07 International Development Studies.

Are you an alum? Interested in forming an independent alumni association? Email montrealalumniexchange@gmail.com.

Dear reader, It’s been a long time. Four months...

Time enough to learn to live without one another. But I don’t want to live without you.

I want you back in my life. I know we can make it work.

Four months... it’s a long time, I know.

But we can make it work again.

Take me back.

Or at least let me know how you’re doing.

I can’t live like this any longer... letters@mcgilldaily.com P.S.: Write soon!

10 Features

The black bloc and the Eric Andrew-Gee on vandalism and state violence at the G20

T

he theory behind confrontational protests, the theory that set four police cruisers on fire and left several of Toronto’s main shopping streets covered in shards of glass on the weekend of June 27, is simple and persuasive.

By damaging private property, protesters provoke the police to overreact.

Property is, after all, one of the things police “serve and protect,” and when the cops clamp down, arresting people and drawing blood, the masses will see the violence it takes to preserve capitalism and see the state’s role in the whole venture. Then, the theory goes, the masses will turn against the state and capitalism: the revolution will come to pass – or at least its seeds.

All of these things did happen in Toronto that weekend – except, of course, for the revolution. Instead, there was a backlash, a reaction, an anti-revolution. Following the G20, the police were praised exorbitantly by public figures and quietly applauded by private citizens. While hundreds remained detained in a makeshift jail on Eastern Ave., Torontonians went back to their lives. The moment was lost. It was an odd turn for a city once bound together in revulsion at the cost and unsightliness of the summit’s security operation.

“Let’s unite the labour movement, the environmental movement – let’s speak with a united voice!”

Sid Ryan, the famous Canadian union organizer, issued this cris-de-cœur on the front lawn of the Ontario legislature, in the rain, on the morning that G20 delegates arrived in Toronto.

The crowd Ryan addressed was already strangely splintered; it covered the spectrum of the world’s political grievances.

The leader of a small group of Vietnamese immigrants bellowed into a bullhorn, “Say no to Communists!” Elsewhere, women in

disposable rain slicks carried signs protesting the stoning of Iranian women. One person wore a full-body seal costume in protest of the seal hunt.

The labour movement and the environmental movement were represented, like a tree in a jungle can be said to be represented: present, but really just part of the scenery.

There was, however, a cloud of people, wearing all black, dispersed through the law-abiding, disorganized crowd, who were intent on breaking laws and were fiercely well-organized. They were known as the black bloc. In fact, “black bloc” is a protest tactic that involves vandalizing private property in a tightly-packed group, dressed in black and with covered faces.

The intention of some protesters to break away from the mass of marchers and charge the security fence enclosing the summit area was known long in advance.

The website torontomobilize.org advertised a protest called Get Off the Fence, which was slated to meet at 1 p.m. at the provincial legislature, Queen’s Park, and then move toward the security fence. It was meant to go beyond “the tired symbolism of parades.” The website continued: “this is a militant resistance, where many forms of resistance and tactics are welcomed and respected.”

When the wider march turned west on Toronto’s Queen Street, militant protesters changed course, heading south and east, towards the heart of Toronto’s financial

district, quieted to an eerie stillness that day by security. On TV, the progress of the militants, smashing windows with planks of wood and hammers, looked chaotic and meaningless. In fact, the meaning of those broken windows animated everything else that took place that weekend.

There are many among leftist activists who find the logic of black bloc tactics cynical. One step in the sequence requires innocent people to be smashed by overreacting police, after all. Black bloc tactics use protesters as pawns, whose well-being must be sacrificed to reveal the greater truth that governments are neither able nor willing to take care of their own people. Many earnest protesters felt they had been turned into collateral damage in an ideological war over which they had no control.

The police response began at Queen’s Park, about four hours after protesters had set out from the same place. Toronto’s Chief of Police, Bill Blair later said that anarchists had changed out of their black clothes and were hiding in the peaceful crowd in front of the legislature when the police began arresting people.

At the time the crowd’s presence seemed accidental, the dregs of the day’s action.

