vol101issu15

Rocky Horror in Montreal

Volume 101, Issue 15

October 27, 2011 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

DAILY

Creatures of the night for100 years

Published by The Daily Publications Society, a student society of McGill University.

Page 16

2 News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

CBC contests Information Commissioner over disclosure exemption Parliamentary committee seeks to clarify law, end taxpayer-funded court case Madeleine Cummings The McGill Daily

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he Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is battling the Information Commissioner of Canada, Suzanne Legault, over a section of the Access to Information Act that gives the broadcaster an exemption from releasing certain records. The case is currently in the Federal Court of Appeal.

The CBC received 327 Access to Information requests (ATIs) last year and responded to 257 within the government-mandated time frame. The Information Commissioner reviews complaints about how ATIs are handled.

The CBC is contesting the extent to which Legault can investigate complaints. In 2010, the Federal Court ruled that Legault could examine information herself and decide whether or not the CBC should be required to release it. The CBC disagrees, claiming that, by law, some information is exempt from being released under the Act. The Conservative government brought the CBC, as well as all other Crown Corporations, under the Act in 2007. The Act’s purpose is primarily to “extend the present laws of Canada to provide a right of access to information in records under the control of a government institution.”

However, the CBC has a special exemption; Section 68.1 states that the Act does not apply to the broadcaster’s journalistic, creative, or programming activities.

In a meeting of Parliament’s Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

last Thursday, Konrad von Finckenstein, former Federal Court judge and current chairman of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), said “the easiest way to fix it is to establish by legislation” whether the Information Commissioner can look at the documents or not.

“Unfortunately, the section in dispute here has been drafted in such a way that you have a double exemption: the Act does not apply, except it does apply,” Finckenstein told the committee.

On Tuesday, Legault proposed a “discretionary, injury-based exemption” that would require the CBC to prove that revealing certain information would cause them harm.

Some Canadians are concerned that the court case is a costly way of resolving a dispute between federal institutions, since taxpayers are paying the legal fees for both sides.

“I think that the fastest way to end this battle would be for Parliament to reconsider Section 68.1,” said Dean Del Mastro, a Conservative MP involved in challenging the CBC, in an interview with The Daily.

Del Mastro disagrees with the way the CBC has been using Section 68.1.

“They’re, in fact, using that clause to exempt all of their expenditures, which is not the intent of access to information laws,” he said.

Derek Fildebrandt, the national research director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, agrees that the court battle is a waste of money, but doesn’t think that the legislation has to be changed.

“The spirit of the Act was very

clear and the CBC has flat-out refused to acknowledge that it applies to [them],” he said. “You can’t spend $1.13 billion without being accountable for it.”

Fildebrandt has experience filing ATIs, and calls the CBC’s current process “an unmitigated disaster.”

“There are some serious problem spots for access to information right across the federal government, but the CBC stands up as the absolute worst,” he said.

Although public interest groups and other media sources do file ATIs, media conglomerate Quebecor has filed the majority of ATI requests with the CBC. Quebecor has challenged the CBC for refusing to release, among other things, the costs of operating its fleet of vehicles.

The CBC responded to challenges from Quebecor in a statement on its website: “We, and [Legault], are trying to clarify the rules which protect ‘journalistic, programming, and creative activities.’ This is the proper thing to do.” The CBC statement added that it reports to several government bodies, and is, therefore, already being held accountable.

While giving a talk at the University of British Columbia about the future of Canadian broadcasting, CBC President Hubert Lacroix explained that the CBC is fighting to protect its journalistic sources.

Yet, Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau told the Parliamentary committee on Thursday that “of the 16 Access to Information requests that are before the court, not a single one is in any way related to journalistic sources.”

Lacroix will appear before the committee next Tuesday.

News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

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Students protest tuition hikes in Quebec City Budgetary decisions contested outside of Liberal Party Convention Ines de la Cuetara News Writer

O

n Saturday, October 22, hundreds of students from around the province gathered in Quebec City to protest tuition hikes and other budgetary measures announced by the provincial government last March.

Starting on the outskirts of the city, the protest moved downtown to the Quebec City Convention Centre, where about 2,000 delegates were meeting for the Liberal Party Convention, the majority party in the Quebec National Assembly.

The theme of the protest was “rouge de colère” – red with anger. Tomatoes were thrown at a poster of Premier Jean Charest’s face, and some students came dressed in red.

Quebec university tuition is set to increase $325 per year, for five years, starting in September 2012. The increases will raise base provincial tuition from $2,168 to $3,793, which is below the Canadian average.

In March, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) referred to the increases as a “declaration of war against students.”

About ten McGill students took part in a SSMU-organized bus trip to the demonstration and back. Among them was SSMU VP External Joël Pedneault, who explained in an email to The Daily that SSMU’s stance is to “oppose all financial barriers to accessing university, including tuition fees.”

“Tuition hikes will not only

increase the amount of debt people have to get into to finish their degree,” he wrote, “but might also deter some people from even enrolling in university in the first place.”

Quebec Finance Minister Raymond Bachand disagrees.

“Nothing allows us to establish a causal relationship between the amount of students enrolled in university and tuition,” wrote Bachand in his official budget plan, released in March. He said that a third of the generated funds will be returned to students through bursaries.

The Quebec government says these are necessary measures to deal with inflation, and claims that students would still be paying less than 17 per cent of the total cost of their studies by 2017.

Pedneault remains skeptical.

“It seems to me that the Quebec government has decided to raise tuition fees…because it is much easier than raising taxes on the private sector or wealthy taxpayers, both of which might decide to withdraw their support for the current government if they had to finance a larger portion of public expenditures,” he said.

He also believes that the government has chosen “the one method of financing universities which primarily benefits financial institutions – incurring debt means having to pay interest, every cent of which goes straight to the finance sector.”

In March, McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum told the CBC that she had hoped for even more of an increase in tuition.

In her view, “the government

Courtesy of Hilary Sinclair for The Link

Five years of tuition increases will begin in September 2012. has been quite timid in the steps that it has taken with respect to tuition. This will leave Quebec’s universities still dramatically underfunded vis-a-vis their Canadian counterparts.”

Yet Pedneault maintained that “the government is essentially banking on its false hope that students will not be able to organize

to prevent tuition increases.”

Marie-Pier Isabelle, president of the Quebec Young Liberals, said that no matter how many protests are conducted, the government would not overturn its decision.

“Throwing tomatoes is certainly not the way to go about dealing with these issues,” she

told The Daily in French after the demonstration. “However, the Liberal Party is always open to discussing ways in which to make higher education more accessible. That remains one of our priorities,” she continued.

Another demonstration protesting tuition hikes is scheduled for November 10 in Montreal.

Vigil remembers police brutality victims Families demand “justice, truth, and dignity” Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

A

commemorative vigil and march to remember victims of police killings took place in Montreal last Saturday.

“Police everywhere, justice nowhere,” the crowd, consisting of victims’ family members and their supporters, chanted in French as they started their march in front of the office of the Montreal Police Brotherhood. The demonstration was organized by The Justice for Victims of Police Killings Coalition, which includes the relatives, friends, and allies of Anas Bennis, Claudio Castagnetta, Ben Matson, Quilem Registre, Gladys

Tolley, and Fredy Villanueva – all of whom died as a result of police actions and interventions.

Andrea Figueroa, a representative of event co-sponsor QPIRG McGill, explained in an interview with The Daily that the coalition was formed in 2010 after the Forum Against Police Violence and Impunity was held in Montreal. “[The families of the victims] met with a bunch of other folks who were helping organize the conference, and wanted to organize something that happened every year that was sort of in memory and to highlight the injustices that have been happening to all these families,” said Figueroa.

According to their website, the

Coalition seeks “dignity, justice, and truth” because they believe that some of the investigations into the police-related deaths were inconclusive and dubious.

“The common demand they all have is that they want justice for their families, for their families’ members that have been killed, and nothing has happened yet,” said Figueroa.

After the march, the group gathered to express their solidarity with the families of the victims and to listen to their concerns.

Julie Matson – the daughter of Ben Matson, killed by a member of the Vancouver Police Department in 2002 – addressed the crowd to express her worries about the reach of police impunity.

“If you look at us, we are all real-

ly normal people – this is the thing about this kind of violence, is that it affects everybody,” she said.

Lilian Madrid, the mother of Fredy Villanueva, was among the members of the Coalition that led the march down St. Denis.

“What we are asking for is justice… We want justice to be made,” said Madrid. “We want that police officer to pay for the death of my child. We are not asking for money, what we are asking for is justice.”

Madrid also told The Daily that she believed racial profiling played a part in her son’s death. “All the boys that were there…there were no Québécois,” she said. “They all were Latino and people that have come to Canada to seek refuge,

people from other countries.”

Following the highly publicized investigation into Fredy Villanueva’s death, Dany Villanueva, Madrid’s other son and a key witness in the investigation, is facing deportation to Honduras.

Robyn Maynard, a social justice organizer in Montreal and Convergence des luttes anticapitalistes member involved with the march and vigil, agreed with Madrid. “[Police brutality] happens to people who are socially profiled, people with mental health issues, people who are very poor, whose lives are not given as much value in our society,” Maynard said. “Those are the people who the police can kind of have impunity to kill because there are no repercussions.”

4 News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Union pickets Montreal morning rush hour MUNACA and McGill begin to address monetary issues at the bargaining table Erin Hudson

The McGill Daily

M

cGill’s non-academic workers set up picket lines early Wednesday morning around exits from the Jacques-Cartier Bridge.

The McGill University NonAcademic Certified Association (MUNACA) has been on strike since September 1.

Union members began picketing near the bridge at about 7:30 a.m., and MUNACA VP Finance David Kalant estimated that there were between 500 and 600 union members participating.

Picket lines formed on Lorimier at the intersections with Maisonneuve and Ontario.

“We were making our presence [felt] there. We would also occasionally cross the streets and we were also trying to hand out flyers to the cars when they

been pushed further and further away from McGill University in terms of trying to get our message across in our picketing,” Kalant said, referring to the three injunctions that McGill has won against the union.

The union’s picketing activities are legally required to operate within the restrictions outlined in the injunctions. The restrictions limit picketing around university property, the workplaces of members of McGill’s Board of Governors, the homes of senior McGill administrators, and the McGill University Health Centre construction site.

Kalant said that union members left the bridge at around 9 a.m. and convened at Papineau metro station before walking back to McGill’s downtown campus along Maisonneuve.

“The police did a road closure of the street for us so we handed flyers out along the way,” he said.

were stopped at the light,” Kalant told The Daily on Wednesday. He added that police were on the scene “almost immediately.”

