Vol101Issu3

Volume 101, Issue 3

September 12, 2011 mcgilldaily.com

MTL GraFFiTi Debate rages on

McGill THE

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3

McTavish Reservoir floods lower campus Erin Hudson

The McGill Daily

O

n Thursday evening, water began streaming out of the McTavish Reservoir on Docteur-Penfield, above McGill’s lower campus. Water from the reservoir flooded McTavish and affected parts of campus bordering the street.

The reservoir holds 37 million gallons of water and is owned by the City of Montreal. According to building personnel, the flood was caused by a pipe bursting.

McGill Security, Montreal police, and firefighters sealed off the area by blocking traffic at various points around it: at the intersections of Docteur-Penfield and Peel, McTavish and Sherbrooke, and the Roddick gates.

Wallace Sealy, SSMU security supervisor, stood at the top of McTavish to direct people away from the street. He said he has never seen anything like the flood in the six years he has worked at McGill.

The flow was largely restricted to McTavish, leading to minor erosion of asphalt along with the “experimental piercings” of grass on the street.

McTavish was roped off by McGill security until 9 p.m. Thursday night as emergency services and University employees worked to remove water and prevent accumulated moisture within affected buildings.

Jim Nicell, Associate Vice-Principal (University Affairs), said that water infiltration was the cause of most flood-related damages on campus.

The key buildings impacted by the flood were the Student Service Point, the McLennan-Redpath library complex, and Wilson Hall.

“We thought there’d be extensive damage given the sheer vol-

ume of the flow but…the reports came back [of] surprisingly little damage, with the exception being Wilson Hall,” Nicell said.

Wilson Hall houses the McGill School’s of Nursing and the School of Social Work. Nicell said that the building has a notorious reputation for flooding and, as a result, there were not many materials being stored in the basement areas, which were subject to flooding.

“With Wilson Hall, we felt that there was a potential danger, so we shut down the [electrical] systems,” he said.

The building was closed without electricity until 2:30 p.m. on Friday and classes were moved to other locations. The building was still in the process of being dried out on Friday afternoon. Nicell said that the cost of the damage to Wilson Hall was unclear and remedial cleaning work still needed to be done.

Nicell said the first step of the University’s Emergency Management Plan was to bring in key people such as electricians, McGill security services and employees of Facilities, Operations, and Development services. He said that custodians, many of whom were working the night shift on Thursday, were mobilized to assist with water removal in the buildings affected by the flood.

McGill Building Services’ on-call supervisor, Michel Ducharme, said that employees have basic training to handle emergencies such as a flood. However, he explained that Building Service employees are not specialized emergency workers.

“In major or very specific situations where the safety of the employees could be an issue…we call a private company outside to come on campus – normally we call Rosco,” he said.

The Rosco Group specializes in disaster recovery. Their operations include disaster restoration and

cleaning, document restoration, construction, and renovation and water damage recovery.

Rosco arrived on Thursday night and continued working on campus throughout the day on Friday.

The McLennan-Redpath library complex also experienced flooding at the basement level and was evacuated an hour after the flood began on McTavish.

“Some paper items were waterlogged [and] subjected to some of the flow that actually came in more from the ceiling and downward,” Nicell said, noting that library personnel had to move materials from the basement very quickly as the flooding occurred.

Sheehan Moore, a McGill student and former Daily editor, was in the library and witnessed the flooding.

“If you listen at the emergency exit [by the emergency staircase on the first floor of McLennan] you can hear water pouring in,” he said on Thursday. Moore witnessed a special collections librarian running upstairs.

“She was completely soaked,” he said.

According to Colleen Cook, the Trenholme Dean of Libraries, there is a library disaster plan for emergencies such as Thursday’s flood. She and her colleagues were at McGill late Thursday night working to handle the aftermath of the flood.

“You have to take action within certain time frames and all of that happened beautifully,” she said.

The soaked books will be freezedried, which, according to Cook, is one of the most effective methods of drying documents.

“If you can get materials into a freeze dry then the recovery of virtually all, if not most, of the materials is practically assured,” she said.

Cook said that the books that were damaged in the flood were “eclectic” and did not have large value within the library’s collection. She noted that

Vicotr Tangermann | The McGill Daily

McLennan Library, Wilson Hall, and Service Point flooded

Firefighters block street on McTavish near Student Service Point. some materials were digitized and would not need to be replaced.

Nicell said that he expected the materials in the library to be fully restored.

Service Point, at the base of McTavish, was another key building that experienced flooding. The building was flooded by a few inches on Thursday, however, it re-opened Friday morning and was fully functional. Nicell noted that lasting effects

might include damage to hardwood floors that could buckle over time.

He said that it was too premature to begin estimating costs from the damages or if the City would be held responsible. McGill will meet with City officials and insurers will have to assess buildings.

Ducharme said that any flood damage to buildings under the purview of Building Services would be covered under McGill’s insurance plan.

Student societies denounce Mendelson contract extension AUS Council votes not to sign memo Michael Lee-Murphy The McGill Daily

M

orton Mendelson will keep his job for another two years after his contract was extended this past summer.

The decision to extend Mendelson’s term as Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) has drawn the ire of student politicians, who have begun circulating a memo denouncing what they deem a lack of consultation about the matter.

On June 5, the SSMU executive sent a memo to Provost Anthony Masi inquiring about a committee to review Mendelson’s contract.

After SSMU sent a follow-up memo on June 17, Masi replied in a memo that he had made the decision to extend

the contract, and that it was approved

by Principal Heather Munroe-Blum.

Masi’s memo also promises to “work closely with the SSMU in assessing the structure and functioning of the Office of the Deputy Provost in assuring this important position at McGill University be clearly defined so that we will be able to find an appropriate candidate to fill it when Prof. Mendelson steps down in 2013.”

SSMU President Maggie Knight said that the student union executive “was expecting there to be student representation on a committee…in keeping with established practice.”

The McGill Charter of Students’ Rights states that the university “has an obligation to ensure that administrative decisions are made, or actions taken, with fair regard for the known

and legitimate interests of students.”

In response to the contract extension, the presidents of 11 McGill undergraduate societies, along with SSMU, have signed a memo condemning a lack of consultation.

The memo is addressed to Masi and will be sent today. It identifies a “lack of trust in existing consultation processes.”

“Engaging in consultation about a key issue affecting students only after a decision has been made does not appear to be acting to remedy,” the memo reads.

Mendelson became the first-ever Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) when the position was created in 2006.

According to the McGill website, the position is “a central liaison among the University’s senior

administration, faculties, student organizations and Senate, with a view to ensuring that impact on student life and learning is factored into decision-making.”

Mendelson was a target of student anger last year, as the administration’s primary point person after the closure of the Architecture Café. The cafe was the only student-run eatery on campus, and was operated by the Architecture Students Association.

Notably, the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) declined to sign the letter. While AUS President Jade Calver would not comment on her executive’s opposition to signing the memo, several sources from AUS have said that much of the opposition to the memo had to do with the AUS’s tense relationship with Mendelson.

Last February, after years of AUS

financial mismanagement came to light, Mendelson withheld $90,000 in student fees from the society.

The minutes from Wednesday’s AUS council meeting were not available before The Daily went to print early Saturday morning.

AUS councilor John Cohen was one of six people who voted in favor of signing the memo. 24 councilors voted against signing the memo.

“AUS is certainly in a difficult position, and I understand what Jade [Calver] said about the need to tread softly with regard to Provost Mendelson, but that doesn’t mean that the values need to be compromised,” Cohen said, referring to student consultation.

Mendelson was unavailable for comment Friday, due to administration meetings.

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onstruction of “District Griffin” continues despite residents’ doubts over its effectiveness at revitalizing the Griffintown neighbourhood.

Developer Devimco, along with its partners Group Cholette, the Fonds immobilier de solidarité (FTQ), and the City of Montreal, have invested $745 million in their plan to transform the area.

The first of three phases of construction is currently under way, and will include 1,375 condo units, a hotel, 200,000 square feet of office space, shops, and other businesses.

The next two phases will include 1,045 residential units, as well as office and commercial space.

In 2008, Devimco proposed a much larger Projet Griffintown that would have brought, among other things, big box stores and a concert hall to the neighbourhood, but the group altered their proposition after strong community opposition.

Jeffrey Dungen, spokesperson for the Committee for Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown, said he was happy the project has been scaled back.

“But the big problem is really that the zoning from Projet Griffintown still exists. That got

voted in and hasn’t been repealed,” said Dungen.

Griffintown residents and city officials have also expressed concern over the number of affordable and social housing units included in the developments. With the announcement of Phase One, Devimco promised to offer 206 affordable housing units and 275 social housing units, surpassing the City’s requirement that they comprise 30 per cent of new residential units.

While Devimco President Serge Goulet insisted that the company would honour its promises, community members like Dungen are upset over the placement of these units within a small triangle of land bordered by Ottawa, Murray and de la Montagne streets.

“The whole idea of having social housing is that it’s inclusive,” said Dungen, explaining that a lot of people took huge offense to this triangle becoming a “dumping ground for social housing,” while residents paying full rent in the taller towers will enjoy better views.

Residents have also voiced opposition to the high height allowances that developers have negotiated. Construction on the second phase of development is set to begin in November.

“The best we can do for the future phases is to ensure… that they tailor everything to the changing neighbourhood,” said Dungen. “We’re not going to go and jump in front of bulldozers or anything like that.”

Photos by Matthias Heilke | The McGill Daily

Griffintown is in the midst of a controversial three phase redevelopment project.

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5

Montreal cracks down on graffiti Boroughs impose fines and spark debate over intellectual property rights Emily Meikle

The McGill Daily

I

n light of the City of Montreal’s recent efforts to crack down on vandalism, at least two of Montreal’s boroughs, those of Côte Des Neiges-Notre Dame de Grâce (CDG-NDG) and Saint-Léonard, have begun charging fines of up to $4,000 to business owners who do not remove, or “buff”, graffiti in a timely fashion. Individual home owners may be charged as much as $2,000, and, if caught, the artists themselves may be fined up to $100.

This system has some members of the community upset, claiming that to fine the property owner is a misdirection of punishment away from the lawbreaker.

“People don’t like the fact that they didn’t ask to have graffiti on their building and now they’re going to get a fine because they have graffiti on their house or their garage,” said Sebastien Pitre, owner of a graffiti removal company called Solutions Graffiti in an interview with The Daily.

Pitre, who receives about 70 percent of his business from the City of Montreal and its boroughs, said that to prevent graffiti, the issue needs to be taken seriously. “Right now some people think [graffiti] is very, very bad, but some people think it’s just a little painting on the wall,” he said.