There was little collective action being taken; people were mingling. One overweight man in shorts and a tight red plaid shirt walked up and down the police line that had formed to block people off from College Street, to the immediate south. The man shoved a cheap digital camera near the plexiglass visors of the riot police, and yelled in a high, nasal voice: “You’re murderers, every single one of you.”

When the police line began stomping forward, people were knocked over with riot shields and dragged behind the police line. The response from the crowd verged on panic, as people stampeded back at every police advance. When the crowd-control horses, also wearing plexi-

glass visors, were let through the line, the retreat was so chaotic that several people fell and were caught under the horses’ hooves. One man, in a polo t-shirt, shorts and plastic sandals, fell at my feet. I took his arm to pull him up, but before I could get him to his feet he was trampled; he must have ended up somewhere behind the police line.

A tiny number of people stood their ground against the police advances. Dana Holtby was one of them. A McGill student, she was at the G20 working for an aboriginal-themed CKUT program, and as an environmental activist. She and a small group, she later told me, were “sitting on the ground, singing songs, saying things like ‘people protest’ and ‘the whole world is watching.’ … It was just a matter of maintaining the space as a free-speech zone and to keep the police line from advancing.”

But just before six o’clock at Queen’s Park that day, a police officer stuck his head out from behind the police line and said, in a voice so low that only a few could have heard him, “Please leave the area, or you’ll be subject to arrest.”

Dana and her group moved backward the first time the police line advanced. The second time the charge came more swiftly.

“There was a group of cops that rushed to the right of us,” she said. “They advanced and enveloped us and we were dragged behind the police line.”

Dana said she was dragged for about a hundred meters before the police stood her up to arrest her. A friend of hers who was arrested at the same time, an intern at The Dominion magazine, had his press pass ripped off his neck as soon as he was taken behind the line. Journalists from CTV, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail were also arrested at various times during the G20.

By the end of the weekend, police

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

11

Rana Encol & Niko Block / The McGill Daily

billy club scarcely offered any pretext whatsoever for their arrests. Large-scale arrests happened at the Novotel hotel on Saturday night and at Queen and Spadina on Sunday evening, when hundreds of bystanders were boxed in by police, or – in the now notorious phrase – “kettled.”

Possession of black clothing, like that worn by some of the militant protesters on Saturday, became a widely accepted reason for the police to round people up. Around 70 out-of-town students, many from Quebec, were arrested at U of T, partly because of black clothes strewn in the bushes near the gymnasium where they were staying.

While some were detained, others were simply beaten. Wyndam BettencourtMcCarthy, a former editor for the U of T paper The Varsity and a writer for the popular Torontoist blog, was at Queen’s Park on Saturday evening when the riot police began advancing. Just after seven o’clock a large police charge was mounted.

Wyndham, like every one else, ran. As she fled, a police officer busy arresting someone else turned from what he was doing and raised his nightstick. Putting his full weight behind the blow, he struck Wyndham on the hip, then turned away, no longer interested. She spoke to me pantingly, in shock, seconds after being hit. Her hip already had a red, oval welt on it.

Dana had a similarly brutal experience in the detention center on Eastern Ave., which came to be known as Torontonamo Bay. “I was in the first holding cell for something like eight hours,” she said. It was 12 hours before she was given food; she was given water and a processed cheese sandwich.

“The cell was freezing,” said Dana. “It couldn’t have been above ten degrees Celsius. People were requesting clothes and blankets and [the police] wouldn’t give us anything.”

My roommate Sam Slotnick, a Toronto

native and Concordia student, was arrested on the Sunday of the summit while trying to take pictures of a small protest near Dundas and Broadview. He was held for thirteen hours without the chance to see a legal counsel, though his father, a lawyer, tried to contact him. He said he was dressed warmly enough to be comfortable but that many weren’t.

One young man, a francophone from Quebec, told Sam he had been arrested while sleeping in the U of T gym. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and was soaking wet. “He was freezing, ‘cause he was wet,” Sam said. “He was complaining the entire time; he was obviously completely miserable from being cold.” The police said they were out of extra clothes, but one of the man’s cellmates helped him out. Sam said, “One guy in my cell managed to pull a hand of out his cuffs and gave his sweater to the guy.”