“They were there very quickly and directing us not to cross on the red lights. So, we obeyed and we crossed where we could on green lights, back and forth, just being visible, and overall it was quite civil,” said Kalant.

The Montreal Gazette reported that traffic was slowed for the duration of the union’s picketing.

According to Kalant, the delay was minor.

“It didn’t really hinder traffic that much and it didn’t cause any serious problems, but it did get a lot of attention from people,” he said.

“It’s probably the only bridge onto Montreal that you have good access to…and we knew there’d be a lot of traffic and so there’d be a lot of exposure and the ability to publicize the fact that we have

McGill issued a statement to the media in response to the union’s activities.

“We think it’s unfortunate that the union has chosen to use this dispute to affect others who aren’t connected with it in any way,” the statement reads.

Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa was unavailable for comment, as McGill and MUNACA were in conciliation meetings on Wednesday.

The two parties are scheduled to meet again on Friday.

Both McGill and MUNACA informed The Daily that “monetary issues” – wage scales, benefits and pensions – would be discussed at the table in the current round of negotiations.

MUNACA President Kevin Whittaker spoke to The Daily on Tuesday, before negotiations began for the week.

“Right now we’re starting to discuss our primary issues, which

are wage scales, and our protections for the benefits and pension,” he explained.

“And we have been told that we should make ourselves available for the weekend – this was coming from the conciliator,” continued Whittaker.

“We are hopeful that we will at least be able to discuss these issues and make it clear to the conciliator what our concerns are and why we are out on strike, because it is these reasons that have caused this strike,” he added.

McGill’s statement explained the University’s position on negotiations in light of the introduction of monetary matters into conciliation.

“We are at the table [Wednesday] and again on Friday, with monetary issues on the table, and we think everyone should really be focused on negotiations right now because that is how this is going to be resolved.”

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Syrian Canadians rally behind embattled president

5

Protests and massacres in home country denied, blamed on foreign nations and media Eric Andrew-Gee

The McGill Daily

A

day before Tunisia’s first free national elections, members of the Syrian community in Montreal gathered in force to support the authoritarian president of their homeland, Bashar al-Assad, and to denounce protesters whom the Syrian army has killed by the thousands this year.

Beginning in the late afternoon, and continuing until nearly eight in the evening, around two hundred people met on the west side of Parc Jeanne-Mance, chanting “We support Bashar al-Assad” in Arabic and carrying placards sporting pro-Assad slogans, like “We trust our president.”

The Montreal rally came a few days after a government-organized rally, attended by tens of thousands of Assad loyalists, in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Assad succeeded his father as Syrian president in 2000. Since March, Assad has been sending armed troops, tanks, and snipers into Syrian cities in response to largely peaceful protests calling for democratic reforms and, more recently, for Assad’s ouster. The UN estimates that over 3,000 people have been killed in the government crackdown, including nearly 200 children. Opposition groups maintain the number of dead is over 5,000.

Some of the protestors on Saturday denied the existence of large-scale unrest in Syria. “Thanks to God, everything is perfect,” said one man, who did not give his name.

“Everything in Syria is positive. There is nothing negative. And all of Syria, they support Bashar [al-]Assad.”

Asked why there were protestors in the streets of Syrian cities –

tens of thousands have participated in protests nationwide – the man replied, “The people of Syria are 23 million. If you see a few – five, ten, twenty – that doesn’t change.”

Those that did acknowledge the protests in Syria were quick to label them the product of foreign interference. The countries named by demonstrators ranged from Turkey and Saudi Arabia to France and the United States.

One man called for “the Americans and the French to leave Syria alone. We can fix our own problems. Our president is working on it.”

U.S. President Barack Obama called for Assad to “step aside” in August, the same day the U.S. imposed energy sanctions on Syria.

Several demonstrators suggested that Israel was bankrolling the protests as retribution for Assad’s hardline stance towards the Jewish state.

Assad is “the only one right now in the whole world who’s standing up against the West and the Israelis,” said a man who gave his name as Reffat A. Reffat went on to say that Turkey and Lebanon were assisting the Syrian opposition because “they want to give a good face to the Israeli lobby, the Jewish lobby.”

There was a widespread feeling amongst demonstrators that the international media is inflating the scope of the Syrian uprising, and distorting its true nature.

“I think all the media have no respect…for the reality and for the truth,” said one man, who asked not to be named.

“It’s a media war,” said Rami Kaplo, a Montreal lawyer.

“A lot of people just despise the Western media because of the lies,” he continued. “The Western media is not even admitting there are armed

Demonstrators gather in support of the Syrian president. gangs” among protestors in Syria.

He pointed to the BBC, CNN, and France 24 as examples.

A number of demonstrators echoed the claim that the Syrian uprising is made up of criminals.

The Syrian government frequently defends its use of force against protestors by saying that “armed gangs” have killed hundreds of soldiers and police. Despite recent reports of sporadic violence by members of the anti-Assad opposition, including the assassination of a pro-regime cleric, the vast majority of people killed since March have been unarmed protestors, according to embassies and human rights groups in Syria.

Foreign journalists have largely been barred from the country.

Many of Saturday’s demonstrators were also alarmed by the pres-

ence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the uprising, saying Islamists threatened to shatter the Syria’s delicate balance of religious and sectarian groups currently held together by a rigidly secular state.

Rex Brynen, professor of political science at McGill, acknowledged that many Syrians who are not part of the majority Sunni sect of Islam are worried about encroaching Islamism.

But, he noted in an email to The Daily, “a great many of the protesters opposing the current regime in Syria are themselves avowed secularists.”

“In any case, the objection rather misses the point. Syrians should be free to decide on the nature of their political system, whether secular or non-secular, through free and fair elections. Rather than offering his people this most basic of human rights, how-

Noah Lanard for The McGill Daily

ever, Bashar al-Assad instead offers only bloody repression in an increasingly desperate attempt to cling to political power,” he continued.

One man, watching the rally with friends visiting from Syria, called those participating “kind of ignorant.”

“In Syria right now people are dying. So watching people supporting him, [playing] music while you have people dying, is kind of sad,” he said.

A march in protest of human rights abuses in Syria is scheduled for this Saturday, starting at noon in Norman Bethune Square.

Kaplo offered a cautious defence of the actions of the current regime.

“Maybe they could have dealt with it differently,” he said of the crackdown.

“If you’re talking about human rights, it might be wrong. But we’re talking about politics.”

Tunisian voters in Montreal help complete 2011 revolution Federal government grants exception to foreign elections policy Andra Cernavskis The McGill Daily

T

his past weekend, roughly 10,000 Tunisians lined up in Montreal and Ottawa to vote for the first time since the country successfully ousted president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali nine months ago.

The ouster sparked similar revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East.

While approximately 90 per cent of Tunisians residing in Tunisia turned out to vote, the Tunisian diaspora around the world also organized itself to participate in the election. Outside of Tunisia, the Instance régionale indépendante pour les élections des Tunisiens (IRIE) was the group responsible for the organization and implementation of the elections.

According to the CBC, many Tunisians living in Canada did not

think they would get the chance to vote after the federal government said in September it would not allow the Tunisian embassy to open polling stations. The CBC reported that the decision was overturned in mid-October.

Bochra Manai, general secretary for the IRIE, said, “Canada only said that they didn’t want to be part of an electoral circumscription… They had this position since September, and they continued to have it in every meeting with the Tunisian ambassador.”

In an email to The Daily, a spokesperson for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Aliya Mawani, addressed the issue.

“Canada encourages foreign states to allow their citizens residing permanently or temporarily in Canada to exercise their right to vote in elections in their country of origin, namely by absentee ballot. All requests for foreign polling are assessed on a case by

case basis,” she wrote.

In February 2008, the federal government established a policy to reject requests made by foreign states to count Canada as an extraterritorial electoral constituency.

Mawani defined an “extraterritorial constituency” as “a voting district or riding determined by a foreign state to include territory in Canada – essentially making Canada a riding of a foreign country.”

Manai attributed the federal government’s position to a misunderstanding. “They didn’t want Canadian citizens to be a part of a foreign assembly, but the fact that we are electing deputies for the [Tunisian] assembly doesn’t mean that they are representing us. They are not representing anyone [in particular]. They are representing all the Tunisians,” she said.

“We had the right to vote here because Tunisia and the [IRIE, who organized the election within

Tunisia] thought it would be important to hear what the Tunisians outside the country have to say. There is no representation of Canada or any other country [in the Tunisian assembly],” Manai continued.

Haroun Bouazzi, a Tunisian citizen living in Montreal, said, “The Tunisian people really wanted to participate in this change… We saw that people were waiting in line for hours, even outside Tunisia. For the vote in Canada and other countries, the participation was very strong. The Tunisian people really wanted to be a part of this.”

Manai said that the IRIE was worried about accommodating the masses of people coming from all over and outside of the city to vote.

“A lot of people came from cities outside of Montreal. The people organized themselves and came in buses. We were scared of the number of Tunisians we would have to deal with,” she explained.

“We had to deal with many challenges in every country, but it was part of the excitement,” she continued.

Borhene El Kamel, spokesperson for the Tunisian Embassy, said the election went “extremely well, in an ordered, democratic and transparent manner” in Ottawa.

“That was the same case for the elections held in the other foreign countries as well as in Tunisia,” he continued.

Ennahda, a moderate Islamist party, was declared the winner early this week, with over 40 per cent of the vote.

Manai said that she thought that “a lot of people are really scared of what the party could say or do.”

She proposed that Tunisians should be patient, however. “If this new government will put in danger the freedom we fought for during the last year… I will, as [a] Tunisian, fight for them again. That’s my position for the moment.”

6 News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Services not meeting demands for homeless Quebeckers Government has no accurate estimates for homeless population Laurent Bastien Corbeil News Writer

D

espite an increase in provincial government funding to combat homelessness – in 2009, $14 million was allocated over three years for preventative measures – the numbers of homeless people are on the rise in Quebec.

According to multiple organizations that offer services for homeless Quebeckers, there has been a significant increase in the demand for services like temporary shelter and clothing distribution.

Despite these reports, neither the provincial nor federal government is able to provide a reliable estimate for the number of homeless people in Quebec.

According to François Saillant, a spokesperson for le Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU), the question of quantifying homelessness is fraught with political difficulties.

“It could potentially be done to marginalize the homeless. It’s been done in the past,” Saillant explained.

Estimating the size of the homeless population is important because the number can affect the amount of government funding allocated for social services.

There have been several attempts by the federal government to determine the number of homeless people in Canada. However, many social organizations have criticized these studies as being too conservative, and some are questioning the necessity of quantifying the homeless

population at all.

