vol101issu18

Volume 101, Issue 18

November 7, 2011 mcgilldaily.com

Dear Heather,

McGill THE

DAILY

Discarded for100 years

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

Students’ and professors’ letters to the principal Pages 9, 10, and 11

2 News

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Latest SSMU Summit discusses equity and diversity within student body Newly implemented Strategic Summits aim to facilitate discussion within campus community Annie Shiel and Andreanne Stewart News Writers

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SMU’s third Strategic Summit took place last Friday, with the discussion focusing on how to promote equity and diversity within the McGill community.

The Strategic Summits are a new initiative implemented this year by SSMU with the goal of facilitating discussions on various topics relevant to the McGill student body. Previous summits have focused on tuition hikes and student consultation.

SSMU’s Equity Committee, a student-run organization founded in

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1989, moderated Friday’s summit.

The committee’s mandate, outlined on their website, is “to confront historical and current inequities at McGill through active engagement and public education.”

According to SSMU Equity Outreach Coordinator Ryan Thom, “the strategic summits are an effort on the part of SSMU to really gauge what the spectrum of opinions and ideas and, perhaps frustrations, are from the student body.”

Emily Yee Clare, VP University Affairs for SSMU and former Equity Outreach Coordinator, added that, “strategic summits are a platform for students to get together and talk comprehensively about one issue.”

The summit lasted five hours, during which students, members of the administration, and representatives from other SSMU committees discussed issues surrounding equal opportunities for those of various races, genders, abilities, and socioeconomic statuses.

Issues were discussed on a global scale, as well as in the context of the local community, particularly concerning the inclusivity of McGill’s current policies and possible amendments to them.

According to Janina Grabs, a U3 Political Science student at McGill, “in a rather intimate setting, [the summit] gives you the opportunity to talk to a lot of people very direct-

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ly that normally you don’t get the opportunity to [talk to].”

The most recent challenge for the Equity Committee presented itself at SSMU’s 4Floors Halloween party on October 27, where certain ethnic costumes – such as Indian princesses and people taping their eyes to appear East Asian – created an environment that offended members of McGill’s student body.

Before Halloween, the Equity Committee circulated posters depicting people of various ethnicities and corresponding stereotypical costumes, which read, “We are a culture, not a costume.” Despite this campaign, there remained a noticeable number of ethnically

offensive and stereotypical costumes at the event this year.

One of the main goals of Friday’s summit was to discuss possible solutions to this problem, and to increase dialogue on issues of equity and diversity in general.

Among proposed solutions was the inclusion of a statement in class syllabi to promote mutual respect among McGill’s diverse student body – a project that the Equity Committee is currently working on with the administration.

According to Thom, “Policy itself is always a work in progress. We have different ideas, but there are always going to be points of contention.”

News

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

3

Council votes to sign the MoA, holds off on signing lease for Shatner 132 student clubs to undergo name changes at request of McGill administration Juan Camilo Velásquez and Henry Gass The McGill Daily

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SMU Legislative Council voted in favour of signing SSMU’s Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with McGill last Thursday.

Council voted not to sign the proposed lease agreement with McGill.

The MoA outlines SSMU’s and McGill’s legal rights and responsibilities to each other. SSMU had been renegotiating the document for over a year, as well as their lease for the Shatner building.

McGill has been seeking to change the names of over 100 student groups on campus, which has been a point of contention in MoA negotiations.

“It has been a long struggle with McGill to get them to accept that students, who go to this University and play a role in student life on campus, should be allowed to use the McGill name,” stated a November 3 memo from SSMU. During last week’s Council, McGill students in the gallery gathered to express their opposition against signing the MoA. President of the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) Josh Redel urged Council not to sign the MoA and asked SSMU to stand strong in their bargaining position.

“It is really unfortunate that [the McGill administration] wants to protect their brand, but we are

their brand, and I think that it is important that we don’t give in to their disgusting pressure tactics of not willing to sign a lease of a building that is an integral part of the campus,” said Redel.

The Monday before SSMU Council met, EUS held a confidential in-camera session to decide whether to launch a campaign against the administration’s proposed changes to student groups’ names.

Redel authored the motion, and said he wanted it discussed incamera so the campaign could be “a controlled leak.” “[We wanted] to make sure that the first thing was this mobilization at [SSMU] Council,” he said on Thursday night.

Redel added that he also wanted authorization from EUS Council before launching the campaign, which started with the lobbying effort at SSMU Council last Thursday.

“There was no discussion against; it was just non-stop discussion of solidarity with [the campaign],” continued Redel.

The campaign – dubbed “We are all McGill” after the subject line of an email that Principal Heather Munroe-Blum sent to students and staff regarding the strike of McGill’s non-academic workers – will feature a letter authored by EUS, as well as letter-writing and petition campaigns.

“We’re looking to get the students to voice their concerns in an easy way – petitions and letter templates – to

SSMU VP Clubs and Services Carol Fraser prepared a nine-page memo describing the nature of the changes mandated for SSMU clubs in the renegotiated MoA. The memo also provided a brief history of negotiations and the University’s rationale behind demanding the name changes – including liability and reputation – concluding that “this statement is only the beginning…of a process of making students’ voices heard during the MoA negotiations.”

Fraser said SSMU is currently in the process of contacting all affected groups about their name changes, adding that all groups who must change their names will be contacted by November 10.

“This entire situation has been difficult for everyone involved,” wrote Fraser. “I myself ran on a campaign position of fighting to retain the use of the McGill name for student groups, and it is something I have kept near to my heart.”