Ronja Krajina, a student at George Brown College in Toronto who volunteered as a legal observer with the Movement Defense Committee on the Saturday of the G20, was on her way to meet her boyfriend on Sunday morning when several police officers approached her. They began searching her bag, and while they searched her, a group of men walked past. “One of the police officers said ‘how ‘bout we let these guys take her around back and have a go at her,’” Ronja said. When she responded angrily, the police arrested her.

Ronja spent 30 hours in custody, and was charged with conspiracy to commit an indictable offense and conspiracy to use explosives. The explosives charge stemmed from a saline solution Ronja had in her knapsack to clean her contact lenses with, and a vinegar-soaked bandanna to neutralize tear gas. The charges were dropped before she was released.

Ronja was interrogated by officers for about an hour, but not asked anything

relating to her charges. “They said that they were gathering intelligence,” she said.

“They asked me if I knew who the leader of the black bloc was.”

During their internment, Ronja and her cellmates kept each other’s spirits up.

“There was actually a lot of support and solidarity within the group of girls I was with,” she said. “We did yoga with our handcuffs on to pass the time.”

It probably isn’t surprising that people who were not detained viewed their experience at the G20 radically differently than those who spent time at Eastern Ave. over the weekend. A little over a week after the summit, I had seven or eight people over to my house for drinks; none of them had been arrested or held in the detention center, but they had all been somewhere downtown during the pandemonium of Saturday and Sunday. As the talk moved to the G20, a consensus quickly emerged about the overarching political and moral meaning of the event: it was fucked up.

No one was really interested in talking about meaning, though; we were all buzzing with raw experience, personal experience. We went around in a circle on my back porch, each taking their turn telling their G20 story, as if every one of us had the quintessential G20 story. One friend talked about meeting Middle Eastern heads of state inside the Metro Convention Center; another talked about the anti-police brutality march that happened the day after the summit ended; a couple talked about taunting police outside the detention center and being shooed away.

It was a narcissistic way to come to terms with the G20, all of us reaffirming the rarity and value of our own experience. And as divided as the G20 protest movement was on Saturday morning, it was more so now – once a splintered group of causes, now an atomized collection of experiences.

In our self-involved story-telling on my

back-porch, my friends and I had eschewed solidarity.

We had also done our part to thwart black bloc tacticians, by failing to come together with our comrades in the wake of a state-violence spree. It isn’t that we armchair G20 theorists weren’t sympathetic to the victims of the police, we were just more sympathetic to ourselves. But in the world beyond the detention center, even beyond my back porch, in Canada at large, people saw the G20 even more differently.

According to a poll by Agnus Reid, for example, two thirds of Canadians thought the police did a good job. Even more starkly, 73 per cent of Torontonians supported the actions of the police that weekend.

On July 7, Toronto City Council passed a motion to commend the Toronto force’s police work during the summit. The vote was 36-0 in favor.

Maclean’s magazine titled their editorial about the G20 “Lock them up: why the G20 thugs don’t deserve any leniency.” They splashed the headline on the front cover, along with an image of a burning car and a masked protester.

After 1,100 people had been detained in one weekend – the largest mass arrest in Canadian history – the images that people seemed to retain were the flaming police cruisers, the broken windows, the masked anarchists wielding baseball bats.

The militant protesters overestimated the strength of one part of their equation: that people would be repulsed by state violence against innocent people in the aim of preserving order and property. The reality turned out to be just the opposite – people were heartened by the sanctioned violence, even saw heroism in it. black bloc practitioners misread their audience. They were right that vandalism would provoke police violence. They were wrong to think people would mind.

Take it fresh with your morning coffee.

Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are.

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Health&Education

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

13

Olfactory environmentalism New trash composters raise the ire of Wong Building staff members Gemma Tierney Health & Education Writer

I

s McGill’s concern for the natural environment taking precedent over concern for its work environment? That’s what certain McGill employees think about a certain summer addition to campus. The Big Hanna T240 composter, the largest model available from Montreal’s own Vertal Inc., was installed under the Wong Building’s overhang in May. Since its installation, several staff members who work in the building have noticed that it seems to emanate what can be best described as the smell of crap.