Pitre spoke about how to unify the perception of graffiti and make changes. “First of all they need to make a real law, make people respect that law and be very strict... Put more police officers on the graffiti problem and really take care of it. Everybody’s talking about graffiti, but nobody’s taking real action about it.”

Police impose fines on graffiti artists and property owners.

The fines are the latest effort in a city-wide battle which has been raging since the 1990s. In 2007, Montreal spent $1.3 million removing graffiti.

In other boroughs, such as Verdun, police have begun to send bills covering clean-up costs to adult offenders and to the parents of youth offenders. While this solution has been met with less opposition than the fines introduced in CDN-NDG and Saint-Léonard, it has met with some opposition.

According to a Montreal graffiti artist who goes by the name Sohoe, “They’ll charge a few hundred dollars to buff a wall that would take about thirty dollars to do with latex paint.”

Some also remain sceptical that the threat of serious fines will be effective in reducing graffiti.

“A crackdown is just a way for the authorities to give the impression that they’re addressing the problem, but I sincerely doubt that it would do anything,” an anonymous graffiti artist told The Daily. “For me, it doesn’t change anything. It’s an urban legend, a news headline to reassure the public that everything’s under control, but graffiti is impossible to control.”

While the City’s crackdown on graffiti has prompted property owners and graffiti artists to enter into debate over which party owns the graffiti and should therefore be held responsible for fines, a second

Matthias Heilke | The McGill Daily

long-standing debate around graffiti has been reopened concerning the intellectual property rights of graffiti artists. A panel addressing this issue was hosted by McGill’s Faculty of Law in 2009.

“They assume [the artists] are ignorant people with no means to legal representation,” Sterling Downey, a street artist and publisher of Under Pressure magazine, told the McGill Reporter in 2009.

“The problem is they don’t have any authorization to put graffiti on the building,” said Pitre. “How can they come after me saying that I’m not allowed to remove their graffiti if they were not allowed to put the graffiti there in the first place? If that ever happens to me, I’m going to call

my lawyer and have fun with that.”

“Sometimes it may look like art,” said Francine Morin, a spokesperson for Verdun borough mayor Claude Trudel, in an interview with The Daily, “but they don’t have permission to put it there, so it’s not art.”

Some artists, such as Sohoe, remain unconvinced that anything can be done to preserve their intellectual property rights.

“I probably should say that I feel like my art’s being stolen or something...” Sohoe told The Daily, “but I think in all reality, unless you have permission to do that, then you’ve sort of given up your right to take ownership of that work... How’s someone supposed to come and ask you? Even if they had to get permission, there’d be no way of getting it without proving that you did this illegal thing.”

Attempts to reconcile the city’s wish to reduce vandalism and the rights of the artists to self-expression have been made in the past; Montreal is home to five legal graffiti walls. However, as one artist who preferred to remain anonymous pointed out, “[Graffiti]’s in the streets and that’s where it has to be. Legal walls don’t work. They ruin the point of it.”

Sohoe is optimistic about the future of graffiti in Montreal.

“There’s always going to be graffiti,” he said. He noted the exclusivity of graffiti but said that he thinks there will always be people willing to do it.

“The graffiti writer, his thing is that he’s putting graffiti out there and yeah, the public may see it, but it’s also more for the graffiti community and the notoriety that he’s going to receive from the community for putting tags out there,” Sohoe added.

Police launch controversial surveillance project Activists speak out against SPVM project mandated to monitor “marginal” groups Jessica Lukawiecki The McGill Daily

A

ctivists across Montreal are protesting a new Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) project, calling it a breach of fundamental human rights.

The project, made public in May, is called Guet des activités et des mouvements marginaux et anarchists (surveillance of marginal and anarchist groups’ activities), or GAMMA. According to an SPVM press release, it was launched in response to the May 1st anti-capitalist demonstration in downtown Montreal at which six police officers were injured.

However, it is unclear when exactly the project began. Jacques Robinette, assistant Montreal police chief and head of special investigations, told the Gazette the project

has been in existence since January.

Leftist student advocacy group Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) has filed a complaint to the Quebec Human Rights Commission about the alleged involvement of GAMMA in four student arrests, three of whom were ASSÉ executives.

The students were arrested for their involvement in protest activities on March 24 and 31, including the occupation of Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s office.

ASSÉ has argued that the arrests stand in direct violation of section 10 of the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states: “Every person has a right to full and equal recognition and exercise of his human rights and freedoms, without distinction, exclusion or preference based on…political convictions.”

The SPVM responded in a press release, saying that “when crimes

are being committed, however, SPVM officers must clearly take steps to stop them,” while reiterating their full support for the freedom of expression as guaranteed by the Quebec and Canadian Charters of Rights and Freedoms.

Coalition contre la repression et abus policier member Alexandre Popovic has filed similar complaints.

“In the provincial [charter] we have this protection against discrimination, including discrimination based on political conviction,” said Popovic.

“It’s not only an attack against anarchists and anyone else who defines themselves as an anarchist, but it’s also an attack against this section of the charter.”

Université du Québec à Montréal professor and anti-police brutality advocate, Francis Dupuis-Déri, told The Daily in an interview, “In principle, you are not supposed to be targeted for your political beliefs – that is not supposed to happen in a liberal

GAMMA was launched to monitor ‘marginal’ groups

society like Canada. That would not be fair according to the idea that the legal system is blind with regard to race, religion and political opinions.”

“The problem is not that you are an anarchist, but that you are smashing a window. So targeting a specific political ideology is problematic from

Ian Murphy | The McGill Daily

this perspective,” he continued.

Speaking about recent protests, Dupuis-Déri said, “What should be known is that the reaction of police with regards to social movements is generally not motivated by what people do in the streets, but by who they are.”

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The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

MUNACA takes issue with administrator emails

What’s the haps

Striking non-academic workers gain campus support

AIESEC Info Session Wednesday, September 14, 6 p.m.

Leacock 232 The Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales (AIESEC) is holding an info session this Wednesday. The studentrun organization, one of the largest in the world, offers exchange programs for students all around the world.

Green Night Tuesday, September 13, 5 p.m.

Thomson House The official orientation event of the PGSS Environment Committee.

Learn about sustainability at McGill, activities of the PGSS environment committee, and projects funded by the Sustainability Projects Fund. There will be free refreshments, including homemade garden dishes. This year’s speaker is Samantha Fink of the Thomson House garden project. The project includes container garden vegetables and herbs along with a permaculture design of plants placed at various locations around Thomson House.

Picketers’ ranks were reinforced by members of both campus and provincial unions last week.

Queen Arsem-O'Malley The McGill Daily

S

tudent and faculty mobilization marked the first day of conciliation meetings between McGill and its largest union last Thursday, whose meetings are now being mediated by a government official.

Students from the SSMU Mobilization Committee (Mob Squad), members of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM), and a number of faculty members joined picket lines on Thursday morning in a show of solidarity with the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA).

The group marched from the Roddick Gates to the James Administration building and the Milton Gates, then crossed campus and joined picketers at McTavish and Sherbrooke.

Members of the Board of Governors (BoG) were also scheduled to meet on campus Thursday morning.

According to Maggie Knight, SSMU President and the undergraduate student representative on the BoG, the meeting was an orientation for new board members.

“You could hear [the march] when it came by the building, but there wasn’t really any formal acknowledgement of it,” Knight said.

AGSEM, with help from the Association of McGill Undergraduate Support Employees (AMUSE) and the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), organized a lunch at the picket line to show support for the strike and to increase visibility to their own members. The Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), of which AGSEM is a member, has aided the union through both legal advising and funding for the luncheon. CSN also provided a sound system for Thursday, which AGSEM used at each picket line to speak in solidarity.

“We had a lot of volunteers come out to support our efforts,” said Jonathan Mooney, a member of AGSEM’s bargaining team.

He estimated that more than fifty members attended to learn about AGSEM positions and issues.

A group of about 15 faculty members from the McGill Faculty Labour Action Group (MFLAG) were also among those in attendance. The group, which formed last week, is still deliberating as to future actions, but has plans to organize another group to march in picket lines for early next week.

Administration updates staff and students Provost Anthony Masi sent a message to all McGill staff on Thursday outlining the University’s position on negotiations. The email

– which MUNACA members did not receive because they are locked out of their McGill emails – included a disclaimer that Masi is “not at the bargaining table and this letter is not addressed, not designed to influence, members of the MUNACA bargaining unit.”

Masi then detailed 19 points that staff “should know” about negotiations. Among the first issues discussed were the fact that McGill has accumulated a deficit of over $100 million on its operating budget, and that a further $6 million will be added to the deficit for the fiscal year 2012 budget.

MUNACA president Kevin Whittaker said the union will be responding to the email, and will prepare a formal letter to address some of the issues raised. The McGill Inter-union Council, comprised of MUNACA, AGSEM, AMUSE and AMURE, are also preparing a separate statement in response to the email.

“There are legal restrictions on how communication [about negotiations] is to transpire,” Whittaker said.

“From what we see Mr. Masi doing, he’s being careful, [but] it may be borderline because he’s not supposed to be negotiating outside of the negotiation table.”

An email from Michael Di Grappa, VP Administration and Finance, was then sent to all staff and students due to “feedback from faculty and students that the McGill community is seeking greater clar-

Sergey Tsynkevych for The McGill Daily

ity” about disputes.

In a section of the email titled “pension differences,” Di Grappa states that “MUNACA has asked to be able to veto any changes to the [pension] plan,” which covers all employees of the University. Currently, McGill’s offer is that they will agree to consult systematically with MUNACA and other employee groups.

Whittaker took issue with Di Grappa’s wording, explaining that MUNACA is asking for “a committee that has equal say, so that the only way to come to an agreement is with consensus. So that means everybody, if you want to call it veto power, would have that power. [Veto power] would not be unique to us.”

MUNACA suspects scab labour Di Grappa’s email also reminds students and staff that certain managers are able to complete work normally done by MUNACA workers, and that “McGill is respecting those provisions of the law.”

MUNACA’s website has a form for reporting suspected scab labour; Whittaker said that the union has received “a huge number” of reports.

According to the Quebec Labour Code, once reports are received, the Minister of Labour may send an investigator to decide whether provisions to protect strikers’ work have been broken. Government investigations into MUNACA complaints began on Thursday.

Aboriginal Awareness Week Monday, September 12 to Thursday, September 15 Downtown campus The four-day Aboriginal Awareness Week will be hosting events around McGill and Montreal this week.