According to Maude MénardDunn, a community organizer for the Réseau d’aide aux personnes seules et itinérantes de Montréal (RAPSIM), the money that goes towards these studies would be better spent elsewhere. RAPSIM bills itself as an umbrella organization for homeless shelters in Montreal.

“We are not opposed to a census for the homeless,” Ménard-Dunn said.

“However, we believe that there is more of a need for social services.”

Most studies are conducted by calculating the number of individuals who make use of homeless shelters.

However, these numbers do not account for those who do not utilize these services.

“It’s obvious that not every home-

less person will use these resources,” Ménard-Dunn explained. “They are people who do not use these resources and are still on the street. There is also the people who couch surf.”

Couch surfing is a form of homelessness in which an individual sleeps in different peoples’ homes rather than utilizing shelter services.

“This phenomenon mainly affects women,” she said. “They’ll offer sexual favors in exchange for a place to sleep.”

The definition of homelessness is also of significant importance.

Various organizations classify homelessness in different ways. For instance, unlike governmental definitions, the Fédération de ressources d’hébergement pour femmes violentées et en difficulté du Québec considers victims of family violence

to be homeless.

A 2006 study commissioned by the Centre Nationale sur la violence familiale, found that when abused women were not recognized as homeless, the capacity to improve their situation “would be severely diminished.”

Meanwhile, the demand for homeless services in Montreal continues to rise. While there is no hard data, according to RAPSIM, the services are overwhelmed.

“We are talking about thousands of people who are turned away from shelters due to lack of space,” Ménard-Dunn explained.

“We are asking for a national policy on homelessness. There needs to be a real vision for the government. We need to know where we will be in 10 years,” she said.

City halts Occupy Montreal expansion Jane Gatensby

The McGill Daily

W

ith Occupy Montreal almost two weeks old, occupiers in the growing tent city are running out of room.

Earlier this week, an attempt to expand the encampment into Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, a public square two blocks away, was met with opposition from the City of Montreal.

“We asked City Hall on Monday night, and again on Tuesday morning, but they said we couldn’t camp there,” said occupier Laurent Goncourt in French.

Gonzalo Nunez, a public relations officer for the City, told The Daily on Wednesday that the City’s decision was for public safety reasons. “Our emergency services have to be able to intervene in an emergency situation, so we’ve asked the protesters to stay on one site,” he explained.

Although occupiers were in Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle earlier this week, they have since left.

The occupation is currently contained to Square Victoria, which was renamed La Place du Peuple on the first day of the occupation.

Stéphan B., an occupier working in the communications tent,

explained to The Daily in French that, for the time being, there is enough space in Square Victoria.

“But, in the future,” he said, “I don’t know what will happen.”

Occupiers are also discussing ideas for continuing the occupation into the winter.

“When it gets cold, people will start to leave if they’re not comfortable,” said Goncourt.

A yurt – a circular, portable, wood-framed shelter – was erected this week, and social activist

Mostafa Hennaway has proposed that people move into empty floors in the adjacent Bourse de Montréal building as the weather gets colder.

Most occupiers seem willing to stay within the law to sustain the occupation.

“From my understanding, we’re trying to do a legal occupation,” said Tara, a volunteer at the information tent. “In New York City, they’re not even allowed to camp. This is the Rolls Royce of occupations.”

Occupy Montreal has expanded to include a sanitation committee, and food, first aid, and communications tents.

Nicole Gileadi for The McGill Daily

Occupiers plan for the coming winter

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Photo Essay

7

ZOMBIE WA L K

Lindsay Cameron

Commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

8

At least use logic A response to Davide Mastracci’s “Religion and children” Zachary Sleep Hyde Park

I

should hope that the following exercise in logic will not appear alien to Davide Mastracci, who seems partial to circumventing it in order to propogate his own religious bias. The argument he makes concerns the dangers of instructing religion to children: i.e. Is it “just” a parent instructing (or as he would call it, “indoctrinating”) religion unto children when they are not yet capable of grasping such a grand and abstract concept at their current stage of growth? He has stated that religious instruction of children is synonymous with brainwashing – taking advantage of the impressionable mind of the child, who does not know enough to divorce facile “blind belief” from enlightened logic. Evidently, the lot of McGill believers were not aware, until they read Mastracci’s piece, that the reverence of their messiahs, the morals of their texts, and

the tutelage of their parents are all unwelcome instruments of religious brainwashing.

Let me begin by asking what method he used to come upon the notion that the universe operates in such a way today that we see logic “trump blind belief.” As a proponent of logic, what logical means of operationalizing did he use to compute that logic was decisively winning? One explanation for his conjecture is that he was merely referencing statistics: Non-believers are becoming greater in number while believers are becoming fewer. Somewhere after that observation, he managed to situate a “therefore” in front of a “don’t maliciously indoctrinate your children with religious propaganda” and deemed it a workable theory.

Applying Mastracci’s “trump” logic in different contexts might help to elucidate its theoretical weakness. For example, the number of creationists in America is on the rise while the number of proponents of evolution is on the

relative decline. Therefore (I am capable of using this word as well), evolutionism is illogical, and it is trumped by the universal truth that is creationism. Amazingly, I was able to use the exact same application of logic that Mastracci used and yet, somehow, I arrived at a seemingly opposite conclusion. One might characterize this phenomenon as an exercise in incoherent or even blind logic. It generally is a symptom of operationalizing things like logic and faith in wholly incommensurable units of “good” and “bad” or “biased” and “unbiased.”

This should provide an alarming demonstration of the bias of his own enlightened logic. To say that the “abusive[ness]” of the religious instruction of children is made apparent in the hatefilled messages of the youth of Hamas and Westboro Baptist is an assertion of one’s own religious bias. I do not hear him singing the praises of the young men and women who volunteer their time to noble causes in the name

of their faith. When I imagine the disappointment in his tone when he opines that “it is likely that indoctrination will continue, as parents wishing for their children to follow their religion know that, without biasing the process, children will likely emerge as nonbelievers”, at the same time I can hear the elation in the believer’s voice who articulates the exact same thing, only with the word “instruction” in place of “indoctrination” and the word “encouraging” in the place of “biasing”.

Mastracci appears to subscribe to the notion that secular instruction is ideally void of all bias. This notion is considered fallacious by believers and non-believers alike.

Realistically, there can be no escape from pedagogical biases as long as we are human. The normative mission of religious instruction should thus never consider the extinguishing of bias as amongst its many goals.

The worthier cause always lends itself to the instilment of virtues, which all parents should consider

part of their raison d’etre.

I do not see the same innate perils that Mastracci sees in instructing religion to children, but – like with any form of instruction – one cannot be weary enough of poor instructors (didactic teachers, ones with bad motives, etc). There is no hierarchy that favors logic to faith that either reason or belief can effectively determine. There is a vast plurality of wisdoms – secular and non-secular – that may benefit humanity at every age demographic. We should not limit the lessons one can obtain because they might contrive the logic of another unless we can prove (and not allege) that it is inherently destructive for everyone. If secular logic can empower the mind to effect good, then teach on. If faith can be an engine of benevolence for the human spirit, then preach on.

Zachary Sleep is a U3 Political Science and History student. You can reach him at zachary.sleep@ mail.mcgill.ca.

We need Occupy, Occupy needs the media Why The Daily’s participation in the Occupy movement is a good thing Niko Block Readers’ Advocate readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com

M

y objective in this column is primarily to take the Daily to task when its content isn’t left-wing enough to suit my own tastes. But, I have little more to say about the Daily’s coverage of Occupy Montreal than to emphasize that I am impressed by the editors’ decision to camp out at the People’s Place themselves.

In doing so, they are transforming what is too often a passive and fleeting exercise into one that is active, participatory, and rigorous.

Few things in the past month have boiled my blood quite like the contention that the Occupy movement is struggling with its own “inchoate demands,” or that it is too idealistic, naive and angry. The real-

ity of the situation is far from confusing. In 2006, the richest one per cent of the globe controlled 40 per cent of its wealth, and we’re pissed off about it.

For as long as I can remember, issues of class have been completely neglected by the mainstream press. Far more seasoned activists and journalists who I’ve talked to recently have said the same thing.

Occupy is starting to change that trend – not just here but also in the thousand or so cities worldwide that are participating in the movement. Never before in history have people from around the globe stood so explicitly in solidarity with one another, combating the same systemic issues of marginalization and impoverishment. It’s exciting.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the historic development of capitalism: the fact that so much of the organizational, physical, and legal technologies that it employs were first established within the context of colonialism, displace-

ment and genocide in the Americas.

The oil industry’s foundation on the frontier of south-western Ontario in the mid-19th century, for instance, and its rapid proliferation throughout Europe, South America, the Middle East, and the South Pacific.

Or the advent of the modern mining industry around the same time as with the gold rushes that led to the creation of California and British Columbia.

These processes in North America generated a lot of wealth for a few people – most of the followers of resource booms are not quite so lucky. But the situation becomes even more complicated when those same technologies that built the colonial frontier – entitlement to mineral deposits, open shop labour practices, land grabs, the physical extraction and export of wealth – are applied globally. What we’re seeing today is the result: huge disparities in wealth, political marginalization, and environmental degradation.

We’ve been spoon-fed a lot of bullshit in the process. A lot of the time, we ingest it eagerly. Occupy is an important and inspiring movement to me is because it indicates that more than a handful of us are beginning to move beyond the rhetoric with which we and our parents and grandparents have been indoctrinated. It suggests that we may be moving towards a time when we forfeit the myth that inhibiting markets means inhibiting progress, and choose, instead, to fight for a society that is simply livable for everyone, globally.

It is true that it’s difficult to see at this juncture how the movement might move from a few ruminating articles in the press – such as this one – to a historical event that palpably improves the lives of single mothers, indigenous peoples, and impoverished individuals the world over.

At what point exactly will the furor of the masses become so great that the prince has no choice but to step out onto his balcony and accede?

The answer is that, although this

movement may be revolutionary, its resolution will not be tidy. Banks sometimes have the luxury of being too big to fail; social movements do not. For now, it may be best to allow these democratic spaces to grow in hopes that they may eventually engulf the entire earth.

The role of the media in the development of this movement will no doubt be critical in shaping it, and, if it has any chance of affecting real and positive change, that coverage will have to be fair and engaged.

In that sense, I’m earnestly gratified to see the editors of this newspaper taking such a participatory role in it. The last thing that we need is disengaged journalists deriding the movement for its idealism.