Frank Caporuscio, a lab technician in Wong who has spearheaded the call for repairs on Hanna, has voiced his complaints to Dennis Fortune, director of McGill’s Office of Sustainability, which is behind the composting pilot program in conjunction with the student-run Gorilla Composting. Both Fortune and David Morris, the Gorilla Composting coordinator, have received specific training on the various maintenance procedures that Hanna requires. But Hanna’s stench has eluded their troubleshooting thus far. Numerous repairs were made this summer, but none have fully eradicated the stench, according to Wong staff members, though Caporuscio estimates that the smell has improved by about

“50 per cent” since he first contacted Fortune about it.

Caporuscio was surprised by the choice of location for the composter because of its proximity to Wong’s front steps, which were once “a big gathering place for sitting and eating lunch and for staff barbecues,” until Big Hanna arrived on the scene. Ray Langlois, another Wong lab technician, further emphasized the importance of this gathering place: “Lunch hour was a good time to catch up with people who work in other research groups. As we lost our cafeteria a couple of years ago, the front of [the Wong] Building was popular during the nice weather.”

Langlois added that the smell will diminish as the weather turns colder, but this is only a temporary solution.

The Office of Sustainability explains on its website that the composter is situated in such a way to be “visible to the public but discreet in its operations.” Public visibility, not usually desirable for composters, makes sense in the case of Hanna, whose installation is a landmark event. It is the first of its kind to be installed in North America and will be turning 60 tonnes of McGill’s food waste into compost in its pilot year, according to Morris, who expressed his excitement about the project “finally coming together five years after Gorilla Composting started” and witnessing “something so

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

A new advanced composter outside Wong has caused complaints from staff. tangible show up on campus.” Its visibility also helps to raise public awareness about the feasibility of composting on a large scale.

But the staff of Wong had trouble appreciating this publicity since it has proven to be anything but discreet in its operations.

Caporuscio was also upset by the fact that Wong’s “staff was never asked or consulted before the com-

poster was installed even though [they] are McGill community members.” But mostly, he and other staff members are frustrated with the fact that the problem has still not been resolved (although there has been a distinct improvement).

Hanna’s pilot year will end in June, after which McGill will have to make a decision to increase its composting capacity (and eventu-

ally add more units on campus) or to embark on a trial period with a different type of composter.

There will be an outdoor information session about the Big Hanna T240 in the next three weeks that will include refreshments and a special demo. The exact date has not yet been determined as of press time, but stay tuned for more info.

Sustainable sustenance Concordia Eats 2010 provides a delicious forum for food activism and education Malcolm Araos-Egan Health & Education Writer

“Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.”

— Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

O

ur culture has always had a complex relationship with the food we consume.

However, though the 19th-century gastronome’s concerns revolved around choosing the correct cheese for dessert, ours have become increasingly tied into a notion of social and environmental responsibility. On September 15, Concordia is holding its first Sustainable Food Festival in hopes of bringing together a diverse group of organizations and people who are pioneering changes toward a better food system in Montreal.

Kim Fox, the Concordia student and organic food proponent behind the initiative, conceived the event as an attempt to deconstruct the path that led us to accept what she views as a “sick, unjust, and dispossessed” food production system. “The thought that I did not know where my food was coming from or what was in it, or that the people who were producing [it] were often unable to feed themselves, or that it was making me sick rather than strong, or that food production and transport is actually the leading cause of environmental degradation... It all makes me angry.”

The festival is a one-day event which, beyond the obligatory free-of-charge tastings, promises a broad line-up of events and organizations throughout the day.

Restaurants like Burritoville and Crudessence will serve their own organic foods, and local farms and urban gardens (including McGill’s own Campus Crops) will be present alongside soup kitchens, food banks, advocacy groups, and specialty stores, all accompanied by live music.