The Opening Ceremony is at 8 a.m. today at the First People’s House. Other events include a film screening in the Redpath Museum Auditorium on Tuesday at 6 p.m., the First Nations Garden Experience at the Montreal Botanical Gardens on Wednesday, and a media panel on representations of aboriginals in public spaces in the Lev Bukhman room in Shatner at 2 p.m. on Thursday. All events are free and open to the public.

SSMU Council Thursday, September 15, 6 p.m.

Lev Bukhman Room, Shatner The first SSMU Council session of the year meets on Thursday in the Lev Bukhman room on the second floor of Shatner.

Activities Night Tuesday, September 13 and Wednesday, September 14, 2:30 p.m.

Shatner cafeteria Come to Shatner on Tuesday and Wednesday nights where The Daily and over a hundred other campus clubs and services will fight for first year email addresses.

Add/Drop ends!

Tuesday, September 13

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The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

7

PM’s new communications director ignites calls of “francophobia�

Quebec group mobilizes against non-French speaking director

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he recent appointment of Angelo Persichilli as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s communications director has sparked controversy in Quebec.

Persichilli, a former Toronto Star columnist and editor of the Italianlanguage newspaper Corriere Canadese, speaks English and Italian but cannot speak French.

This prompted a Quebec group to file a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission regarding the appointment.

Gilles Rheuame, from the Ligue quĂŠbĂŠcoise contre la francophobie canadienne filed the complaint with the Commission on behalf of the Ligue, calling the appointment and previous comments made by Persichilli “absolutely unacceptable.â€? He claims that the fact Persichilli is unable to speak French violates the rights of francophone Canadians. “It is against the constitution, against Canadian laws governing official languages and violates federal

rules about linguistic aspects of civil servants of Canada,� said Rheaume.

Section 20 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom states: “Any member of the public in Canada has the right to communicate with, and to receive available services from, any head or central office of an institution of the Parliament or government of Canada in English or French.�

Rheaume continued, “We feel that Francophone Canadians, especially those who are members of the media, will not have access to the Prime Minister’s communications director.�

The Ligue has also criticized Persichilli for comments he made in an April 2010 Toronto Star column. In the column, Persichilli writes, “Many are tired of the annoying lament from a province that keeps yelling at those who pay part of its bills and are concerned by the over-representation of francophones in our bureaucracy, our Parliament and our institutions.�

In the same article Persichilli also argues that “special treatment given to Quebec is balkanizing this country so that all provinces are

starting to consider Ottawa only as an ATM machine.�

Rheuame is calling for Harper to fire Persichilli, saying that the comments made in his columns are “pure racism� and that “if we spoke this way about any other group in Canada in the same way he talks about the French Canadians in Quebec it would be a scandal.�

Persichilli told the Globe and Mail he will treat Quebeckers with the “utmost respect,� and that he will learn French, though he does not know how long it will take.

According to Rheuame, mobilization against Persichilli’s appointment will continue. “We will continue to inform the other French countries in the world who are members with Canada of the [International Organization of the Francophonie] of this appointment,� he said.

Persichilli’s first day in office was last Tuesday. He took over the position from former communications director Dimitri Soudas, who announced that he would be stepping down in June.

Persichilli could not be reached for comment by The Daily.

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Commentary

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

8

A privilege or a right How our systems of education are hurting our ability to learn Alex Briggs

The McGill Daily

E

ducation is supposed to enlighten the general public – especially in a democracy – and to empower them to live healthy and informed lives. Unfortunately, the reality of our school system today falls far short of these ideals.

Instead, the university system is a devious mechanism of social control. An education has become a highly effective mix of product and privilege. It is sold to the masses at such a high price that they are shackled in debt for the first and most creative years of their adulthood. At the same time, not all university educations are created equal, and those privileged few able to afford the highest tier are fast-tracked nearly automatically into positions of continued power.

There are scholarships that allow for some amount of social mobility, but these are few enough that the wealthy ruling class remains firmly in control. With the tuition hikes that students face, we now find ourselves at the forefront of this issue.

To be fair, there is logic in the argument for tuition hikes: the diplomas that we are paying for will allow us to secure higher-paying jobs, if we choose to seek them out.

In this way, going to university is an investment in ourselves, and it is unfair to ask the general public –

which on average makes less money than we expect to – to subsidize us with their taxes. But this argument depends on student motivation generated by striving towards an elite class, and the reality of the existence of this elite has become a burden that we cannot support. It has become apparent that we need a different model. We can see it already.

Austerity measures make life for the non-affluent more difficult, higher tuition makes social mobility a myth, and the empowered classes languish in their security. The very few and very bright are only allowed to move up from the lower classes through scholarships, and they do revitalize the upper class to some extent.

However, their innovation is outweighed by the mass of the unmotivated rich, who cause our bureaucracy and management to bloat and stagnate. For a functional capitalism to exist, new ideas must have the chance to be developed and tested in the free market. This idea is called “free enterprise.” Unfortunately, it’s not actually free. It takes a huge amount of money to put new ideas into practice, and that money has to come from somewhere. In most cases, this money is held by the already wealthy, and this is a major force of stasis. These people have a vested interest in maintaining certain processes – the most problematic ones, such as fossil industries – because they own these industries, and continue to profit from them.

This is why a free university independent from industry and capable of investigations in self-determined directions is essential. This gives the much larger (and often more motivated) population access to the free market in the way that its creators intended.

With all the challenges facing our world, we need everyone’s input and ideas if we are to have a chance at building a sustainable future. Without this access, free enterprise is just a term used by irresponsible oligarchy that can explain away any need to tend to those less fortunate in terms of “equal opportunity.” In this light, allowing tuition increases is just another step towards a more corporate model of education. A patent factory where undergrads are only consumers and where graduate students are underpaid workers. We must stop these tuition hikes in their tracks, and we must change our schools of privilege into schools of freedom.

Alex Briggs is a U3 Engineering student. Please contact him with ideas and dreams at alexander. briggs@mail.mcgill.ca. The Mob Squad is a horizontal assembly of students concerned with the issues raised in this piece, such as tuition rises and austerity, please contact them to help organize and resist at mcgill.mob.squad@gmail.com.

Rosie Dobson | The McGill Daily

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Commentary

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

9

Witnessing assault at the metro station An account of the injustices on our streets The McGill Daily

T

wo weeks ago, I was outside the Papineau metro when I saw someone assault a homeless man. He was standing near a pay phone talking to another man in cut-offs and a knit fleece sweater.

As I reached for the station door, the man in cut-offs backhand slapped the homeless man. “What did you call me?” the aggressor shouted.

The homeless man backed against the wall, turning towards the station.

His nose was bleeding. He moved into the station and then doubled over as blood dripped onto the station floor.

Shocked, I followed the homeless man inside and stood beside him.

Looking around, I realized that no one was coming towards us to offer help.

I appeared to be the only direct witness, and no one else seemed to register that there had just been an assault.

I turned to the man and

asked if he was all right. He stared at me and gestured at the blood on the floor. He mimed using something to stem the blood from his nose.

I went over to the STM ticket booth with an agent inside. I explained – with big gestures – what happened. The agent didn’t even move from the booth to get a better view of the man who’d been hurt.

He leaned in to speak through the microphone and asked me calmly, “Does the man want the police or ambulance to be called?”

I looked over at the man two meters away, his nose still bleeding onto the floor, and I realized that I hadn’t thought to ask. I had assumed that he would want some kind of authority to become involved. When I asked him later, he dismissed the question with a wave of the hand and an eye roll. I asked for paper towels.

The agent ripped off several paper towels from a large roll and

again if he was ok. He replied that he needed money for medicine – did I have some spare change? I dug through my pockets.

Still, no STM worker had directly approached us.

I got in line once again in front of the STM ticket booth. Waiting for my turn, a loud commotion suddenly broke out. The man had left the station and was face-to-face with the aggressor. He had returned. With both arms spread wide, the aggressor was yelling and the man was retreating once again back into the station, abandoning his backpack outside at the feet of the assailant.

I pushed past the line and shouted at the agent inside to alert him that the attack was happening. The last part of their confrontation echoed through the station as the homeless man pounded the nearest door with his fist in frustration. The agent picked up the phone and told me to wait for the authorities to

slid them through the small divot in the ticket counter to me. Then, I carried the towels back to the man and asked him

arrive.

Meanwhile, the man, his nose no longer bleeding, was upset and agitated. He began pacing around the station, speaking to himself, looking through windows to see where the aggressor had gone. He retrieved his backpack quickly, then took off.

Across the station, an STM worker was cleaning the floors on the inside of the metro turnstiles. She eventually made her way over to the bloodstains. She spoke to the agent inside the booth, mimicking the actions the homeless man had made around the station just before he had left. They laughed together.

I looked out the window and saw what appeared to be an STM security vehicle. On the other side of the station, I saw the aggressor in line to board a bus. I ran to the STM van and found it empty.

Five minutes later, an STM responder carrying a walkie-talkie came walking back to the van. I recounted what I had seen and how both parties had left. He told me that, unless I was hurt myself, their policy is to take down information from the person who was assaulted.

He told me that if I wanted to file the description, I should go to the STM website.

The situation was shocking and deplorable. The STM neglected it until they were forced to acknowledge it. The man who was hit wasn’t offered any kind of protection from his aggressor. To receive the most minimal level of treatment for his injury – the paper towels – it took my asking. At no point did STM workers even become involved in the situation.

The STM’s handling of the situation gave the aggressor full freedom to act with impunity; he, or anyone else so inclined, can essentially harm whomever they wants if the victim is not judged worth protecting or defending according to the on-site authorities.

Not to mention the downright cruelty of back handing someone with full force is shocking in itself.

Violence with no restraint is unnerving. The purpose of a security force is to protect and defend against the exercise of that kind of violence, and that system failed entirely in this case.

The right to be in public spaces, to feel protected, and to be assured bodily safety is a right that in practice not all have.

There are many assumptions and stereotypes concerning people who are homeless. But none of those judgments excuse the disrespect, diffidence, callousness, and neglect that the man at Papineau station experienced from the STM and bystanders. Those views disconnected the person from his humanity. I saw it happen: people continued to stream in and out of the metro, dodging the blockage, and STM workers continued their work.

Erin Hudson is a U3 Political Science and Middle East Studies student. She is currently a Daily News editor. You can email her at erin.hudson@mail. mcgill.ca.