The readers’ advocate is a twicemonthly column written by Niko Block addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of the Daily. You can reach him at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

Commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

9

Don’t get locked up, Harper Keep mandatory minimums to a minimum

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Richard Carozza Hyde Park

I

’ve recently become aware of the rhetoric in defence of Bill C-10, the “tough on crime” bill going through Canadian Parliament. It argued that the Left’s political movement against the Bill was filled with “hug-a-thugs,” a pithy expression the right coined for those that oppose their draconian legislation. It clouded the debate by claiming that opposing the Bill is tantamount to opposing its stricter penalties for child pornographers and human traffickers – who are not the main targets of the bill – and that the foundation of the criminal justice system is rooted in a philosophy of retribution for crimes. I agree wholeheartedly that the judicial system should assign appropriate punishments for individual’s respective offenses.

Yet, this crime Bill does not do that. Instead, it targets those who

commit non-violent crime who would be better served by being reformed rather than incarcerated.

The bill also limits judges’ abilities to set punishments by establishing mandatory minimums, the most lenient sentence that the convicted must serve, which acrossthe-board has been shown to be ineffective and immoral. Proper legislation is needed that can make proper distinctions between those situations for imprisonment and those for rehabilitation.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no sympathy for child rapists and kidnappers, but legislators need to get out of the courtroom. If they continue down this path, they will follow the same endless road of incarceration that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan did in the U.S. during the 1980s. Statistics and common sense point to the fact that Reagan’s “tough on crime” policy was a failure. Indeed, when the movement began after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, the population in prison due to nonviolent drug convictions

was 50,000; by 1997, the number of inmates exploded to 400,000. Total incarceration quadrupled. This was the culmination of irrational policies such as instituting a minimum five-year sentence for possessing five grams of crack cocaine – a few sugar packets worth. The United States now incarcerates not only a higher percentage, but a higher actual number of people, than the Soviet Union did under the authoritarianism of the USSR. 80 per cent of people in American prisons are convicted for nonviolent, drug-related offenses.

And evidence, such as escalating drug abuse alongside harsh sentencing and increased incarceration levels, supports the theory that locking up small-time drug dealers does not lower crime, as another dealer comes and fills the void.

Harsh crimes deserve harsh sentences, and, if there were empirical evidence that longer sentences correlated to significant drops in crime, I would support them for all crimes, but they don’t. All evidence points

towards reform. Rehabilitation costs one-fourth as much as locking somebody up, and has a much better chance of succeeding in preventing subsequent offenses. Indeed, reforms in New York decreased the incarceration rate by 15 per cent and violent crime by 40 per cent, an achievement of a calibre mandatory minimums cannot boast.

Many tough on crime proponents also espouse the idea that people who commit crimes shouldn’t just be rehabilitated, but punished in a manner in line with the offense. Once again, I agree, but mandatory minimums don’t achieve that. It shifts power from judges, who are by definition supposed to be the unbiased observer, to the prosecutor, who is anything but impartial. The job of the prosecutor is self-defining, and they may be vindictive and self-serving, using the threat of mandatory minimum sentences – without the possibility of a judge’s leniency – as blackmail to coerce a guilty plea. While obviously there is going to be a level of human

error with any human laying down punishment on another, judges exist for the purpose of accurately surveying the situation and doling out the appropriate punishment. Why are we messing with this system?

Harper’s crime bill is so outrageous that even both judges and legislators in Texas – the harshest punishing state in the U.S with 300 in line to receive capital punishment – rejected a similar bill. Serial killers deserve life in prison without parole. Individuals convicted of less serious crimes should be given a less serious punishment and given an opportunity for rehabilitation Learn the difference, Canada; America didn’t. Don’t make the same mistakes, otherwise you’ll end up like America, with over 7.2 million people monitored by the criminal justice system, spending $74 billion on corrections.

Richard Carozza is a U2 Physiology student. You can reach him at richard.carozza@mail.mcgill.ca.

10 Features

Three Days Occupying Wall Street Molly Swain

Feature Writer

“W

elcome to Zuccotti Park Zoo,” says the sign, ducttaped to a tree at the edge of the newly-renamed Liberty Park, the heart of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). “Please ask before taking photos. Do not photograph the sleeping residents.” The sign is light-hearted, but its message is strangely appropriate; Liberty Park, and OWS more broadly, has become a New York City tourist destination. Sightseeing companies have modified their routes to include a drive down Broadway Street, allowing passengers on their massive double-decker buses a glimpse of the action on their way to Battery Park and the Staten Island Ferry. The tourists rove outside the camp – ringed by dozens of NYPD officers, media vans, and food vendors selling cheap coffee and pizza. As a rule, they ignore the sign on the tree. I woke up on my first morning to discover a photographer pointing her lens not ten inches from my neighbour’s sleeping face.

As the swarms of tourists attest, OWS has stimulated the imagination of millions of people worldwide. The Occupy Everything movement has become a locus for those looking to address the economic disparities between the richest and poorest in society. One week after the mass arrest of 700 occupiers on the Brooklyn Bridge, and one week before the beginning of Occupy Montreal, I decided to head down to New York to see for myself whether OWS had the staying power necessary to affect lasting change in the U.S. The first thing you notice about Zucotti Park is how organized everything is. As I settled in, I came to understand that, whether or not Occupy’s long-term goals are achieved, the

community provides a functioning model of non-hierarchical and anarchist organizing principles.

Many people arrive at Liberty Park with little or nothing, either because of poverty or homelessness, or simply because they dropped everything to make the trip. Mandy Earley, a Ph.D candidate in Management at York University in Toronto, is one of the latter. “I was a little nervous about camping out.

I was afraid that I’d be sleeping on the cold, hard pavement... but it worked out so amazingly well. They pretty much have everything you need here. People are donating everything: stuff, time, skills. I’ve been warm and cozy.”

The camp’s Comfort Station provides for the material needs of the protesters. Sleeping bags, thermarests, shoes, warm clothing, and tarps that have been sent from around the world – Spain, Japan, Australia – are available for those who need them.

In the centre of the camp is the Kitchen, a constantly bustling open-air system which feeds hundreds of protesters everyday around the clock on ready-to-eat food that has been donated from as far away as Egypt. This can lead to some interesting meals. Breakfast my second morning in Liberty Park was a couple of Oreo’s, some bread with jam and a piece of cake. The “Occu-Pie,” a cheese and pepperoni pizza, has become famous at OWS as the “food of the revolution.” It is delivered directly to the Kitchen from pizzerias in the area, paid for by supporters from across the globe via online billing.

There is a huge library set up against one wall of the park, which carries books on everything from anarcho-syndicalism to science fiction. There’s also an internet cafe, nestled unobtrusively in the sleeping area, where a Wi-Fi connection and outlets are available for people with laptops.

Other entertainment needs have been thought of, too. At

the east end of camp is an ever-present drum circle, which includes everything from old buckets to djembes to full drum kits. When I was there, they provided a steady rhythm, almost like the heartbeat of the movement, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, only dying down during quiet hours, which the occupiers negotiated with the surrounding community. (The surrounding community has since soured on the drummers, who have agreed to limit their thumping to between noon and two p.m., and four and six p.m.)

Meanwhile, copies of the Occupied Wall Street Journal are handed out to everyone passing by. The paper has released one Spanish and two English-language issues thus far. It has full-colour photographs, time lines of populist revolutions, and a poem written by Lupe Fiasco dedicated to the occupiers, along with articles and a transcription of a speech given by Naomi Klein.

The north side of the camp is the home of the Arts and Culture working group. (Working groups are voluntary cells that take on responsibilities as small as organizing a morning yoga session to something as enormous as the 24-hour media relations operation). Boxes of art supplies are stacked beside a carpet of painted cardboard signs saying things like “Industrial Civilization is Murdering Life on Earth,” “I Can’t Afford a Lobbyist – I Am The 99%,” and “Native Women: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”

The politics of the occupiers are surprisingly eclectic, running the gamut from small-government conservative to Communist. You can find protesters holding signs addressing everything from the bank bailouts and immigration to calls for “9/11 Truth” and endorsements of the libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul lining the sidewalk.

The south side of the camp contains the main sleeping area. Blue-tarped bundles of various sizes lie neatly along the

All photos on pages 10 and 11 by Camille Chabrol for The McGill Daily

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

sides of the footpaths, unattended and untouched. At night, these will be unrolled, with their contents – sleeping bags, blankets, and backpacks in every condition imaginable – laid out and crawled into for the night. The constant influx of people into the camp means that the use of space must be renegotiated every night, a cause of tension for a lot of the campers, especially the “old-timers” – protesters who have been inhabiting the park for more than a week. This area is also one of the main thoroughfares of the site, with the more adventurous tourists using it as a starting point for their journey through the camp, and the residents using it as an avenue to drop off or pick up personal items, or to try to catch some sleep after a night shift with their respective working groups.

Or after being released from jail. Sitting and chatting with a group of protesters from the Bronx in front of their elaborate tarp shelter, my conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Jason*, fresh out of prison. “Hey guys, I got parole!” he said, to much rejoicing. After a round of hugs and high fives, Jason grabbed a blanket from inside the shelter, lay down, and immediately fell asleep.

The arrest of some 700 protesters the previous Saturday was a huge topic of conversation in the camp. When I asked residents about the most outrageous thing they had seen since arriving, I expected to hear about the woman dressed as Marie Antoinette telling everyone to eat cake, or the guy who tried to lure a member of the 1 per cent to the camp to discuss the economy. Instead, without fail, I was told about the “Brooklyn Bridge arrests” and the police brutality that people had either witnessed or experienced since moving to Liberty Park.

Carl Messineo, an attorney with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a Washington-based law group, was collecting

the names and contact information of those who had been arrested on October 1. The group had just filed a class action law suit against the NYPD with the goal, in Messineo’s words, to “get an order from the courts prohibiting the trap and arrest tactic here in New York.”

Some looked for silver lining in the arrests. Brian*, from Connecticut, voiced the opinions that many had in regards to the intentions of the police on the bridge: “the good thing is that this [the Occupation] was not in the news until that happened. Thousands of people in the streets and you couldn’t find it on any news, television, or radio stations. That put it on the news. Even if it was unfair or entrapment, it was probably one of the better things that happened in terms of exposure.”

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund is just one small part of the overall organizational structure of the Occupation. Just beyond is the working groups’ hub, there is an information table with a full daily schedule of events, a “wish list” of items needed by the camp, and a “to do” list of tasks and positions that need to be completed in order for the various working groups to function. Newly arrived campers and protesters are usually directed to one of the several information tables scattered throughout the site to get their bearings.