The festival will also feature more than a dozen demonstrations on topics such as seed-saving, food politics, self-watering containers, preserves, permaculture (agricultural techniques that mimic natural environments), and more. Even a media centre has been set up for festival goers to watch various short films about food issues and potential solutions, and to take a look at an interactive map of Montreal, which Fox created in conjunction

with the festival. The map locates various initiatives around the city and invites participants to click on them to learn more about what they do, why they do it, and how to get involved.

After all is said and done, Fox hopes that festival goers will leave with a revitalized approach to their food. “I hope that the next time [visitors] go into a supermarket or restaurant – or even the next time they sit down to eat – that they have lots of new questions and that we provide them with plenty of resources and skills to help answer them.” Fox’s ultimate ambitions, however, reach beyond the festival and into our campus communities.

“I would like to see more [courses] incorporating food and food issues into their discussions...food should be brought front and centre as a

critical area of study,” she said.

“But everyone has some part to play in this,” Fox continued. “I would like to see support across Montreal for the various initiatives that are being engineered to make positive and sustainable changes,” she said. While she argues that dialogue is a step in the correct direction, Fox concedes that there is no overarching solution to current food problems. The Concordia Sustainable Food Festival aims to provide a venue for these discussions, but also promises to be an rewarding culinary and learning experience.

Concordia Eats starts September 15 from 10:30 a.m. until 10 p.m. on the back terrace of Concordia’s Henry F .Hall building, 1455 Maisonneuve O.

Editor, healthy and educated, seeks writers, same. healthandeducation@mcgilldaily.com

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Culture

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

15

The fabricators Textile community endures in Rosemont despite commercialization Ming Lin The McGill Daily

J

ust north of the Jean-Talon market, St. Hubert’s shopping mall houses a small textile district. The mingling of cultures that make up the neighbourhood is mirrored by the wide array of fabrics available, ranging from gingham to batik. A closer investigation of the shops – and conversations with their owners – reveals a small community of distinct backgrounds and a mutual feeling of pride in the businesses they have created.

Shop fronts feature lavish drapery, models of upholstered furniture, and sleepy-looking mannequins sporting hand-sewn garments. Competition is lively, with many owners seeking to create a niche for their business by specializing in textiles that serve a particular function, such as home furnishing. Others offer a wider selection, and the resulting potpourri of colours, textures, and designs becomes the material for costumes and curtains alike. A diverse and loyal clientele attests to their success – some shop owners have been doing business in the area since as early as the 1940s.

The green glass awning which covers part of the street, running from Bellechasse up to Jean-Talon, is the result of an ambitious dream city planners had at one time to turn St. Hubert into the “world’s biggest shopping centre.” The St. Hubert covered shopping centre was more than just another moneyspinning development scheme and neighbourhood overhaul; it was an effort to protect the local merchants of this area from the competition of larger commercial malls which were beginning to appear across North American cities. This would be achieved by both the reputation garnered by the sheer magnitude of the mall, as well as the year-round guarantee of a comfortable shopping experience despite Montreal’s harsh winters. Their vision didn’t materialize as they had expected.

By the time the construction was unveiled in 1984 – more than 30 years after its initial conception – what was to be an array of 750 shops had decreased to less than half that number. The glass roof, intended to enclose the entire mall, had been reduced to the partial covering which extends just across the sidewalk on either side of the street today.

“Personally, I think it took out the energy from the street,” laments Danny Ohayon, a shop owner who has been in the neighbourhood for 30 years. “St. Hubert used to look a bit like Ste. Catherine street.” With the awning, he observes, “you don’t see the tops of the buildings and

you don’t see really the names of the stores.” The awning’s severe presence damages the vibrancy of an otherwise aesthetically and culturally colourful neighbourhood. For Ohayon, this is not a main concern.

His shop, Draperies Georgette, sits just outside the covered portion of the mall. Still, he wishes that they would remove the structure, if only to restore a fluency to the appearance of the street.

The awning is not the only problem facing the merchants of St. Hubert. While it is apparent that there is still a market for textiles in Montreal, many proprietors in the mall have experienced a recent decline in their business.