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10 Features

Getting by or getting high It’s easy to forget that, for many, “study drugs” are part of everyday life Shannon Palus

The McGill Daily

“I

hate that people take ADHD medications to study,” Katie Ellston* says to me. We’re halfway through our first round of raspberry blondes at Brutopia. It’s the end of summer.

“I’d give a million dollars not to have to pop a pill every day” she says. And she begins telling me about a side of so-called “study drugs” that I had never quite stopped to consider.

The tale of the student who takes ADD/ADHD medication sans prescription is, to the modern day university student, a familiar one. Mythical student Alex (a friend of a friend, or a character in a news story) is a great student, but needs more time for studying, the soccer team, and partying. Alex finds there are meds that improve concentration and keep you up all night. (“Yeah, that’s exactly the type of person who drives me nuts,” says Ellston.)

Alex buys the medication, probably the short-acting Ritalin or Dexodrin, from a friend who has both ADHD and a prescription that provides them with more pills than they need. Alex has a

few sweaty, red-eyed nights, but has plans to work at Goldman Sachs and live on Park Avenue. The drug will wash in and out of Alex’s system and leave not a trace.

We know this story by now. If you don’t take concentration meds, you know how to get them, and if you don’t know how to get them, go ask your friends. I’ll bet $5 that you can find a

pill in the time it would take you to read this newspaper cover to cover. A recent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal explains that an estimated 5 to 35 per cent of students abuse prescription stimulants. The editorial is titled “Time to address stimulant abuse on our campuses,” and calls for the de-normalization of their use. The adults don’t think we’re alright.

But Ellston is not like Alex. During the school year, she takes a pill every day. She’s had a prescription for Concerta – Ritalin’s long-acting cousin – since she was diagnosed with ADHD at 15. “It’s a hardcore drug,” she says. She feels that people who take “study drugs” to try to get ahead in academics don’t understand that. When she goes across the border to the U.S., she can only take so much of the drug – one pill for every day she is traveling – with her and she has to be carrying a doctor’s note. Further, she feels that people taking the medications casually trivializes her illness, which is part of her everyday life.

Concerta, like the other medications commonly used to treat ADD/ADHD – or like caffeine, or cocaine – is a stimulant. That is, it increases the amount of dopamine in the user’s brain. With Concerta, Ellston experiences many of the physiological aspects of an addiction. On days during the school year when she does not take her medication – when she forgets or wakes up after 10 a.m. (if she takes it later than this she cannot fall asleep at night) – she experiences headaches, nausea, and slight depression, much like a cocaine user coming off a high or a coffee addict running too late for work to pop by Starbucks. During the summer, Ellston chooses to go off Concerta, and she has up to a week of nausea and depression. She refers to this period of time as “detox.” “Detox is hell,” she adds. She’s going to start taking Concerta again next week, she tells me, once classes start gearing up: “I’ll basically be high for a couple of days.”

Concerta produces the same effect in people with ADD/ADHD that it does for people without, though the improvement in concentration is more dramatic for people who have a clinically diagnosable difficulty concentrating. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how it works though. The literature is a string of “might”s, and “probably”s. The thinking goes that upping the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain – which ADD/ADHD medication does – improves concentration. People with ADD/ADHD may naturally have less of these neurotransmitters, the conventional wisdom goes, which is probably why taking Concerta can

bring them up to the level of concentration that most people experience without the help of drugs.

All stimulants have the effect of improving concentration to some degree. Robert Franck, the Clinical Director of McGill Mental Health Service, says that, more than once, he’s had patients come in with concentration problems that turn out to be ADD/ADHD, and has realized that they have been unconsciously self-medicating by drinking tons of coffee. (“There are lots of reasons people drink coffee,” he says, when I, in a moment of hypochondria, mention that I drink

tons of coffee.) Like Ellston, he doesn’t like the fact that students take medication for concentration without a prescription. Though the drugs are relatively safe, they come with a suite of risks and side effects, and their use should be carefully monitored by a health professional – one who knows what other drugs you’re on, too.

Hypertension, arrhythmias, and psychotic episodes are at the extreme end of bad things that can happen from taking ADD/ADHD medication. The CMAJ editorial rattles these off, and adds that, though rare, overdoses are “potentially lethal.”

These are all true and valid reasons not to abuse ADD/ADHD medication, explains Franck, “But scare tactics don’t really work.” Further, it’s not just potential physical harm that makes him concerned about medication being used to study. Franck explains that taking drugs as a band-aid solution to, say, anxiety about not being able to complete all your assignments during finals, is to ignore other problems and to potentially mask clinical anxiety or depression. Franck’s motto is, “medication when necessary, but not necessarily medication.”

When Ellston was diagnosed with ADHD – a process of elimination of sorts – the medication was the last step of her treatment plan, and remains just one part of her regimen.

In addition to taking the drug, Ellston sees a therapist every week. Through the Office for Students with Disabilities, she’s allowed four hours instead of three to complete exams, and a short break to walk around during an exam. She also gets to bring in a fidgeter – a small object like a koosh ball or a bean bag that she can play with.

She knows her own study habits incredibly well. She doesn’t work on any one assignment for more than half an hour at a time. “The information won’t stick if I try and make myself,” she says. She has a CD-case style binder with 100s of DVDs in her apartment; she loves unwinding in front of the television on Saturdays by watching Harry Potter film after Harry Potter film. “But, see, that takes a lot of concentration.

So even when I’m watching movies, which I love, I’m also painting my nails, and checking my email, and texting. I’ll take breaks to just walk around my apartment.”

She describes the feeling of having ADHD like this: it’s like having 100 different thoughts going on in your head at once, popping around and soaring off on their own little orbits.

“When I’m on the drugs, instead of 100 thoughts, I only have 50. And when one tries to go off on a tangent,” she says, moving her hand away from her head, “I can feel it being pulled back. It’s like it hits a wall.” It’s not that she’s not herself on the drug, it’s just that her thoughts behave in a different manner.

“Being on the drugs is like running down a hallway, and not being on them is like running through a field.”

It’s odd, but the fact that these are prescription drugs with a medical use hadn’t quite settled in my mind before now. Perhaps it’s because of stories that have been popping up in the media over the past few years – each taking the tack that study drug abuse, like hooking up, smoking pot, or using the internet, is a new trend hitting the continent’s youth. Perhaps it’s because I went to a high school filled with overachievers who went on to universities that boasted as much of a problem with ADD/ADHD medication abuse as they did with any other drug. Though I’ve never taken Ritalin or Concerta, it’s never occurred to me that I should have any qualms about doing so – not even the basic concerns that come with smoking pot now and then. It’s not even treated like a recreational drug in the crowd I run with. It’s not done for fun – it’s done to achieve.

According to Alan Desantis at the University of Kentucky, I’m not alone.

He’s spent the past handful of years facilitating interviews with hundreds of students, and has found that, for some, taking the medi-

11

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

drugs to wend one’s way through undergrad amounts to cheating yourself out of the things that you actually enjoy in life. These are the things – whether coding, reading, playing soccer – at which you might end up being successful, the activities you love so much you can sit and do them for hours and lose track of time.

“That, that is the kind of attitude that I fucking hate,” says Bellwood, when I bring up Franck’s argument. “It’s actually really harmful, that kind of faux naïveté. ‘Why are you studying so hard?!’ Theoretically, this is the point of attending a university.”

This brings up a much larger reality about education, especially at a school like McGill: that it’s a dream world, of sorts, a strange pocket of society filled with bright people, 24-hour study facilities, 24-hour coffee shops, and an endless tunnel of hoops to jump through. There are small, flickering lights dotting the tunnel – if I can just pass this midterm, just make it through finals, just get my diploma – that make it seem like ad hoc solutions, like one more all-nighter, or two, or eight,

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friendly place for kids who have different learning styles, whether they are diagnosed with a disorder or not. She loves being able to do that.

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*Names have been changed.

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could be enough. We’re judged by our peers, by the numbers that stare back at us from our transcripts, by the test score requirements on grad school information pamphlets. Perhaps most importantly, for Bellwood and for many of us, we’re here because of reasons that are genuine and innocent: because we love academia, because we want to grow up and be happy and prosperous. Doing well in academia can bring us those things, and drinking coffee and popping pills can bring us success in academia. It seems like such a simple transaction, like magic.

But, to Franck, to the adults, you have to learn to live within the constraints of the real world. Franck explains “university is a wonderful opportunity to develop understanding – not just academic, but how to feel good about yourself, how to manage time, and to develop coping strategies.” By popping study drugs, Franck believes, you set yourself up in a lifestyle that is unsustainable and potentially soul-sucking, one that’s not based on doing the things that make you happy, but on the things that you feel society – or the job market, or your parents, or your peers – want out of you. Still, he sympathizes with the plight of the George Bellwoods of the world. He knows the heat of the floodlights turned on students these days. That’s why he thinks people like him – adults, and MDs – need to work harder to educate students about the perils of study drugs, and about ways to cope without the drugs.

Ellston agrees. She’s studying high school education. When on field experience (a sort of mandatory internship for education students), she’ll often have a child or two in her classroom with ADHD. She feels she can effectively teach these kids in a way that teachers without ADHD can’t. “They’ll do things like stand up in the middle of class and start walking around, and their teacher will say, ‘no, no, sit down,’” she explains. Instead of becoming frusturated and disciplining them, or singling them out, Ellston can empathize: “I’ll talk to them about it, and say, ‘if you need to stand up during class, stand up. I need to do that too sometimes.’”

She wants to teach for a few years, and then go into educational policy, where she will design curriculums, and play with the way the classroom is structured, making it a more

Al

cation sans prescription was less of a concern than drinking beer or smoking cigarettes. For some, ADD/ADHD medication doesn’t carry the same weight as party drugs. In his research he found that students use a number of arguments to justify their lax use of the medication, including that they only take it during finals, that they are self-medicating for concentration problems, and what Desantis refers to as the “I’m-doing-it-forthe-right-reasons” argument.

“No, they’re definitely a drug!” says George Bellwood*, a McGill student without ADHD who took Concerta about eight times last year. “Yes, eight, I think. I’m thinking about this in terms of the number of major assignments,” he says, counting on his fingers.

For Bellwood – who has also done cocaine, pot, and MDMA – the study drugs are a tool to be used during long nights of working that come free of particular health or moral concerns.

Scare tactics referencing potential death do not work on him.

Concerta is long release, so it allows Bellwood to work overnight. He’ll drink two or three cups of coffee in the evening, settle into the Arts computer lab, and get to work on a paper. Around two a.m., when the coffee stops being enough, he’ll pop a pill. The metallic taste of the Concerta hits his tounge, and will stay there in his mouth for a while (“like licking iron,” he says). He’ll feel jittery, sweaty. His mind will feel clear, he explains, making a desk-clearing gesture with his hands. And then he’ll work.