The Medical Centre, run by the Black Cross Health Collective – motto: “fight the power, do no harm” – is staffed 24 hours a day and has a presence at every march and demonstration. Medics are also walking through the camp at all times. Independent from the medical team is the Community Herbalist, Lezlie*, a trained herbal health practitioner with a backpack full of plants, ready to treat those for whom the constant police scrutiny and sensory overload are overwhelming.

“When I come down here,” she says, “what I’m seeing is folks

11

doing a lot to care about each other...but there are also a lot of people who are really stressed and strained. It’s really important that healing is not seen as this wussy thing where you need to come and martyr yourself and your body for the movement, but that it’s central to racial and economic justice, and that people who have really high quality health are generally people that are really privileged.”

Leszlie’s herbal medicine is supplemented by a small, cordoned-off area devoted to spirituality. It holds a community shrine with constantly burning incense and is one of the locations where guided meditation and prayers are held at least once a day.

Still, in any large-scale setting with people living and working in such close quarters, there will inevitably be conflict. Instead of relying on the surrounding NYPD to resolve these conflicts, OWS has developed an Internal Police. They are comprised of members of the Security sub-group in the Safer Spaces working group, and are trained in de-escalation techniques and nonviolent conflict resolution. Halo*, a deputy, described his role as part of a larger community “immune system where people who are overbearing or confrontational tend to leave, just get ejected from the space – they’re not given fuel. There’s a culture of respect here, a culture of non-violence.”

Everyone I interviewed spoke of this culture of respect, and I experienced it several times myself. The absolute lack of theft in the camp was astounding. I left my backpack, with all but the most essential of my possessions, completely unattended in downtown Manhattan, sometimes for more than ten hours at a time, and could confidently return at night to find it completely untouched. All the resources in the camp were continued on page 12

12 Features

procedural guidelines of the GA. It also means that GAs can last upwards of three hours.

People can air concerns at the GA with a combination of hand gestures: wiggling your fingers upwards means you agree, while wiggling them downwards means you disagree; a triangle means the speaker’s point is not immediately relevant; and an index finger held in the air means you have a point of information to contribute. Sometimes, a proposal is brought forward that the majority seems to agree with, via a “temperature check.” Finally, an individual can halt consensus by “blocking,” which they do by crossing their forearms. Blocking is considered a very serious step in the GAs procedures: it is to be used only when an insurmountable moral or ethical issue exists in a proposal, and that, if your amendment were not adopted by the assembly, you would leave the movement.

The assembly operates on a progressive stack model. A ‘stack’ is similar to a speaker’s list, and a progressive stack takes into account social inequalities such as gender, race, ability and sexuality, that can lead to white male voices being over-represented – women and people of colour, for example, will be bumped to the top of the stack if the previous speakers have been predominantly white men, in order to ensure a plurality of voices is being heard. Facilitators and stack-keepers are given training and are constantly rotated.

Consensus-based decision making only works well if those in attendance are all working towards a shared goal, and want to see the movement succeed. By focusing on the bigger picture, the nitpicking and bickering that can seriously slow down or halt progress is avoided. Not every individual will get exactly what they want with every proposal, but through sharing concerns, asking

questions, and fine-tuning drafts, a decision is reached that is in the best interest of the community as a whole, without ignoring or alienating a minority. This kind of empathy is at the core of why OWS has managed to be a successful movement, despite being without a centralized leadership or written laws. Every occupier is personally invested in the continued success of the Occupation, and, with their basic needs provided for (and in helping to provide those needs to others), they can focus on creating the change that brought them to Liberty Park in the first place.

Relying on donations as heavily as it does means that OWS will not be able to last indefinitely. The occupiers view it as a first and vital step towards a radically different political and economic system, and, while there are many different viewpoints and strategies that people want to see put into place, ultimately they all have a unified goal: change. But change comes in many forms: if OWS were to end tomorrow, crushed by the repressive system it seeks to overturn, and every occupier went back to their respective cities and states, they would still be left with the knowledge that they can shape society.

There are alternative methods of organizing, interacting, and engaging with the people around you, and if each occupier takes even a fraction of the passion, energy and knowledge they gained in Liberty Park back to their own communities, then the movement will not have failed: the people of the United States will realize their ability to shape their own society. Maybe then the devastatingly unequal, corporatist society they live in will die the slow death of irrelevancy, instead of the quick death of revolution. *Names have been changed

All photos on page 12 by Nicole Gilead for The McGill Daily

continued from page 11 available for everyone to use, so visitors’ and residents’ needs were all being met, so no one needed money to obtain anything they desired. It was a kind of perfect syllogism of non-capitalist economics.

People were also just really nice. Within an hour of my arrival at Liberty Park, I was “adopted” by two North Carolinians, Loren* and Mandarrr*, who showed me the ropes and gave me a tour. Once, a group of over three hundred people who had gathered for a special session of the General Assembly, put the process on hold to use the People’s Mic to find the father of a young child who had gotten lost in the crowd.

The People’s Mic is a human amplification system – the speaker says half of a sentence, which those within hearing distance repeat as loudly as they can to the surrounding group, ensuring that everyone in attendance can understand what is being said. In a large crowd, this practice must sometimes be repeated several times, sending out ever-larger concentric circles of sound, known as “generations.”

Nowhere was the pervasive respect and tight organization of the Occupation better embodied than at the General Assembly. The GA has become something of a legend in non-hierarchical organizing circles for its use of consensusbased decision making, and the People’s Mic. The People’s Mic came about as a response to the city’s prohibition of any form of electronic amplification. Even the famous speakers who have made appearances at OWS – Slavoj Žižek, Bill McKibben, and Pete Seger, to name a few – use the People’s Mic. This, of course, requires diligent organizing on the part of the facilitators, who make sure discussions stick to the

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Letters

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

13

You are a practicing bureaucrat and a fabulist. A university principal used to have an interest and pride in the knowledge and calibre of its graduates. You have an interest in their money.

Cole Powers U2 Philosophy

Kudos, brah.

You are a fabulist

Don’t discount nuance

Don’t assume it’s self-evident

America needs wealth creation

Re: “Don’t Defame. Debate.” | Commentary | October 6

Madam Principal,

Re: “Daily, please don’t drink the corporate Kool-Aid” | Commentary | October 13

Re: “Crisis and action” | Commentary | October 17, 2011

Re: “From Tahrir Square to Wall Street” | Commentary | October 17

Dear McGill Daily,

Dear McGill Daily,

Dear McGill Daily,

The commentary article “Daily, please don’t drink the corporate Kool-Aid”, written by Niko Block in response to a Daily feature about private research funding (“The Oil Patch and the Ivory Tower,” September 17) gives a misleading, vitriolic and myopic account of how scientific progress is credited and funded. The two main points of his commentary seems to be: ‘Scientific progress must be rescued from those who want to make a buck, and anyone with mixed feelings on the subject is uninformed.’ This attitude is, quite frankly, insulting to anyone who works in scientific research.

Public and private research teams have their own strengths and weaknesses, and these differences are critically important to scientific advancement as a whole. Private companies invest enormous capital into basic science investigation, testing, and product production; in return they expect to make a profit. Public research labs invest resources into research, with the goal of publishing scientific articles and subsequently receiving more public money. The uniting factor between these two groups is the scientific process of validation. If one particular research group reports an important discovery, others will attempt to repeat these findings.

Scientists are not stupid; they do not simply accept news at face value.

Suggesting that publicly funded scientists have been fed “corporate Kool-Aid” implies that academic researchers are too blind or too stupid to question anything that comes out of Big Industry. Block appears to believe that a scientist who accepts private money is clearly misinformed and must be educated about the inherent evilness of corporations. Those best suited to evaluate scientific partnership between public and private industry are scientists themselves, not armchair critics. The relationship between science and profit is complicated; Palus’ measured discussion of the issue is a far better piece of journalism than Block’s offensive, knee-jerk reaction.

While I agree with the general sentiment expressed in the article “Crisis and action” about income inequality, I feel that the author has made the common mistake of presenting statistics in lieu of real arguments about the harms of income inequality. All too often, we on the Left simply assume the self-evidence of our stance against income inequality without addressing the competing idea of meritocracy. The reality is that meritocracy and income equality stand on equal moral high ground and, in order to win over the general public, we must not ignore arguments coming from the other side.

The great stumbling block to arguing against income inequality is the idea most people have that not only is meritocracy fair, it is also essential for a healthy economy. Our job, as activists, is to show how reducing income inequality does not necessarily conflict with meritocracy, and is actually beneficial to the functioning of the economy. There are many arguments that can be made to prove this point, such as pointing out the negative externalities of poverty, the decreasing marginal utility of money, and the psychology of monetary incentives.

Unless we go beyond using only vague feelings of unfairness to support our position, the public will continue to see the Occupy movement, and the Left in general, as naive and out of touch with economic realities. It is essential for us to challenge this stereotype by making much more of an effort to flesh out our position with concrete arguments that address the economic as well as the moral aspects of the issue.

Regarding Carozza’s Hyde Park on the state of the American economy: while I welcome the attention that Carozza has drawn towards such an important issue, I couldn’t help but find his conclusion rather counterproductive to his apparent aims.

It is no secret that the American “corporatocracy,” as it is referred to in the article, is a sizable behemoth, one that stands in the way of much needed economic and political progress. Yet, the real problem is not that these companies are earning too much, but that they are sitting on their earnings, too scared to invest. What is needed is an economic atmosphere where growth can occur, and as the freemarket has seemingly failed to create this, it is necessary for the government to do so artificially.

This does not mean raising taxes. This means working with and being tough on businesses.

For too long debate has revolved around numbers, and not persons.

A social security paycheck is not equivalent to a paycheck. The threatening rhetoric of Carozza – “citizens...made an investment in you. Now it’s time to cash in” – runs counter to the clarity, objectivity and far-sightedness that is precisely necessary at this critical moment. Just as the middle class does not need to be the target of austerity measures, neither does business. America needs wealth creation, not wealth redistribution.

Dear McGill Daily, Kudos to Richard Carozza for “Don’t Defame. Debate.” A few parts were, I thought, a bit of a stretch, but on the whole everything in the article sounded genuine and heartfelt, and, what’s more, completely reasonable. I look forward to reading more from him in the future.

Sam Baker U2 Joint-Honours Mathematics and Economics VP Communications of the Economics Students’ Association

This is ridiculous Dear McGill Daily, I really need to vent about the little known fact that due to the McGill strike, all vaccinations and immunizations are currently unavailable. This might not sound like a big deal to those of you from nearby McGill, but, for international students, it really really sucks. Since we don’t have provincial healthcare anywhere, we’re forced to go to private clinics and pay several dollars up front for one of these shots.