For Josef, of Tissus Saint Hubert, “business depends on the season,” but it wasn’t always so. When he came 20 years ago, business was good, but starting about three years ago, the number of customers started to decrease. His explanation is simple – “everyone is broke.” Ohayon has a more positive attitude: he believes the dwindling customers are due to the fact that “a lot of people that used to live around here moved out in nice suburbs.” Either way, the bulk of the clientele today are students from fashion or art schools, theatre companies, and people looking to decorate their homes.

Despite the challenges, certain businesses have been able to carve a niche for themselves. Draperies Georgette is one of a dozen or so textile stores which have opened just north of Jean-Talon, where the mall continues, but is no longer shaded by the austere glass awning.

This small enclave of shops is a vestige of the old St. Hubert commercial street that predates the construction of the plaza, and goes back to the turn of the century.

Shops began to spring up along St. Hubert as a result of a growing population and continued to expand throughout the years, regardless of the various development plans that were brewing. This part of the mall maintains the colourful painted signs and different types of architecture which used to characterize the entire street.

Store owners and workers hail from all parts of the world and often have backgrounds unrelated to their occupation today. Ohayon, who came from Morocco as a teenager, attended McGill’s architecture program for two years, during which time he also studied art history. “I had two years left” he says, thinking fondly of his university days, “in the 70s, it was easy to make money in business, so I dropped off and went to business.” Ohayon would later join his wife, who is also from Morocco, in opening Draperies Georgette – naming the store after her mother.

All photos by Naomi Endicott | The McGill Daily

The Ohayans have been in the neighbourhood for 30 years.

Lebanese people own the majority of the businesses in the textile district. Next door to Draperies Georgette, Ultratext specializes in sequins, tassels, and other accessories which dangle enticingly from ceiling rafters.

Their clients include the Montrealbased circus troupe Cirque du Soleil and the Montreal Casino.

One worker of many years was previously employed in the food industry. He came to Canada after a brief stint in the U.S. because working papers here were far easier to get. At its height, the mall contained more stores and business had been booming, drawing many immigrants to the area. Latif Reckallah, the owner of the store, says he has seen many Lebanese people go into textiles after failing to find jobs elsewhere: “We look for other jobs, but we see Lebanese here.”

Antoine, of Textile Riatex, is also from Lebanon. With an interest in business – he had been a hair dresser back home – he jumped at the opportunity to assist his brother-in-law, who was working in the textile industry, in opening up a store in Montreal. “I was here in ’89 and most of the Lebanese came at that time,” he says, citing a civil war which began in the ’70s as the reason many people were forced to emigrate. He guesses that many Lebanese people go

into this business because “they like to work for their own.”

While people like Antoine, Josef, and the others take an obvious pride in their work, they can seem like members of a dying breed.

Their personal and friendly relationships with their customers and each other are a far cry from the big chain clothing stores on Ste. Catherine. One might think that because of the wide availability of

prefabricated clothes and household items today, a textile district like the St. Hubert mall would be unable to survive. However, because of the cultural forces holding the neighbourhood together, and the reputation the stores have collectively built as the best source of materials for people working creatively with textiles in Montreal, the mall has developed into a unique and enduring phenomenon.

16Culture

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

Protect me from what I have Text artist Jenny Holzer explores language pushed to its limits at DHC Joseph Henry The McGill Daily

A

McGill Farmer’s Market

Campus Eye

Photo by Victor Tangermann

CKUT 90.3 FM-McGill’s Campus-Community Radio

McGill, You have a Radio station

meet us!

get involved!

learn more!

Garage Sale www.ckut.ca Sept 1 & 2, noon - 5pm, more about our fall activities General Orientations and programming in front of the station Every Thursday in September at noon, 3647 University Ave Wild in the Streets, 3pm & 6pm at the station, everyone Live Concert on Campus is welcome, no registration required Sept 5th in front of the this is the first step to becoming a James Administration Building CKUT volunteer Open House Volunteer Training Weekend Sept 16, 3 - 8pm at the station September 24, 25 & 26 Thursdays (A)Live! learn all the skills you need to produce McGill’s finest live music, radio programming at CKUT free every 3rd Thursday of the you must come to a General Orientation or www.ckut.ca month at Gerts before this weekend in order to participate

tune in 90.3fm!

fter immersing herself in themes of brutality, oppression, and violence for almost 40 years, conceptual artist Jenny Holzer decided to stop writing.