He dispels my notion that these drugs offer a sort of trance. “Is it like kicking a soccer ball around for hours? That kind of focused?” I ask.

“Oh God no. You don’t lose track of time. You’re really aware of the next step.” He drums the table with his index fingers.

“And you don’t want to be doing the work. You just are.”

He’ll continue in that robotic haze, one task, and then the next, and then the next. By four a.m., there are only two or three other students left, at least one of them asleep. “It’s so fucking bleak in that room, with those fluorescent lights.” The janitor comes in at seven, signaling that the rest of the world has moved onto the next day.

Bellwood plans on going to grad school when he’s done at McGill – he explains that for his field, history, he has to. (George also asked that his real major not be used). His normal facial expression is a sort of cheshire-cat grin, which makes him seem at once eager and carefree. He talks about history – citing paradigms and scholars – the way other people talk about TV shows. Last semester he got a 4.0, started a journal, edited a section of a campus newspaper, had a part-time job, and, though he insists his social life was cut in half, still went out every Saturday or so. “What, how to you do all that?” I ask him.

“The drugs!” he says, his hands flying into the air. What is it that I thought I was interviewing him about?

The drugs are a prop he hopes he will cast aside when he’s finished hopping along the stepping stones to a successful future. But he can’t say when that will be. “When you’re in grad school? When you’re working an entry-level position?” He’s not sure, he just sort of knows that there will be a time in the future when the work will pay off, a spot in life where the things on his to-do list can be accomplished without him breaking out in a chemically induced sweat, accomplished with room left over for seven hours of sleep and a substantial social life.

Sitting in Franck’s office, I outlined Bellwood’s reasoning: wanting to go to grad school, wanting grades and extracurriculars to be a tangible currency he can exchange for a job after graduation, and knowing meds can help a person do more and do better. Shouldn’t we take a leg up in the world when we can? (In fact, this was before I first talked to Bellwood – these concerns are near-universal amongst a certain kind of high-achieving McGill student.)

“I would say, to those people, why do you feel you have to study so hard?” Franck said. Wanting to get ahead in life does not necessitate medication – you can be organized and reasonable about what you take on. But it’s not just that: Franck thinks doing

Study Smarter Joshua Foer (the other Foer brother) wrote in a Slate article that after popping Adderall, “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my inbox apparently shut down.”

So, why not just shut off your Macbook’s airport?

According to Franck (and perhaps common sense) turning to drugs isn’t a long term adaptive strategy for making it through life. Instead, students should try to identify the root of their distraction problem: switch up your environment, take more breaks, evaluate your courseload, get more sleep. Find out what kind of learner you are (haptic, visual, audio, et cetera). Don’t hesitate to contact McGill Mental Health if you’re stressed out.

Facts about ADD/ ADHD The number of children and adults with ADD/ ADHD is hard to pin down – it’s not a condition that reveals itself with a simple test, the way that an iron deficiency or a broken leg can. The last revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 2000, stated that the number was between three and seven per cent.

Diagnosis is on the rise, but it’s not necessarily due to overzealous doctors. A 2007 study by doctors at the Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center looked at a sample of 3,082 children, and found that 8.7 per cent met the criteria for the illness. Just under half of those were currently diagnosed – which means that over four per cent were not receiving any treatment for the illness.

Sports

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

12

No fan is illegal The MLB fails to take action against anti-immigration laws KT Helin-Glick Sports Writer

T

he official attendance of the Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star game on July 12, 2011 was recorded at 47,994. However, just outside the entrance gates to Chase Field, other groups of people congregated. One group quietly handed out white ribbons, while another carried signs and rallied around chants such as “You can’t hide, we can see your racist side!”

It was an impressive effort, but, ultimately, didn’t make much of an impression. The game was sold out. The highlight reels that evening showed Adrian Gonzalez’s home run and Heath Bell’s “goofy” slide on the pitcher’s mound. The demonstrations were mentioned as an afterthought, if at all.

The two groups were protesting the fact that the 2011 All-Star Game was being held in Arizona, a state that had just passed State Bill 1070 (S.B. 1070).

Officially known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, the bill was a landmark effort to hamper illegal immigration into the state. The law requires that all non-native residents of the United States register with the government and carry their registration papers at all times.

When the law was signed in July of 2010, it initially sparked considerable controversy, especially outside of the conservative state of Arizona. Opponents called the bill “Gestapo-like.” However, many corporations were reluctant to

overtly speak out against the bill because it mostly affects undocumented workers who deliberately lead lives outside of the public eye.

The Major League Baseball Player’s Association (MLBPA) was one corporation that decided to speak out against the bill. The chairman of the MLBPA was quick to issue a statement citing its opposition to S.B. 1070, asserting that it would “consider additional steps necessary to protect the rights and interests of our members.”

The MLBPA statement went on to state, “These international players are very much a part of our national pastime and are important members of our Association.

Their contributions to our sport have been invaluable, and their exploits have been witnessed, enjoyed, and applauded by millions of Americans.”

For a sport that has touted its reputation as equitable ever since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, this stance was not unexpected. However, the reasoning to speak out may have been fueled more by worries about their business than by altruism.

constituency.

But, whatever the reasons, the baseball community banded together in dissent of S.B. 1070.

Fans called for a boycott of Arizona Diamondbacks games and demonstrated at the National’s home games in Washington. Players threatened to not take part in the All-Star Game if it remained in Arizona. When Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig chose not to move the game from Chase Field, fans promised to picket at the game.

However, these vows of action were made nearly a year before the game was actually slated to occur.

By the time July 12, 2011 rolled around, the cries had mostly faded to a whisper. Despite promises to do otherwise, every All-Star player ultimately chose to participate in the game. The loss of fervor was also seen with fan responses – protesters acknowledged that while they had expected roughly 200 people to take part in protesting events, only about half that number actually showed up.

Many fans were critical of the players’ choice to play the game, but most were also unsurprised.

Despite the league’s ideologi-

other baseball controversies – most notably the steroid scandal of a few years ago – and it was no different with this case. Most sports analysts argued that, for the players, no action was the best action.

For example, E.J. Montini, a columnist for the Arizona Republic, suggested, “S.B. 1070 isn’t their problem. It’s ours...No matter what a group of young millionaire athletes does.” In short, it was in the players’ best interests to threaten opposition to the law, but to not actually do anything about it.

However, as long as Arizona’s S.B. 1070 remains law, and as other states follow suit and pass their own anti-immigration laws (as Georgia and Alabama did this past summer), the MLB may have to take concrete actions.

S.B. 1070’s immediate potential effects are greater for fans than players. The Latin American players themselves may have felt discriminated against, but they are all legally documented immigrants.

Because there are now so many

Latin American players in the MLB, the Latin American population in the U.S. – many of whom are undocumented immigrants – makes up an increasingly growing percentage of baseball fans. In a sport that is already struggling to make enough revenue from ticket sales, the loss of any part of their fan base would greatly affect business.

There is also now a pervasive worry that the bill will dissuade Latin American players from coming to Arizona to play in either the Arizona Rookie League, or in the state’s collegiate athletic powerhouses: the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.

If other traditionally conservative states, particularly those in the southern part of the United States, continue passing their own anti-immigration bills, this deterrent effect will likely spill over to schools in that region that serve as huge talent

pools for professional clubs.

In essence, it is in the MLB’s best interest to alter their position of ‘all talk, no action’. If it does not, not only is it encouraging the xenophobia from which anti-immigration policies stem, but it will also suffer the loss of both its fans, and, eventually, its talent.

With over a quarter of major leaguers identifying as Latin American and with Latin Americans making up an even greater percentage of minor league players, the MLBPA could not have taken any other official position on the bill without angering a substantial part of its

cal narrative earlier in the year, players have historically chosen to refrain from making grand political gestures.

The idea that “sports and politics don’t mix” was popular during

Ian Murphy | The McGill Daily

Sports

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

13

Hits to the head

Health issues in hockey gain media attention The McGill Daily

W

ith publications like The Globe and Mail calling this past summer “one of the saddest in the hockey world,” a critical look at the sport that so many Canadians love seems necessary. The deaths of Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak have brought about a newfound awareness of the hidden depression that so many “enforcers”– meaning they are purposefully put on the ice to fight– experience, and the sometimes-devastating effects that this depression can have. Perhaps no less upsetting to many fans is the news that Sidney Crosby still has not been cleared to play after receiving a concussion this past January during a game.

While these events are upsetting, at least they cause people to pay attention to a very serious issues: mainly, depression and concussions. There is no denying that hockey is a violent sport. There is a large debate over whether or not fighting should be banned, the idea being that if it was, both of these issues would be reduced greatly in severity. However, fighting has become an institution in the game and to remove it all together may

not be possible.

Regardless of the proper solution to these issues, it is clear that something needs to be done. Lynn Bookalam, head therapist and manager of the McGill Sports Medicine Clinic and an expert on concussions, agrees. “Something has to be done at the higher levels to ensure the safety of their athletes,” she asserts, adding “both for the health of the players and because they are ambassadors to the younger players. If [the younger players] see bashes to the head, they will think it’s okay.”

A concussed player that is receiving an immense amount of media coverage right now is Sidney Crosby. One of the debates revolving around Crosby’s case is whether or not he should retire. Some believe that he has enough money and glory to be able to retire, and should not risk his health by continuing to play. They argue that the next concussion could be devastating. Others make the claim that hockey is Crosby’s calling, and to take that away from him would be like taking away his life.

Bookalam chimes in on this debate, pointing to science. “Right now, the science says that if [Crosby] completes the six step return to play protocol, he has as good a chance to return as someone who has never

had a concussion. I don’t have any problem with Sidney Crosby returning to hockey if he has correctly gone through the return to play protocol and has been honest with himself about his symptoms. There is no lie detector, so a lot of it relies on the player’s honesty.”

The solution to the issue of depression in players who act as “enforcers” is much trickier. Many believe that being put in a position in which you must be aggressive and ready to fight multiple times a week can be psychologically damaging. “I can’t say that an enforcer will suffer from depression. You won’t have any medical professional say so. I know that’s what they are trying to conclude in the news right now,” maintains Bookalam.

She does add, however, that if a player becomes injured, as enforcers often do, this could lead to a period of psychological change.

She asserts, “It’s not because you are an enforcer. It’s because you can’t do what you normally do.”