Maybe this sounds whiny, but the whole point of vaccines is that they are preventative medicine. In my case, I went to McGill seeking the second shot in the time sensitive HPV vaccine. It requires three different shots over a three to four month period. It’s bad enough my primary healthcare service requires me to wait in line several hours for any appointment, but now I have to pay $100 to $400 up front because I don’t want cervical cancer.

The crazy thing is, there is a semi-solution. As far as I can tell, students can get dental services at Concordia’s clinic because of the strike. (This is what I have been told, it could be up in the air.) Why can’t McGill have a reciprocal arrangement for something like vaccines or the flu shot? They take all of three minutes, so they wouldn’t be a huge burden.

Thanks for listening, Erin Hale U4 Philosophy Honours Former Coordinating News Editor 2009-2010

Your most recent communication regarding the strike, “We are all McGill,” seems to say two contradictory things at once: both that “we are all McGill,” and that “by dint of their recent actions, MUNACA members are not a part of McGill.” It has the clear intention of rallying its readers both around you and against MUNACA members while saying nothing either substantive or documented about why exactly.

A university principal used to be a practicing academic. You are a practicing bureaucrat and fabulist. A university principal used to have an interest – and pride – in the knowledge and calibre of its graduates. You have an interest in their money and influence. You know very well that “sharp but civil” discourse is a losing tactic for anyone but yourself and your cabal of administrator cronies, since it is in fact not discourse that wins the day here at old McGill, but money and power. Your tenure as principal of this university is an embarrassment: certainly to my parents and me but also to many with whom you presume to stand in solidarity. I can only hope that you will, in time, come to see for yourself exactly how shameful it is.

Sincerely, Cole Powers U2 Philosophy

Alex Danco Masters 1 Neuroscience

Xiuqi (Rex) Xia U1 Political Science and Microbiology and Immunology

Chris Liu U1 Political Science and Philosophy

14 Art Essay

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Punk Rock Mama Alex Chalk

Health&Education

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Encouraging collaboration within the humanities IPLAI uses interdisciplinary approaches to advance teaching and research Joseph Henry

The McGill Daily

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mong the various course codes one might see when scrolling through Minerva picking courses, the acronym PLAI seems like a relatively new addition.

PLAI represents courses offered by the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI, pronounced “I-Play”), a humanities-based research and teaching institute that focuses on presenting scholarship in an interdisciplinary public forum, an approach more than welcome in McGill’s sometimes rigid departmental boundaries. The Daily interviewed Desmond Manderson, a Law professor and director of the IPLAI since its inception in 2009.

The institute conceptually arose from both Manderson’s connections to academics in other faculties upon

arriving at McGill and, in 2003, the creation of the Shakespeare Moot Project and an accompanying course with Paul Yachnin, a Shakespeare scholar and current Chair of the English Department. “[This] interdisciplinary project [brought] together Law Students and Graduate Students in English around a Moot [or, simulated court proceedings], which was built around contemporary legal problems but in which the works of Shakespeare were treated as the law, as the constitution,” Manderson stated.

The Moot Project proved to be a success, with pairs of English and Law students arguing cases before scholars flown-in for the occasion; audiences sometimes reached several hundred people, according to Manderson. Intellectually, the event fostered what he sees as the most beneficial type of interdisciplinarity, one “in which we both learned from

each other, rather than simply informing the other about what we knew… In other words, the way in which it created within us rather than

between us a sense of interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding was very exciting and satisfying.”

In 2007, after four years of the Moot Project, Provost Anthony Masi announced a new initiative that would provide particular funding for the humanities in an interdisciplinary sense. Masi asked Yachnin to create a working group on “Languages, Literatures and Cultures” (the current name for the administratively unrelated area studies department merged this year). After over several months of planning with a committee composed of professors from seven different faculties and six proposals sent to Masi and faculty deans, the IPLAI was finally created in the fall of 2009.

The IPLAI incorporated the intellectual models of both the Shakespeare Moot Project and Yachnin’s own interdisciplinary project called Making Publics, which focused on the creation of the public sphere in the early modern period. It aimed to function as an institution that “had this broad

mission of interdisciplinarity in the humanities, but also had this more specific and public focus, looking at how ideas and the humanities effect the world, and how the world effects ideas and the humanities,” according to Manderson.

Interdisciplinarity and the impact of humanities became the twin foundations of IPLAI, from which the institute would aim to create bridges within McGill’s academic, intellec-

tual, and artistic communities and to imagine versions of these in the community at large.

It seems that interdisciplinarity as such is not a novel concept, both in intellectual production and pedagogy.

“If you go back a fair way, earlier than the 19th century, you find that almost everybody is interdisciplinary,” Manderson explained. “They’re interested in all sorts of different objects, sites, or projects rather than particular disciplinary logics.”

“I think the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are seen as the ‘rise of disciplines,’ the idea that we can have specific bodies of knowledge and we need to be specialists,” he continued. “And I think certainly since the 1960s, there’s been [a move] against that sort of [approach], that sort of disciplinary isolation.”

And though Manderson maintained IPLAI’s interdisciplinarity is not necessarily unique within McGill, some students have seen it as a new pedagogical approach. Ted Ledford, a U3 Cultural Studies student who took the PLAI course “Studying Place and Reinterpreting Choreography” taught by Architecture professor Ricardo Castro, stated his frustration over stringent disciplinary lines in other courses: “I’ve taken lots of seminars in other departments outside of my major and I found the conversation very narrowing and closed off to divergent thinking.”

His PLAI course featured weekly guest speakers and a variety of experimental and sometimes personal assignments.

Manderson emphasized IPLAI’s emphasis on a kind of active pedagogical environment, to perform interdisciplinarity.

“It’s important in our courses [to] have more than one teacher in the class at the same time for there to be a dialogue amongst the teachers so that students themselves can see how different disciplinary frameworks engage with the same material,” he said.

His Shakespeare course with Yachnin often featured the two instructors debating each other in front of the course. This performative aspect to teaching is one tenet of the IPLAI’s approach to pedagogy, along with the development of new collaborations.

IPLAI selects resident faculty fellows to both teach courses and conduct research on a particular theme (“Memory and Echo” was last year’s), pairing them together in productive combinations after choosing the best applicants.

In general, Manderson sees teaching as integral to the research undergone at IPLAI: “It had been the experience of many

of us that it was through teaching that we became exposed to new ideas, that we got on top of new literatures, and we could try out our ideas with intelligent audiences like students.”

In addition to advances in the classroom, the IPLAI has strained to move outside certain typical university spheres. In addition to traditional conferences and guest speakers, the institute has held a series of “Great Trial” public lectures at Westmount Library, wherein professors discussed notable cases and trials relevant to their research. The series is now being held at Atwater branch, and IPLAI is hosting a “Theater and Danger” lecture series at the Segal Center for Performing Arts. Reading groups hosted by the institute have drawn in undergraduates, graduates, professors from four of the city’s universities and people from the community, including local artists.

“We’re developing collaborations with The Walrus, we have internships with the McCord Museum and with art galleries,” Manderson added. “We’re trying to build those links in a whole lot of different ways, because it matters, in the end to, as how the humanities are funded, as to whether they’re visible in the rest of the world.”

Yet the IPLAI is still fairly new, and is still facing certain structural challenges, such as funding and finding a more efficient implementation of their pedagogical strategy.

“It’s very hard for us to get funding from generally grant institutions or even more specifically from the university,” Manderson elucidated. “[McGill] was very generous when it set up [the institute’s funding], but in order for it to keep going in the future we need to sort of secure commitments from other parts of the University, and, because of the funding situation now, it’s been very hard to do that.”

Furthermore, Manderson commented on the difficulty of acting on the IPLAI’s founding intellectual principles: “Finding the ways in which we can work together, finding collaborations that actually work rather than just saying that this is a good idea is still something which we’re working on and trying to develop.” In his PLAI course for example, Ledford mentioned certain visiting professors “weren’t familiar with how the class was conducted, or the general vibe.”

But despite growing pains, the IPLAI may be able to fill a niche in the McGill academic experience.

Ledford noted, “the interdisciplinary institute has provided a great way for people to explore things that disciplines would otherwise not investigate.”

Culture

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Time warped since 1973

Rocky Horror enraptures Montreal audiences year after year John Watson

The McGill Daily

J

ust as sure as Halloween will bring the usual mediocre horror film spinoffs and remakes, the hunt for a perfectly original/ hilarious/sexy costume, and horriblywritten assignments due November 1, so will it bring one of the longestrunning of cinematic traditions, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Every Halloween weekend, as some grab their pillowcases for a night of trick or treating and others make “True Blood” from vodka and cranberry juice, thousands of like minded fans will line up outside theatres, fully costumed, with rice and newspaper in hand, anxious to revisit the longestrunning cult film in history.

These special screenings, often accompanied by a shadow cast who mimic the film’s actors, are entirely immersive and interactive, inviting the audience to throw rice and confetti into the air, holler at annoying characters (like the narrator), and dance along to every move of “The Time Warp.” These events have become a mainstay of the Halloween season, and have permeated our culture to such an extent that even the TV leaders of all things hip (Glee) have paid tribute to it, much to the dismay of “true” fans.

Although it has reached eternal cult status, the film is not the original source material of the Rocky Horror phenomenon. Richard O’Brien wrote The Rocky Horror Show as a stage musical, which first premiered in 1973. After successful runs in London and on Broadway, the musical was adapted for the big-screen.

Although the film failed to garner mainstream success and flopped at the box office, some theatres began showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show at special midnight screenings, catering to the audience who loved the film. Those involved in such events began inventing new ways of engaging with the film in order to evade the boredom that could come with repeated viewings. These midnight screenings became a sensation in large cities like New York and L.A., and by the end of the 1970s gained such popularity that screenings began across North America. Thus, the Rocky Horror phenomenon as we know it today was born.

Like most cities, Montreal is host to numerous Rocky Horror events this coming Halloween weekend. For those seeking the most traditional experience, The Imperial Cinema boasts that it is “the ONLY annual event in town presenting the original cult film on a big screen with a live cast on stage and massive audience participation!” This is the first time the event, which typically takes place at the Rialto, has been held at The Imperial Cinema. There will be two

screenings each night of the 29, 30, and 31, with a special discount for students on the 31. What’s more, there’s a costume contest hosted by local DJ/ self-identified drag queen Plastik Patrik.