Research into various gruesome stories had come to disgust her. Now her work is comprised solely of the words of others – usually projections of texts onto a variety of surfaces, from small plaques to enormous public buildings. She placed a poem by Henri Cole on the façade of a feared wartime Venetian police station, the words “into some desiccated realm of beauty” slowly creeping up the doorway. For her show at DHC Gallery, Holzer summons the words of the U.S. Army for a series of chillily violent representations of the Iraq War, pushing her brand of text art into new extreme proportions.

The gallery also prominently features Holzer’s “Redactions Paintings”: enlarged silk-screens displaying the titular blackingout of classified information in Army dossiers released per the U.S.’s Freedom of Information Act. Torture becomes a matter of semantics in these presentations, as two army officials communicate regarding the status of an Iraqi prisoner as a “lawful” or “unlawful” combatant, and hence the type of detention he will receive. Language (or explicitly, in the case of “Redactions,” the lack thereof ) begins to neutralize violence into a matter of classified jargon or even the trappings of an email conversation, complete with appropriate headings and obligatory psalm as a signature. Water Board black white redacts everything from a military document except the words “water board,” a clever if ghastly flipside to the decidedly apolitical text-based conceptualism of American artists like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. An interrogation transcript calmly relates that “the decedent was shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth at the time he lost consciousness and become pulseless,” in the standard letterhead format.

To print is to distance.

In other pieces, Holzer returns to her most famous kind of work – scrolling LED messages in the style of those ubiquitous in the metro and above airport customs desks.

Rib depicts a soldier’s account of his accidental shooting of an Iraqi civilian in a manner typically used to announce stock prices on Wall Street. Public language seems most problematic to Holzer, who gained renown predominantly from public pieces, like the words “sex differences are here to stay” emblazoned on a Hollywood marquee. Rib confronts the viewer with a barrage of incongruous ambiguities: the text presents private visceral horror as disembodied and formalised army protocol (arguably, a reality of any military system) in the guise of a public announcement. Rib is a presentation of trauma in an inappropriate context, something Holzer herself can’t avoid. Despite her eagerness to convey her conviction that the way we use language isn’t suited to documenting trauma, Holzer herself cannot transcend this very problem. Her showand-tell technique in “Redactions” stumbles in Rib, especially when coupled with the blatant arrangement of human bones in the nearby Lustmord Tables.

Holzer (and DHC’s) penchant for theatricality is ramped up with For Chicago, an enormous panel of vertical slats with the same LED letters scrolling downwards. A yellow glow permeates the columned room and the result is an aesthetically impressive confusion. Holzer again focusses on the gruesome with her text (“her head explodes in the fire”) but the writing is difficult to read vertically and at times moves too fast. Language is certainly a poor choice for representing horror, but unlike the sobering effects of the “Redaction” pieces, For Chicago overwhelms. The glaring mustard tint combined with the threatening yet meaningless sets of dizzying words quickly alienate any viewer trying to decipher who precisely is saying what.

In an interview with Art21 on PBS, Holzer stated, “I hope the installations are atmospheric. I want colour to suffuse the space and pulse and do all kinds of tricks.” The texts she presents become visual elements both insistent on and devoid of meaning. Any instinctual reaction to the scope of the project is soon displaced by the result of Holzer’s indecision between presentation and content.

Check out Holzer’s work at the DHC Gallery (451 St. Jean) until Nov. 14.

Greetings loved ones Let’s take a journey.

Culture.

So hot we’ll melt your popsicle, daisy dukes, bikinis on top culture@mcgilldaily.com

Compendium!

The McGill Daily, Thursday, September 9, 2010

18

Lies, half-truths, and a delicate potpourri of crap

FENDELSON SERVES SOME STRAIGHT-UP BULLSHIT BELOVÈD INTERIOR DESIGN BISTRO CLOSED FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON

CAPITAL SUSPECTED AS CULPRIT; FENDELSON UNCOMPROMISING Télésphore Sansouci The McGill Daily

D

eputy Vice-Viceroy Mortono Fendelson offered bullshit excuse after bullshit excuse yesterday evening at a news conference held on the subject of the closure of the Interior Design Bistro.