Despite all the media attention focused on these matters, Canadians still love hockey and still want to play the sport. There has been no decline in registration at the youth level, confirms Kevin Boston, Director of Marketing and Events for the Ontario Minor

Hockey Association (OMHA). He asserts that the OMHA takes safety very seriously. “Our organization has always been one of the leading organizations in all of hockey to be on the forefront of any safety issue… We were one of the first organizations to implement many of the safety regulations that are in the game today.”

In a press release that the OMHA released on August 25, the OMHA said, “The 2011 Hockey Canada AGM has addressed the issue of head contact and continued commitment to zero tolerance measure in this area.” The press release goes on to outline rule changes that will take effect immediately and will hopefully help eradicate the problem of head contact.

McGill’s Sports Medicine Clinic is also concerned about the safety of their own players and of the younger players of the sport. Like Boston, Bookalam claims that there has been no decline in the interest of hockey. “I am particularly proud of how strict we are with concussions. I have spent a great deal of time helping to share my knowledge of concussions with the community. We have to influence young players on the risk of concussions and the right way to play. McGill has an opportunity to be an ambassador to the younger community,” she declared.

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14

Come together Right now. Theories of crowd psychology compared.

Veronica Winslow

Science & Technology Writer

C

rowd psychology is a mysterious thing: get a large group of people together and suddenly they go nuts – or maybe they don’t. It’s like mixing together red and blue paint, but unexpectedly getting green. It is by no means a new idea that people act differently in crowds. Classical theories of crowd psychology were pioneered by scholars such as Sigmund Freud and Gustave Le Bon, who believed that crowds cause the minds of individual members to merge and form a collective way of thinking.

Individual morals are sometimes corroded, emotions may be intensified. Above all, this theory states that it is this collective crowd consciousness, and not the individuals, that determine a public’s actions.

Convergence theory, on the other hand, states that crowd behaviour is not dictated by the entire crowd, but rather by particular like-minded individuals. People who share existing beliefs and values come together to create a reaction that is representative of widespread feeling, not always irrational mob thoughts.

Historically, crowds have been responsible for dramatic changes in societies, and this summer has proved no different. Although the recent riots seen in London and Vancouver are radically different they both show that crowd psychology is more relevant than ever.

What causes average people, such as you and I, to flip cars, loot stores, destroy public and private property, and light shit on fire? What is it that causes people to riot? Is it a case of individuals losing their moral identity in a large crowd? Or is it a case of convergence, similar people coming together to act in a way that is truly representative of their feelings?

Columbia University’s Tory Higgins believes that riots like those in London typically occur because people feel “ineffective” or “powerless.”

“In situations like this,” he says, “there is a long period – prior to the riot – of feeling that you’re not in control of your own life. They basically don’t feel respected or that they’re making a difference.”

Higgins’ theory seems to effectively illustrate what happened in London. As is well known, the catalyst of the riots in London was the death of Mark Duggan, a black man shot by the police. Even earlier, the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham in 1985, which involved the death of an African-Caribbean woman during a police search of her

home, tension has existed between the largely white police force and the local African-Caribbean people of Tottenham, who have long suffered from generational unemployment and poverty. Since then, this tension has only escalated, so that Duggan’s death became part of “the historical sense of injustice at deaths in custody,” according to Claudia Webb, chairperson of Operation Trident – a Metropolitan Police Service unit set up to investigate and inform people about racial firearm crimes, specifically related to the sale of illegal drugs.

Though the response to Duggan’s death began as a peaceful protest, it quickly escalated into riots showing attitudes of hatred and anti-police sentiment, as well as destruction, theft, and violence. The prolonged feelings of disrespect, racial discrimination, and powerlessness in this case make the London riots seem like an example of convergence. But at the same time, it is hard to determine if individuals would have taken similar actions without the influence of the crowd.

While Higgins’ thoughts appear to explain what happened in London, they don’t quite line up with the situation in Vancouver. So what may have happened there? Aly Kassam, a U2 Neuroscience student, was present in Vancouver during the time of the

riot, describes the atmosphere he felt amongst Canucks fans in the days leading up to the riot. Kassam says that Vancouver fans were “calmer than most hockey fans.”

According to Kassam, no one was cheering, and most remained seated during the games that led up to that fateful night, and even during the majority of the final game. It was a calm-before-the-storm type of situation.

“Everyone seemed to be under control, relaxed. No one appeared to be drinking, and cops were there the whole time. It wasn’t until the last five minutes or so, when they knew they were going to lose, that things started to get really, really weird,” he tells me. “A fight broke out and one guy got knocked out almost right away. Then someone flipped a car and lit it on fire.”

Kassam also says that Vancouver fans seemed to have come to the game prepared to riot, regardless of whether or not they won. One of the rioters brought a homemade bomb, which was later thrown into a Starbucks, to the game. “I got the vibe that they wanted to live up to the riot in ’94,” said Kassam. 1994 was the last time the Canucks advanced all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals, when they lost to the New York Rangers and a riot of similar proportions broke out.

Author Bill Buford wrote a book titled Among the Thugs, wherein he describes his experience taking part in a British soccer mob, and which offers insight into why sports riots flare up. He writes, “I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable… This is, if you like, the answer to the million-dollar question: why do young males riot? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much or smoked dope.” In this way the Vancouver riots may epitomize classical theories of crowd psychology: normal people’s values and morals are eroded away by the crowd, resulting in irrational and senseless destruction.

Whether or not riots are a result of classical mob thought or convergence, recent examples have at least had one thing in common: social media. In London, the antipolice sentiment was spread by youths via BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Messages on BBM can not only reach a large number of people instantly, they are also encrypted and private, unlike posts on Twitter or Facebook, making it the perfect medium for organizing flash mobs and other demonstrations without notifying authorities. Messages inciting people to “unite and hit the streets” had police struggling to keep up and control the violence.

“Doesn’t matter if the police arrive cos we’ll just chase dem out because as you’ve seen on the news, they are NOT ON DIS TING. Everyone meet at 7 at stratford park and let’s get rich,” one BBM user broadcasted. Social networking technologies like BBM give crowds a whole new way to gather.

In Vancouver, rioters posed for pictures, and onlookers took videos of the destruction to be posted on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

These images are now being used to identify and incriminate riot participants. Online “shaming campaign” sites have also been created. Unfortunately, it seems that Vancouver’s online response has not been entirely positive: many social media users threatened riot participants and their families with messages of hate and vigilante justice. “The mob mentality has moved into cyberspace for the first time,” says UBC sociologist Christopher Schneider. The anonymity historically created by crowds can now be created even if one is all alone in their home. The internet allows the users to perform mob actions without all of the risks.

However, it is important to keep in mind that the mentality of crowds does not necessarily have to be that of an angry mob. Take the impromptu clean-up efforts of Vancouverites after the riot: Facebook events and group pages were created almost immediately, urging people to come together to clean the streets of Vancouver. The streets were cleaned quickly, and those who helped created a “citizen’s wall,” where Vancouverites could gather to impart messages of support. It is a perfect example of convergence theory: like-minded people coming together to form a crowd.

In the end, there is no one answer to the question, “why do people riot?” There is no one reason why people act differently in crowds. People riot for different reasons in different places. Is the crowd just an enabler, allowing existing feelings and thoughts to be expressed through collective actions? Or is the crowd itself the creator of an entirely different and irrational mob mentality? The “why” behind crowd psychology may very well remain a mystery for years to come, but one thing remains certain: ordinary people will always be able to gain power by acting collectively. Only time will tell how this power will be used or abused.

Esma Balkir | The McGill Daily

Science+Technology

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

15

There’s probably no God (particle) Don’t panic, we’re just talking about the Higgs boson Andrew Komar

The McGill Daily

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uring the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics hosted in late July at Grenoble, the latest data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator was presented. After years of waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be built and brought up to operational levels, and after numerous frustrating technical setbacks, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was ready to present its first tenuous conclusions about the Higgs boson. It was there that they dropped the bombshell: CERN stated that there was a 95 per cent chance that it did not exist, effecitlvey ruling out its existence.

The Higgs boson, popularly known as the “god particle” because of its supposed role in endowing everything in the universe with mass, has been furiously searched for since the postulation of its existence in 1964. The Standard Model predicts a menagerie of subatomic particles. Of these, the Higgs boson is the only one yet to be confirmed. As a scientific theory, the Standard Model is the most thoroughly tested in all of human history. It successfully unites electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force that keeps atomic nuclei together, and the weak nuclear force that controls radioactive decay under one theoretical framework.

The Standard Model essentially says that all matter in the universe is composed of varying combinations of fundamental units called fermions of which there are two types: quarks and

leptons. There are six types of quarks and leptons respectively, with each also having antiparticles. The combination of these 24 different fermions is what gives rise to the matter in the universe. Particles such as protons are composite particles; those made from different quark combinations are collectively referred to as “hadrons”.

Another important part of the Standard Model is the idea that all of the forces we are familiar with, such as the electromagnetic radiation that makes up visible light and enables wireless internet, arise as the result of interactions between force-carrying bosons. This is where the Higgs boson fits into the picture: it is supposed to be the force carrying particle that brings mass into being.

Much of the theoretical work that goes into the Standard Model entails

Jerry Gu | The McGill Daily

predicting the characteristics of these bosons. However, for any scientific prediction to be considered valid, it must survive the process of experimental verification. For the Standard Model, this requires that the existence of these theoretical particles is demonstrated. For most of these particles, under normal conditions, evidence of their existence cannot be observed.

However, by providing high amounts of energy, these exotic particles can be created in a laboratory.

Unfortunately for Standard Model experimentalists, this requires building ever-larger and more expensive particle accelerators, which smash together hadrons at the speed of light.

The LHC is the latest and greatest particle accelerator to date, and uses $100,000 worth of electricity to get beams of atoms moving one way or another around a 27 kilometer track just about three meters per second shy of the speed of light. These two beams are then smashed together, and scientists sort through the resulting hadron debris to figure out which particles were generated in conditions that have not existed since microseconds after the big bang. For the LHC, there are about 40,000 individual collisions per second, which makes for an awful lot of data to sift through.

Over the course of the past three years, the LHC created billions of collisions, each of which generates thousands of particles. The sheer volume of the data generated is daunting, to say the least. Even with the most sophisticated detectors ever created, it is extremely difficult to distinguish a true hadron detection and to do so requires thousands of hours of computation. The scientists at CERN have even started the LHC@home project, which uses the processing power of personal computers around the world to assist with these calculations.