For those looking for a more unique experience, The Rialto Theatre will be putting on The Rocky Horror Show exclusively with a live cast for the first time ever. Fans of the film be advised: this is not a screening of the classic picture show, but rather a production of the original 1973 stage musical. So, if you’re a diehard fan of the movie, and too used to Tim Curry as Frankn-Furter or prefer Susan Sarandon in her underwear, then you may want to avoid The Rialto. However, the stage performance promises an exciting experience for old and new fans alike, and will offer fans all the elements that they love about the film and more.

Barry O’Connell, who will play Frank-n-Furter in the Rialto Theatre’s production, sat down with The Daily to discuss the differences between the film and the live show, things to expect at the Rialto this Halloween weekend, and what draws people to this cult phe-

nomenon year after year.

Aside from an additional song not featured in the film, one of the main differences is that the live show involves much more dancing, making full use its 24-person cast and live orchestra. O’Connell also explained how there are many more opportunities for audience involvement. “The same interactions that fans of the movie know and are used to are also incorporated into our show, but there is an added layer of cast response,” O’Connell elaborated. “For example, fans will often yell things at the characters on the screen – well, now the characters will have a chance to yell back. This definitely keeps our actors on their toes.” Director Philippe Gobeille explained that one of the big-

ment all night long!”

You’ll get the chance to meet most of the cast and crew, and maybe after enough drinks they’ll do the “Time warp” again. Also in attendance for the first two nights will be CTV News’ Tarah Schwartz as the performance’s narrator. It’s a Rocky Horror tradition that a local celebrity plays the role of the narrator, John Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily Waters and Molly Meldrum being two past examples.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show gest challenges was remaining faithful isn’t the first film to gain immense to the film experience, while, at the popularity as a midnight movie – same time, interacting with the audi- 1932’s Freaks and 1968’s Night of the ence and environment in new ways. Living Dead are only a couple of the Gobeille noted that “we have to keep numerous films whose cult followings the magic of how a cast interacts with are rooted in this late-night tradition.

Unlike other midnight flicks, Rocky an audience when it’s not a movie.”

Ezio Carosielli, owner of the Horror continues to draw in large Rialto, envisioned an event that crowds year after year. When I asked could become an annual tradition O’Connell, a long-time fan of Rocky for the theatre. “He [Carosielli] has a Horror, why he thinks this cult classic lot of support for creative artists and is particularly successful, he boiled it wants the theatre to reflect a diverse all down to the show’s motto: “Don’t range of programming,” O’Connell dream it – be it.” Sentimental as this said. Aside from entrance to the may be, O’Connell finds the show to show, the ticket price admits you have an emotional resonance that to a post-show costume party with, has persisted – along with its characcording to the promotional poster, acteristically bizarre, yet immersive “lot$$$ of prizes to be won and wick- quality – over its relatively short but ed, crazy, sexy, haunting entertain- exhilarating lifespan.

Culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Witchcraft: it’s only rational

17

A look at alternative methods of law enforcement in light of corrupted courts The West and the Rest Kurtis Lockhart thewestandtherest@mcgilldaily.com

I

t is well documented by historians that monks and clerics of the Middle Ages did not simply perform benedictions. They also performed what are referred to as maledictions, wherein they harnessed the divine power bestowed upon them by an almighty God to curse those irreverent few who were foolish enough to cross them or steal church property – or so they would have the surrounding townspeople believe.

Of course, with the advent of modern science, historians and theologians alike now know that these monks weren’t exactly being honest when promulgating their claims of supernatural power. But, while the morality of these bogus maledictions was questionable, the service that they provided was actually quite practical and, indeed, necessary – with no government or armed infantry in place, maledictions filled a security vacuum and protected church property from theft.

The economist Peter Leeson analyzed the conditions that were needed in order for these maledictions to be effective in protecting property rights. These conditions formed what he called his “theory of cursing.”

Leeson claimed that

three criteria must be met: curses must be part of a target’s belief system, monopolized by the cursors, and, unfalsifiable.

Alas, the scientific method functioned as a one-two punch for all three of these requirements. It was not long before maledictions were quickly dropped as a clerical practice and the church ceased to sanction their use. As if by magic, cursing disappeared from the face of the earth...or did it?

Currently, I live in rural Kenya in a small town called Kianyaga, which is about a two to four hour drive from Nairobi, depending on road conditions. Crime, particularly theft, is rampant. Just the other day, I allowed a twelve year old boy and his younger brother of two or three into the house to play computer games. The kids come to my house often, mostly because they’re fascinated by caucasion people (the locals call caucasion people mzungus), and I indulge their curiosity by welcoming them inside.

During this particular visit I had to go get an item from the other room and, so, the children were left alone for a moment. When I returned they were gone – and so was a cell phone that had been lying on the table (the cell phone was broken, but the children didn’t know this).

A few hours later, on that very

Alex Chalk | The McGill Daily

same day, a local Kenyan friend of mine – let’s call him John – was at my house and got a call from his mother.

She told him that a neighborhood boy, about fourteen years old, had broken in and stolen approximately one thousand shillings (about $10, which is not a negligible sum here) from his homestead. John quickly dashed off, hailed a piki-piki driver (a motorcycle taxi), and went searching for the boy for four hours, to no avail.

After these incidences, I decided to sit down with some local friends, John included, and ask them about the prevalence of crime in these areas, how justice is administered, and the different systems that one can use to enforce one’s property rights.

“Poverty and corruption are the greatest factors causing theft cases in Kenya,” Sally told me, rather matter-of-factly. I was surprised at her candid answer because most locals are reluctant to mention their hometowns in a negative light to a visitor. But, we had known each other for months at this point, and, so I assumed this familiarity made her comfortable enough to assert such brazen opinions.

John added, “People keep stealing because...there are no punishments.

For example, in the past, we had a sub-chief who was so corrupt, and, if someone would steal, they could just bribe the sub-chief and the case would be resolved informally.”

With corruption so pervasive, affecting even the formal justice system, I wondered whether locals had any informal means by which to enforce property rights and the rule of law. Both John and Sally mentioned, quite hesitantly, that some locals resort to employing witchcraft.

I was intrigued.

It turns out that the Kamba peoples of Kenya’s Eastern Province are notorious for their practice of witchcraft. Michela Wrong, in her book It’s Our Turn to Eat, warns that Kambas are known for brewing potions, being the masterminds behind freak accidents, and placing charms underneath the beds of unsuspecting victims: “these are the spell-casters of Kenya,” she says.

And the Kamba peoples’ curses are not conjured randomly: on the contrary, their services are sought out by those seeking to punish thieves who have stolen from their land. Sally told me that the price of their services, especially in the case of the most infamous wizards, is steep. “It’s a business,” she explained, “and you have to pay an attractive some of money...probably 10,000 shilling [just over $100] and above. So, maybe more people would like to use [wizards], but they don’t have the money.”

John wished that the services of wizards were more affordable because, then, he’d be able to punish the boy who had stolen from his homestead: “[If] I made somebody insane by going to a wizard, nobody would ever steal from my house.”

They even told me stories about certain locals who had gone insane at the hands of a wizard’s curse. Like the crazy “street boy” in Kianyaga who was cursed because he stole a sewing machine from his dad who then, not knowing that the thief was his son, employed the services of a wizard. The curse, my friends tell me, drove the man’s son mad. Moreover, as John pointed out, “witchcraft is so feared because it is not reversible.”

And, so, to this day, the Kianyaga “street boy” still wanders lamely while mumbling nonsensical sounds.

It is stories like this that make the threat of witchcraft more feared, and

more effective in deterring theft, than the corrupt court systems.

The Deputy District Commissioner (DDC) of Kiriniyaga East District confirms these assertions: “the court system is feared, but not as much as a curse... They have the potential of wiping out an entire family, [the family] can die from unexplainable reasons.”

The DDC told me a story about a Kamba man in Mombasa who used witchcraft against a thief during the post-election violence in 2007.

“People broke into a Kamba man’s house and one stole a television set and carried it on his shoulder.

Then the TV could not come out of his shoulder... It was stuck there.

That effectively reduced cases of theft in that area. Nobody wanted to steal anymore.”

In fact, everyone I consulted – everyone – affirmed that rates of crime and theft were lower in areas where witchcraft is known to be practiced, particularly in the Eastern Province where the Kamba are most populous. Enforcing property rights by employing witchcraft seems not only to be more effective than the court system, but moreover, hiring a wizard is also likely to be more affordable than shelling out a bribe. What’s more is that the DDC asserted that, unlike some judges and police officers, wizards are seen as “incorruptible,” and, thus, a fair rendering of justice is more likely to be administered under their tutelage.

Therefore, far from being irrational, using witchcraft in rural Kenya, where the nascent justice system suffers from grotesque amounts of graft, is sensible given the circumstances.

Leeson would point out that the efficacy of these curses in deterring theft is due to the satisfaction of his three aforementioned conditions: curses must be part of a target’s belief system, monopolized by the cursors, and unfalsifiable. The fulfillment of Leeson’s requirements was summed up in one sentence by the DDC: “of course there’s no proof...but it’s what we believe.”

Too often the West is overly quick to write-off Africa as primitive and backwards. Witchcraft is a perfect example of this Western proclivity. We simply assume that the use of witchcraft is irrational and archaic – but it’s not. Kenya may be better off if it had a functioning judiciary, and didn’t have to resort to witchcraft when dealing with those who commit crimes, but, sadly, this is not the case.

I’m reminded of a quote from Abraham Lincoln, uttered when friends of his were bashing the peoples of the South for their attitudes towards slavery: he said, “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.”

18 Culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

VAV-va-voom

Victoria Lessard talks art and democracy with Concordia gallery co-directors

W

alking into Concordia’s VAV gallery on a chilly Sunday morning, I found the walls bare, stark white in their simplicity. The gallery was preparing for its next show, and co-directors Emma SiemensAdolphe and Courtenay Mayse had agreed to take the time to discuss the various realities of running this unique space. The VAV is a student-run, democratic exhibition space – a designation that provides its own distinctive challenges and freedoms.

The McGill Daily: Tell me a little bit about yourselves, your background in art, and how you became involved in the gallery.

Emma Siemens-Adolphe: Well, my interest in gallery work, and my involvement in it, started with my first internship at age 16 in an artist-run gallery in Hudson, New York. Then, I had an internship at Eastern Bloc last year, and then I decided to apply for this job.

My background is in art history, but I see myself partaking in exhibition spaces – my favourite part of the job is interacting with the artist. It just seems that the process of facilitating shows is very rewarding.

I’m an art history major, but I see myself going into art management, or maybe the business aspect of art.

Courtenay Mayse: I moved to Montreal because it was more of a creative center than where I’m originally from, Edmonton.