The conference was held on the moon in order to evade reporters.

“Listen,” he told this reporter as well as the other assorted inkslingers from such illustrious papers as the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Peoria Journal Star. “I’m pretty peeved right now. We closed this bistro during the summer because we didn’t want whiny Goddamn students to voice their stupid complaints. Then we held this conference on the moon and you have

the audacity to come all the way up here to pester me with your pointless questions.”

A visibly agitated Fendelson responded tremulously to the questions pelted by the legpeople there assembled. When asked why the Interior Design Café was closed, the Vice-Viceroy spewed some totally bogus rationalization: “Listen, we don’t want to be liable. The place didn’t have its finances in order. I mean, we controlled the financial end of things and didn’t allow the Interior Design Students’ Association access to the books, so maybe it’s our fault, but after this two-year experiment, it’s become obvious that students cannot ‘run’ their own food services, even under direct, authoritarian supervision from the all-powerful, all-wise administration.”

Pressed, Fendelson turned remarkably frank: “Listen, here’s why we really did it. We hate student-run initiatives because even if they don’t use the McGill name, they could influence the way corporate donors think of us and make us lose the big bucks.

Furthermore, we have a perfect captive public here: a bunch of students with no alternatives on campus but whatever crappy food contractor we hire. That’s some more dough right there. How do you think me and the rest of the admin got so much rhino?

We’re rolling in it, mothertruckers.

FENDELSON OUT.” Meanwhile, a group of curious Moonpeople had gathered in a semi-circle around the conference. A thoughtful conversation on the nature of plutocracy broke out amongst them.

Architecture Café unilaterally closed by admin

MINUS 425

New Brunswick premier proposes teaching First Nations languages in schools

PLUS 50

McGill varsity sports teams demoted to clubs status HMB calls for tuition deregulation, supposedly to increase financial aid (among other reasons)

MINUS 5 MINUS 25

Most financial aid will go to grads

EVEN

ELO member Mike Edwards dies

MINUS 10

Edwards killed by freak bale of hay Iraqi TV show pulls pranks on celebrities by planting fake bombs in their cars & pretending to arrest them

EVEN MINUS 15

TV show has catchy tunes

PLUS 1

Projet Montréal cracking down on noise pollution on the Plateau

MINUS 5

It’s gotten colder, which is nice

PLUS 10

TOTAL

MINUS 424

LAST WEEK’S TOTAL

MINUS 141

Métromètre is a weekly quality-of-life index, wherein news items and other notable happenings are given totally arbitrary scores that will let you know how good or bad life is going. Let us know if you want to see something on the index: compendium@mcgilldaily.com.

Where are your manners?

Pogo New for The McGill Daily

SHIT I FOUND

“No gain is to be made by writing out the names of the eighty-eight sections [of the book], for their titles are too obtuse to be of use at this point in the exploration. The most that can be said in this description of the contents is that the final section deals with Happiness, which should be incentive enough to begin reading.”

From the electronic table of contents for Buddha is dead: Nietzsche and the dawn of European Zen, by Manu Bazzano.

To the dude jostling me in line at Gert’s, despite the fact that there are six people (tops) in the bar: As if campus swarming with students weren’t enough. Having already gone through a couple agoraphobic fits in the past 15 minutes as I searched for a coursepack (forget it), coffee (no dice) and then food at Franx, I come down to the relative calm of Gerts and get in line only for you to amble in with your two bros and amply demonstrate your total lack of understanding of the concept of space. Yes, in fact, when you throw your beefy elbow around, it will hit the person next to you. When you swing your backpack about, you got it – gonna hit them. Try to pay attention next time, butthead.

Fuck This! is an ad-hoc, no-names, stress-relieving rant column. Mail me your jeremiads, as long as they’re not hateful, at fuckthis@mcgilldaily. com. Anonymity guaranteed!

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