Even with all that data generation and processing, the successful identification of an as-yet-undiscovered particle such as the Higgs boson can require years of continuous collisions, to allow the signal to rise up above the extraneous data, such as those collected from the collision of other particles. For a new particle to be considered confirmed, it must pass the so called “5-sigma” rule, demonstrating a 99.99995 per cent likelihood that the observed results are not more easily explained by background noise.

Even with this commitment to statistical rigour, sometimes there can be anomalous signals within this noise.

Earlier this year, a leak from CERN showed data that matched exactly what the Higgs boson would look like.

However, as more data was collected, those promising conclusions faded into statistical insignificance.

It is in this conservative experimental context that the significance of the conference’s summaries can be fully appreciated. Discovering with 95 per cent confidence that the Higgs boson probably does not exist is practically the raison d’etre of the LHC, because after nearly fifty years of waiting, scientists finally had the ability to test a central tenet of the Standard Model. Even though the Standard Model is the most viable theory thus far, new discoveries such as this show us that our fundamental understanding of the universe is incomplete.

In terms of the underlying physics involved, this non-discovery lends credence to other so-called “Higgsless” models. These theories include the idea of technicolour, which creates mass through a different (and more complicated) method than the Higgs boson. Other alternative theories include the possibility of inducing mass through an interaction with a fourth spatial dimension, or even a theory called “loopquantum gravity”, which posits all of space-time as being made up of tiny quantized, interwoven, fuzzy loops, with the interaction of these loops giving rise to all the phenomenon in the universe, including mass.

Although this is an exciting discovery for physics, it is understandable if the enthusiasm is not contagious. To many, a project of this scale is simply a waste of resources. However, disproving the Higgs boson is equally as important as giving evidence for its existence. This new discovery opens the door to other untested and novel theories of the nature of the universe.

Although these studies are admittedly esoteric, their findings have farreaching consequences. The thing to keep in mind about pure research, such as this, is that it’s always unpredictable. The technology behind MRIs arose from research not intended for practical use; its existence was only made possible through pure, esoteric, scientific inquiry.

As we move into the future, the words of Socrates come to mind: “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” For all of its successes, the Standard Model is completely incompatible with general relativity, which accurately describes the structure of the universe at its largest scale. Even current “theories of everything” such as String Theory (which has the Standard Model built into it) are incapable of accounting for astronomically observed realities like dark matter and dark energy. The sea of our ignorance is vast; but with each discovery such as this, the shores of our limited knowledge expand ever so slightly.

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16

Shallow sentiments in deep space Cirque de Soleil founder’s exhibition scratches the surface of sustainability Christina Colizza

The McGill Daily

W

hat would you do with 35 million dollars? Give it all to the needy?

Take your whole extended family on vacation? Or maybe just settle down in a small cabin in the rolling hills of wherever? To me, those three answers seemed fairly obvious, but I suppose I don’t have the curiosité of Guy Laliberté.

A Quebec native, Laliberté began his career as a street performer in Quebec City. A short stint in university only solidified Laliberté’s feelings that he belonged in the entertainment business. In 1984, he joined a ragtag troupe of jugglers and firebreathers in Baie Saint Paul. It was then that Laliberté convinced the Quebec government to fund a celebratory project for the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s arrival in Quebec, and the illustrious Cirque de Soleil was born.

Now, 27 years later, Laliberte, according to Forbes, has a net worth of 1.5 billion and Cirque de Soleil has 22 shows spread out across the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia. This Canadian clown turned billionaire, however, had bigger dreams outside the of circus tent.

Originally inspired by Montreal’s Expo 67 and how one could “travel” from booth to booth to different countries, Guy Laliberte’s dreamt of going on a space mission to take photographs of different countries of the world from space. This $35 million dream took off in 2009 under the tagline of a “Poetic Social Mission.” The series of photographs ­ -taken over an 11-day period in which he orbited earth 176 times going at 28,000 kilometres per hour – makeup Laliberte’s current exhibtion “GAIA,” outside of Place des Arts. Gaia, referring to the ancient Greek earth goddess, seems an appropriate name for the whimsical exhibit.

Sounds of bongo drums and children lightly singing in different languages hum from speakers over the bright photos, whose immensity and coloration appear more like abstract paintings from

Fabien Maltais-Bayda | The McGill Daily

“GAIA” exhibition at Place des Arts. a distance. A small booth surrounded by tourists grabbing at $68 hardcover books sells GAIA merchandise. The photographs are grippingly beautiful, but can they really be worth the $35 million photoshoot?

All of the proceeds from GAIA, as the promotional posters state, will be given to Laliberte’s One

Drop foundation. Throughout his career, Laliberte has supported organizations such as Oxfam, as well as other charities for the homeless. Most recently, his One Drop foundation develops “integrated, innovative projects with an international scope, in which water plays a central role...in generating positive, sustainable

effects for local and foreign populations,” as their website states.

Yet, without reading the captions, the photographs hardly evoke the sense of urgency that should be felt regarding the world’s safe water supply.

It was with these questions in mind that I asked an employee of the exhibit about Laliberte’s pur-

pose in his “Poetic Social Mission.”

“Well, people told him after the fact that [the photographs] were so good, so I think he decided afterwards to make ‘GAIA.” Recovering from the initial shock of her answer, I ventured to ask whether she thought such a trip was worth the money he had spent. “I don’t really know what to say,” she responded.

The GAIA employee raised an interesting point, considering that Lalibertés One Drop was founded only two years prior to his trip to space. The only logical conclusion I could come to was that One Drop served a convenient purpose in allowing Laliberte to guiltlessly travel to space. Besides the $35 million, the energy used to travel for 11 days was seriously detrimental to environmental sustainability. Flipping through the opening pages of Laliberté’s book only reinforced my ill feelings. In the book’s four to five page preface, Laliberté only touches on One Drop towards the end. The beginning statements are filled with colorful language describing Laliberté’s thoughts just before taking off. He writes, “Up there, I will be like a private explorer…

I will be the artistic producer. I will be like a sponge, a child filled with wonder. I will be the eyes of my children.” Sensationalism is to be expected from the leader of the world’s largest performance circus, but feels out of place when addressing a project solely geared towards awareness of water issues.

Yet, critical reception to Laliberte’s trip seems remarkably positivite. Media outlets have praised it, and during a U2 concert, they skyped live with Laliberté during his journey. He was wearing a red clown nose and a graphic “Poetic Social Mission” tee.

I do not mean to completely denounce Guy Laliberte. I applaud his entrepreneurial achievements and philanthropy, but I cannot help but feel this trip to space had primarily selfish motives, and it can hardly have been an effective way to address the world’s water problems.

GAIA, albeit beautiful, satisfies the onlookers’ environmental conscience more than it induces any real change.

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17

Second hand, but one of a kind

Vintage POP offers Montrealers a unique and highly enjoyable shopping experience Anqi Zhang

The McGill Daily

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or the scores of audiophiles at McGill, the mention of POP Montreal conjures up heavenly images of going to see an assortment of talented artists perform for about the price of a Santropol sandwich. Although the music starts on September 21, POP-goers saw the third edition of Vintage POP this past weekend.

Vintage POP is held under the umbrella of Puces POP, the cultural segment of the international music festival. The idea is simple enough – 12 of Montreal’s vintage vendors bring together their hand-selected and curated collections. What they create is more of a gallery space than a store, and shoppers are presented with a variety of pieces to try on and purchase.

The result is stunning. The brightly lit yet cozy space is reminiscent of a boutique at its best, complete with a friendly atmosphere and tailored soundtrack.

Displaying clothing from the 1920s all the way to the 1990s, the gallery somehow manages to present an eclectic yet organized melange of eras.

Tessa Smith, one of the coordinators of the event, told The Daily in an interview that “the idea is to showcase the collections of local vintage hunters.” Held as a backto-school event before the start of the festival, it is a presentation of vendors’ fall and winter collections, and, said Smith, “the perfect place to find POP Montreal concert-going outfits.”

As Smith herself seems to note, fashion and music have become inextricably tied, even at a small festival like POP. From Lily Allen’s musical performance

on the Chanel catwalk to Grizzly Bear albums playing at Urban Outfitters, music and fashion are often used to sell one another.

Think of fashion product placement in music videos, and CDs sold at the checkout counter in Topshop.

As is the case with these mainstream clothing outlets, fashion appears to be an ever-growing part of POP Montreal’s identity.

In addition to Vintage POP, there is Fashion POP, a collaboration of emerging Montreal clothing designers, to be held later in September.

When investigated further, however, there seems to be less integration of these two arts than is suggested on the surface. Despite Vintage POP’s affiliation with the music festival, shoppers are not bombarded with advertisements for POP or POP’s sponsors. In fact, apart from the old 1950s tunes

softly playing just above the shoppers’ murmurs, there is little trace of the true musical purpose of POP Montreal. In an interview with The Daily, Smith noted that Vintage POP’s affiliation is with Puces POP, the culture and DIY crafts fair, rather than with the music festival proper. This might explain the lack of promotion. Vintage POP’s relatively loose affiliation to the festival at large also results in a less festival-centric schedule. Though POP Montreal “is [their] busiest time of year,” noted Smith, she and her fellow coordinator also run “pop-up shops throughout the year.”

A four day thrifting event seems commonplace in a city like Montreal, which has a thriving second hand industry, but Vintage POP is not your typical thrift store experience. “The quality is so much better than sorting through bins at the [Salvation Army] or wherever,” said Smith.

While larger second-hand stores do undeniably carry some high quality pieces, it can be a real task to find them. Not so at Vintage POP, where each collection is carefully handpicked. New finds are brought in on each of the four days, creating a constant flow of pieces. Vintage POP also provides a venue for the merging of virtual and in-store shopping – Smith said one of her favourite parts of the event is meeting “the online sellers who you know through their blog or Etsy shop”.

Vintage POP may be over for this fall season, but Puces POP has various other offerings during the festival itself – including Fashion POP and several other arts and crafts events. If all of these offerings are as refreshing and well-organized as Vintage POP, they will be well worth your attention during all that spare time between concerts.

Notoriously G.O.O.D. potatoes A guide to cooking spectacular spuds Henry Wright with Cole Powers Culture Writers

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was about 14 when I heard Notorious B.I.G.’s “One more chance.” In those days, I took the lyrics “I only smoke blunts when they rolled proper,” quite literally. I no longer take them literally, however, I have come to realize that they apply to many facets of life. Case in point: potatoes. Poorly prepared potatoes haunt restaurant side-plates and barbeques worldwide. PLEASE: cook potatoes properly. Once you do, you will certainly never go back. Becoming a potato snob is both a blessing and a curse, so read cautiously!