I started a gallery in a loft that I moved into when I was 19, and that was my first experience. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that my friends were making really good work, and I wanted to have a place to show it. I converted this loft into a gallery space, the Paper Apartment Gallery, for two years. I think that’s what made me want to put on shows. I’m really interested in exhibitions and ways of showing art. I’m a studio arts major, so, I’m an artist, and I think that also helps with curating, having that different perspective.

MD: What is the mandate or goal of the VAV gallery?

CM: Well, our mandate for the gallery is to support undergraduate student artists. For a lot of these students, it is one of their first experiences showing their work, and so just going through everything with them is important. In terms of our goal for the space, I think it’s just to give first time exhibiting artists a taste of what it’s like in artist-run spaces around the city.

MD: Being that the gallery is a democratically run space, could you speak more about that process in terms of how you guys became the co-directors of the gallery, as well as your role within the gallery itself as a director?

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily ES-A: Yeah. I’d say that the reason for [our title as director rather than curator] is because the artists themselves have a lot of agency within the gallery.

Especially in terms of what they want to exhibit, in what space, and what layout. Of course we do have quite a bit of say, and we tend to influence the artists in terms of suggesting what would look best.

Also, because there is maybe on average four artists showing at a time, it’s always best if Courtenay and I can have the final say by suggesting pieces, but seeing as it’s democratically run, we have to be careful not to act with too much say, it’s more of a compromise.

CM: In terms of how we got the job, it’s not that democratic.

It’s not like we were elected, it was an interview process, and we were selected for the job.

However, it’s not just us that chooses the shows, we did select a jury. We got a student from creative writing, and then a couple of students are art history majors,

and we also have another artist.

There are equal guys and girls, as we just wanted to make it as unbiased as possible.

MD: How does the selection process work for the art-pieces granted a place in an exhibition?

ES-A: Last weekend only, we had a jury weekend, [where we reviewed] ninety applications, or a bit less, in about six hours. The committee was made up of about six of us and we had a grading system of different categories, such as: how people were going to show their work, the quality of the application, how comprehensive it was, and how their artist statement corresponded to the actual art piece that they were showing. Then based on that grading, it was a final grade out of 20. We just thought that that was the best way of somewhat simplifying the process of selection, because it can be quite subjective.

CM: I think it’s important to note too, that even though we had this process, there are some

shows we are planning now, where we are discussing pieces that we would really like to show, but we just can’t. If the work is so idiosyncratic that it can’t really be programmed with other pieces, that’s difficult, because we never program solo shows, just in order to show as many artists as possible in a school year. Sometimes work doesn’t always get shown, even if it’s awesome, just because it doesn’t have the makings of a cohesive show if we had to curate it with other works.

ES-A: The programming itself is a long process, it’s so hard to minimize artwork to just a number, as there are so many other factors to take into consideration.

I thought we could maybe finalize our programming within a day or two, but we’re still working on it it’s also a matter of digesting all of the work too.

CM: It’s really intense, seeing 300 artworks blown up on a wall in one day. No, it’s cool though another aspect of this job is we

get to really see an inside look into what is being produced at Concordia and where people’s concentrations, trends and fixations lie.

MD: Do you start planning your programming with themes you want to create shows around, or do you create the thematic message of the shows through groupings of the artists’ work?

ES-A: That’s exactly the difference, between directing a gallery and curating, artists are not applying to a theme, we create a theme around their artwork.

The VAV gallery provides an important place in the artistic community for students to create their own space and have their creative visions fulfilled, and with an impressive twentytwo installations a year, there is plenty of innovative and exciting work to see. Counterbalance is currently showing at the VAV gallery (1395 René Levesque Ouest) until November 4.

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

EDITORIAL

volume 101 number 15

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

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Amina Batyreva and Victor Tangermann

We are all McGill At a university, our most valuable currency is the free exchange of ideas. The right of students to express themselves and feel safe in their campus environment is one defended throughout the world. It is something that any student body should be able to count on. But two recent moves by the administration have called their support for student free speech into question.

Last week two undergraduate students were told that disciplinary proceedings against them had begun for participating in an October 11 sit-in at the Y intersection of lower campus. The administration stated that the proceedings were due to violations of two sections of the Student Code of Conduct.

Another incident earlier this semester saw McGill’s Department of Human Resources threatening unspecified disciplinary action towards two graduate students in the Faculty of Medicine who were collecting signatures in support of MUNACA. It’s hypocritical for the administration to claim to uphold a “longstanding McGill tradition of respectful and civil discourse” – according to Heather MunroeBlum’s latest email – in its governance of the University while policing free speech amongst its students. This is not how a university should relate to its students.

University administration has no business threatening punishments based on the political views of students.

Not only are McGill’s charges towards its students unacceptable and inappropriate, they’re inaccurate. For example, the Arts students were told they were violating school rules by blocking traffic on campus.

Not only was this demonstration peaceful and accommodating to all campus traffic, one of the accused students, the SSMU VP External Joël Pedneault, wasn’t even at the October 11 demonstration. According to his fellow SSMU Executives, Pedneault was at a meeting, doing the job students elected him to do.

This is not the first time McGill has tried to silence voices on campus. The injunction against MUNACA’s picketing strategies and the administration’s thwarting of Professor Michelle Hartman’s attempt to avoid picket lines by holding her classes offcampus are among a few further examples from the last two months.

At a demonstration organized by professors in response to McGill’s first injunction against MUNACA, Derek Nystrom, a professor in the English department, addressed the crowd, saying “Make no mistake, if they can silence MUNACA in the way that they are doing here, they will silence the rest of us when our time comes.” Based on the administration’s recent behaviour, they are already trying to silence us.

But, as students, we won’t tolerate this kind of intimidation, especially not from an administration that has taken to preaching about the importance of the “McGill community.” If the two undergraduate students are found guilty, or the University’s threats against the students continue, the McGill community will not stand for it. As Munroe-Blum wrote “We are all McGill”. We will not idly watch while our fellow community members are silenced.

Contributors Shaina Agbayani, Laurent Bastien Corbeil, Niko Block, Lindsay Cameron, Juan Camilo Velàsquez, Richard Carozza, Camille Chabrol, Madeleine Cummings, Ines De La Cuetara, Jane Gatensby, Nicole Gileadi , Noah Lanard, Victoria Lessard, Kurtis Lockhart, Zachary Sleep, John Watson

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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Marie Catherine Ducharme, Alyssa Favreau, Joseph Henry, Tyler Lawson, Sheehan Moore, Joan Moses, Mai Anh Tran-Ho, Aaron Vansintjan (chair [at] dailypublications.org), Debbie Wang

Errata The Daily is proud to be a founding member of the Canadian University Press.

All contents © 2011 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

Printed by Imprimerie Transcontinental Transmag. Anjou, Quebec.

ISSN 1192-4608.

The Daily article “McGill students undergo disciplinary hearing for involvement in MUNACA demonstration” (News, page 3, October 22) incorrectly stated that the students had a private interview last Thursday with Associate Dean of Arts Andre Costopoulos, the disciplinarian for the case. In fact, the students have yet to meet with Costopoulus. The Daily regrets the error.

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Com pendiu M!

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 27, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Lies, half-truths, and schipperke pups!

20

In effort to stymie pickets, McGill destroys campus Egan Chico Spengler, Esq. The McGill Daily

F

earing that the existence of physical space on and around campus has given labour organizers an unfair advantage amidst the ongoing strike, McGill administrators have decided to turn the University’s campus into a gaping pit of rubble and dirt.

Apparently at her wit’s end, Principal Fairweather MunroeHume sent a memo to staffers last week entitled “Just, just, just blow it all up.” “Friends, we are entering a period of total war,” the memo read. “The time for dillydallying and compromise is over.

As Principal of the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Learning, I hereby decree that all physical space on around campus be reduced to a smouldering pit of destruction.”

According to an official at the Department of Defence who wishes to remain anonymous, Provost Tony Mass-e recently put in a request to have the Royal Air force carpet-bomb the area between Peel and University, but the request was declined on the

The Milton Gates were the site of the administration’s latest offensive. basis of new austerity measures recently implemented by Minister of Defense Peter McKee. “We’re sympathetic to the Ministry’s efforts to reduce spending,” Provost Mass-e told the Daily in interview last week. “We just really effing wanted some carpetbombing up in here” he added, before parenthetically muttering under his breath, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

As locations where pickets have taken place, the areas surrounding the Milton Gates and McLennan library have been the first to go. According to Provost Mass-e, students can look forward to seeing the Arts Building destroyed by means of wrecking ball in the coming days. “We’re bringing this University DOWN,” laughed the Provost maniacally.

“IT’S GONNA BE BIBLICAL.”

Love the fall? Write a fuck yeah. Hate the fall? Write a fuck this. Think fall’s hilarious? Send us some jokes. compendium@mcgilldaily.com

Mob squad doing MUNACA teach ins

PLUS 30

Also, Joël Pednault is sooooo dreamy

PLUS 150

Occupy Montreal still goin’ strong

PLUS 50

Fall leaves, hot chocolate, pumpkin carving

PLUS 75

HALLOWEEEEEEN PARTIEZZZZZZZZZZ

PLUS 30

The administration continues to be ridiculous We still have to wear last year’s winter coats.

TOTAL

MINUS 200 MINUS 60 PLUS 75

Rippled Schipperke Pup FUCK YOU OVERLAPPING CLASSES

Fuck this school. And, by fuck this school I mean fuck all three interesting classes available next semester overlapping with the only classes I can take for my program because my two majors are underfunded and run by overworked academics with eyes on their CVs. And, by fuck this school I mean fuck the one hour of counselling services available a day because of the fucking strike (not strikers), the same fucking strike caused by the administration’s (the same administration who underfunds those two majors) repulsive hierarchical contempt for everyone but themselves (and any BoG and nice military research), who sends out the same deceitful emails with the same fucking McGill-approved leering image of HMB’s same fucking press-op smile, as if bureaucracy itself could physically mold someone into a ghoul of neoliberal ideology. And, by fuck this school, I mean fuck the ambience of ugly brutalist buildings and perpetual, mismanaged construction and the wasteland that is the Redpath Cafeteria, and the bleak language class I’m skipping where I have to listen to some asshole ask what a subordinate clause is, and where circularly, the one way maybe to get the fucking help is of course effectively shut down (work in the system, use resources available, McGill’s a place where you have to make it happen go the Orwellian mantras of the same disengaged corporatized admin –> here’s your system assholes), and, by that, I mean, fuck this school that makes me want to go the Counselling Service (god forbid Mental Health have an appointment before January) before reducing it to nothing. Fuck. this.