There are a lot of ways to ruin a perfectly good potato. Potatoes are, in many ways, the ultimate comfort food, but they are too often under seasoned, under cooked, simply greasy, or plain old butchered. It’s a common misconception in cooking – simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy, but rather denotes a method of cooking that allows ingredients to speak for themselves.

Potatoes 101: There are two types of potatoes: floury and waxy. Waxy potatoes have more protein than starch, and floury potatoes have more starch than protein. Unlike floury potatoes, waxy potatoes hold their shape because starch breaks down more easily than protein.

In our opinion, the best way to cook potatoes is by roasting them. Boiled or steamed potatoes don’t caramelize on the outside

and you can’t season potatoes in deep fat unless you do it afterwards. Plus, fries or chips aren’t too healthy. Now, do as you may like, but this is how we roast potatoes: First off, don’t wash your potatoes, and don’t peel them – we’ll explain this later.

Next, cut them into any shape you like. We like medium chunks.

Draw a large pot of water and add about 1 tbsp of salt per litre of water. It may seem like a lot, but this is the only chance to season the otherwise bland inside of the potatoes. Add your potato chunks to the cold salted water, and bring to a boil. Real snobs will peel their potatoes and put the reserved peel in the pot at this point to infuse the peel flavour into the diced chunks.

Test the potatoes when they have been boiling for twenty or so minutes. You want the inside to be flaky and fluffy, and the outside of the chunks to begin to fall apart. Strain your potatoes and give them a gentle shake in the strainer to mark up the outsides a little. Ideally, you want to create a couple nooks and crannies on the outside of the potato with the inside remaining soft.

Place them on a sheet pan and toss them in the fridge for twenty minutes. At this point, the fluffed up edges will harden, and roasting them will create a thicker, more satisfying crust. Heat your oven to 190 C and put your baking sheet (or whatever you have to use) into the oven with about one cm of olive oil or clarified butter (the tastier, albeit more difficult, option to make). A common mistake is to start roasting

Nicole Stradiotto | The McGill Daily

the potatoes in cold oil. This is a major error because the potatoes will suck up the oil and become greasy, stopping the oil from crisping the outsides.

When your potatoes have finished cooling in the fridge, put them into the smoking hot olive oil and mix them around quickly, then toss them back in the oven. At this point you have about 25 minutes until they are done, time you can spend ruminating on how you’d like to flavour your potatoes. Here are some recommendations, but remember, potatoes are bland as dirt without salt, so be generous with it (half of it

will end up in the oil anyways): 1. About halfway through cooking, add fresh sprigs of rosemary and thyme; salt and pepper.

2. Add herbs de provence, and sea salt.

3. Instead of herbs use spices – potatoes love paprika, cayenne, onion powder, garlic powder, and white pepper (not all at the same time!).

4. Make garlic butter with fresh parsley and toss the cooked potatoes in it after they’ve cooked.

I guess it seems like there’s a lot to know about potatoes, but this shouldn’t surprise you. We

have been slowly mastering the art of cooking them for so long that most people you cook for will have had proper potatoes, and will critique yours if they are done poorly. I have been cooking for six years and still fuck them up. Side dishes can be considered secondary, but since their cooking is considered easier than the protein, there is far less room for error. A perfectly cooked piece of steak, or perhaps eggplant for those vegans and vegetarians out there, is nice, but, paired with proper roasted potatoes, it is divine.

Compendium!

The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Lies, half-truths, and crazy floods!

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Fuzzy Puppies Like telling jokes?!

compendium@mcgilldaily.com

FUCK THIS I HAVE TO WORK ON MY BDAY FUCK YEAH I’M 20!

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ellz yeah I’m 20! Who cares that it’s on a work night. I have only one year till I am legal in the Great USA. This means I’m two years older than the Quebec drinking (take that bouncer who thought I was underage). All those dipshit years of not being old enough for this and that are now almost done! Whether it was bouncers who don’t let me in bars, cops who don’t let me drive, or fair grounds staff who don’t allow me on the roller coasters, the legacy of my rivalry with these people is totally fucking done!

W

orking on your birthday fucking sucks.

Even if you work an interesting job with great colleagues, being sober when your age changes sucks. Being forced to apply your mind to something productive should be only reserved for ordinary weekdays. On your bday you should have the opportunity to play Beer Pong at BDP, dance on the tables at Korova, and piss in an alleyway. Being sober in an office sucks and people should not be subject to this on their birthdays.

Fuck this! is an occasional anonymous rant column. Send your rants to fuckthis@mcgilldaily.com.

Administration floods McTavish Janvier Larochene The McGill Daily

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ustling McTavish came to a raging standstill today as gallons of water plummeted down the street, washing away several squirrels, that Pizza Pizza container you dropped after lunch and were too busy to pick up on your way to your 1 p.m. COMMS class, and the last vestiges of the green paint nobody wanted anyway.

In a shocking turn of events following ever-worsening relations between MUNACA and McGill, the administration was forced to resort to more creative measures to bust the flourishing picket line at the corner of McTavish and Sherbrooke. Mickey Jaegermeister, who’s the only person this reporter could track down who has claimed any participation at all in strike mediation, said, “Talking didn’t work. Playing hard to get didn’t work. This labour dispute, it’s a fucking third wheel man. So what else could we do? Wash ‘em all away, blates. Just gotta roll with it.” However, the bib-

lically-proportioned flood did little to dampen the spirits of the picketeers, who were well prepared after their synchronised swim classes - the latest in a range of services to be cut from employees’ benefits package.

U6 Midwifery student Nalex Shmunn witnessed the event. “There was a lot of water,” Shmunn reminisced.

“Everyone was just like...” and then she made a goofy face.

Members of the McGill Outdoors Club quickly mobilised for an impromptu kayak practice. VP (Kayaking and S’mores Supplies) Marcia Mallow said, “opportunities like this come along so rarely and I think it’s really valuable to the McGill community that these massive structural collapses happen every now and then, because how else are we going to make the McGill community aware of the pure joy that comes with shredding some gnarly wave of untreated acid rain?” And for forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They

rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than 15 cubits. Every living

thing that moved on land perished – birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nos-

trils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth.

First Last / The McGill Daily

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

The administration enjoys fucking with us.

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The McGill Daily | Monday, September 12, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

volume 101 number 3

EDITORIAL

editorial 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

Joan Moses

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com coordinating news editor

Henry Gass news editors

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Eric Andrew-Gee commentary&compendium! editors

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Christina Colizza Fabien Maltais-Bayda

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health&education editor

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Shannon Palus le délit

Anabel Cossette Civitella rec@delitfrancais.com Contributors Esma Balkir, Alex Briggs, Madeleine Cummings, Rosie Dobson, Jerry Gu, Andrew Komar, Matthias Heilke, KT Hlin-Glick, Emily Meikle, Michael Lee-Murphy, Ian Murphy, Cole Powers, Sergey Tsynkevych, Veronica Winslow, Henry Wright, Jordan Venton-Rublee, Anqi Zhang.

Big brother is watching After the May Day anti-capitalist march on May 1, 2011 took a violent turn, the Montreal Police (SPVM) made public the existence of a police task force to surveil anarchists and other “marginal” political groups. The project was given the orwellian title “Guet des activités des movements marginaux et anarchistes” (Surveillance of marginal and anarchist groups’ activities) – or GAMMA. While the SPVM announced that project GAMMA was launched as a response to the May 1st demonstration, Jacques Robinette, an assistant Montreal police chief and head of special investigations, told the Gazette that the project has been in existence since January.

L’Association pour une solidaritée syndical étudiante (ASSÉ), a leftist provincewide student lobbying group, and the Coalition Against Repression and Police Brutality have already filed complaints against project GAMMA to the Quebec Human Rights Commission for their alleged involvement in four student arrests.

Out of the four students arrested, three of them were ASSÉ executives.

The task force lacks any clear motive and leaves open a broad category of groups who can be subject to increased discrimination from the police. Francis Dupuis-Déri, a UQAM professor of political science, told The Daily in an interview that “It is not really clear what [GAMMA] is – we don’t know anything, there’s no mandate. Nothing is clear and that is part of the problem.”

The SPVM, in a press release, explained that the project’s purpose is “to investigate the demonstrators who committed crimes.” Six police officers were injured after the May Day riot, and those who have committed crimes should be prosecuted. We do not oppose investigating criminal activity. Our concern is that the SPVM is openly targeting specific political groups because of their beliefs or affiliations and unjustly labeling them as threats to society.

By specifically targeting anarchist and so-called “marginal” groups, project GAMMA stands in direct violation of section 10 of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which states that “every person has a full and equal recognition and exercise of his human rights and freedoms, without distinction, exclusion or preference based on political convictions.”

By specifically monitoring groups involved with political protests, and, thus, by potentially instilling fear in such groups, project GAMMA also threatens the fundamental human right of freedom of peaceful assembly, as laid out in section 2 of the Canadian Constitution.

While anarchism, a label which encompasses a legitimate and diverse spectrum of political beliefs, sets itself against authority and the state, there is nothing in its ideology that necessarily marks its adherents as violent. Many anarchists, just like members of any other political group, are non-violent.

Even more concerning is the use of the word “marginal” in project GAMMA’s name, leaving open to police interpretation whom they are targeting. The SPVM’s mandate is to uphold peace and order without discrimination or preference. Projects like GAMMA make it too easy for police abuse of power to go under the radar, taking subterfuge under the vague labels of “anarchist” and “marginal.”

Police could use this task force to target political dissidents and protestors.

Students involved in protests this year should be aware of GAMMA’s implications, but shouldn’t be afraid to exercise their freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

Everyone has a right to publicly voice their opinions and beliefs, regardless of what they are. Political ideologies, so long as they are not violent, must be given the full power of freedom of speech and the full protection of the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms. GAMMA is a project that threatens this fundamental freedom, and could have a chilling effect on those who wish to advocate for a different vision of society.

The Daily is published on most Mondays and Thursdays by the Daily Publications Society, an autonomous, not-for-profit organization whose membership includes all McGill undergraduates and most graduate students.

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ISSN 1192-4608.

Nicole Stradiotto | The McGill Daily

Errata In the article “McGill still adapting after week of picketing” (News, September 8), a McGill faculty member attempting to drive through a MUNACA picket line and identified in a photo was mistakenly named as Dr. Hang Lau. Dr. Lau was not at the scene, and was not involved in the incident described. The Daily regrets the error.