These are the new styles of group names – effective June 1 – approved by the administration, including recent notable examples of name changes: ­ • McGill Students [insert] • McGill [insert] Students’ Society • SSMU [insert] • [insert] – SSMU • McGill Students for [insert] • McGill Students Supporting [insert] • McGill Students Chapter of [insert] • [insert] @ McGill • TVMcGill now TVM: Student Television at McGill • McGill Walksafe now SSMU Walksafe • McGill Nightline now (McGill Students) Nightline • Elections McGill now Elections SSMU

pull them together and send them to McGill, show them we’re not happy,” said Redel last Thursday night.

After more than four hours of in-camera debate, SSMU Council voted to sign the MoA and accept McGill’s conditions. According to SSMU President Maggie Knight, the decision was not an easy one.

“It was certainly not a unanimous decision… Nobody felt like we had any good options,” said Knight.

“Having spent the last five months trying to get this to be as good as possible, I am not sure how or if we would have been able to achieve anything better by going back to negotiation, which is a very sad thing,” she added.

The day after Council’s vote, Redel said he felt “disappointed” and “disheartened” by the decision, especially given the widespread support the EUS’ campaign received during the discussion of the MoA. “You’re sitting there and you’re listening to everyone applauding, everything that everybody said, and then it’s 3:15 in the morning and they’ve decided that, ‘Oh, we’re just going to do the opposite.’ I’m really intrigued as to what possibly could have, you know, been more moving,” he said.

“It’s lost,” he added. “Instead of there being 133 names on this campaign – this movement to be able to associate with our University – now it’s one. It’s EUS, and the others are kind of gone.”

According to Redel, EUS had a “refocusing meeting” on Friday morning to alter the “We are all McGill” campaign. Redel said the campaign would now be “a bit more silent.”

“It’s not that we don’t have the power, but we don’t have the voice anymore – and that’s what I tried to say at SSMU Council yesterday, is ‘Once you sign this, you’re not just signing away SSMU clubs. And you’re not signing away SSMU, you’re signing away 132 clubs,’” he said.

Facing their own struggle with the administration over the use of the McGill name in the EUS logo – EUS’ MoA with the University expires next year – Redel said that the SSMU Council vote would affect EUS negotiations with McGill.

“There’s no precedent for not changing the logo now. I’m done, I have so much less bargaining power,” he said.

Redel was also critical of SSMU’s mobilization efforts around the issue, specifically the SSMU Executive’s explanation that it was difficult to mobilize students during negotiations.

“I’m sorry. We’re two months into school. You had two months, and now it’s done, and there’s no excuse

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

EUS launched its “We are all McGill” campaign last Thursday. for September [and] October.”

He was also disappointed in SSMU’s promotion of the discussion on the vote itself.

“I didn’t know. Nobody knew it was going to SSMU Council,” he said.

“Why do you think the only people in the gallery were engineers? It’s because I emailed them, because I found out from a councillor that it’s going to be on the agenda. No one knew. Clubs didn’t even know.”

McGill informed EUS at the beginning of the year about the issue with the use of the McGill name in their logo – instigating the “We are all McGill” campaign – and Redel admitted that he thought they waited too long to mobilize around the larger McGill name issue.

“It was something that could’ve been worked on earlier, and I am a bit disappointed that we didn’t do something sooner or bigger,” he said. “We had always intended to do something as EUS, and I knew that clubs were undergoing changes, but what I was told is it was ten or twenty [clubs].”

“To just kind of give fifteen minutes with a possibility of a five-minute extension to a discussion about some-

thing that directly affects 132 groups and sets a precedent across campus is a bit of a sham,” he continued.

“The reason we have a body like SSMU is for this kind of cause, this kind of purpose… Their job isn’t to back down,” he concluded.

The memo from SSMU, distributed to members of the gallery, noted that McGill will be providing $25,000 in financial assistance to clubs and services to assist in the cost of altering names, including new website domain names and rebranding merchandise. However, according to the memo, the financial assistance was contingent on the expense being incurred before November 15.

Though voting to sign the MoA, SSMU Council voted against adopting the lease of the Shatner building, and decided to wait for more information from the administration.

“There was a concern that SSMU had perhaps not received full data on the state of the building that would be necessary, because the new structure would require us to take over the responsibilities of utilities, and there was a concern that it would have ended up being extremely expensive,” Knight said.

4 News

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

CKUT and QPIRG face existence referenda for fee renewal and reinstated in-person opt-outs Organizations’ campus opposition served notice for illegal ‘no’ campaigning Queen Arsem-O'Malley and Henry Gass The McGill Daily

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oting opened last Friday on the existence referenda for campus-community radio station CKUT 90.3FM and QPIRGMcGill. The two organizations are calling for the renewal of their student fee and a move from online to in-person opt-outs.

Both organizations have tied their referenda questions, which ask for a renewal of student fees ($3.75 per semester for QPIRG and $4 per semester for CKUT), to a question asking to replace the online opt-out system with an internally-run alternative. The questions must pass – proving continued student support for their existence – in order to begin MoA negotiations with McGill.

MoA negotiations include lease renewals, which concern QPIRG and CKUT’s shared space, a building on the corner of University and Pins.

Adam Wheeler, co-chair of the QPIRG ‘yes’ committee, said that online opt-outs in recent years have had such a severe impact on the organization that they felt compelled to include it in the fee renewal question.

“We are actually at a point where the existence of opt-outs, the way that they’re happening – as opposed to the student-run refund system that we had previously – is

undermining our ability to fulfill the student mandate,” he said.

“Opt-outs present both obviously a financial burden on our organization, but [also] a huge human resources burden. It’s incredibly taxing on our board and staff to essentially, every semester, run a referendum existence campaign against the optout campaign,” he continued.

Both referenda questions ask that fees be “not opt-outable on the Minerva online opt-out system but [are] instead fully refundable directly through” the organizations.

McGill instituted the current online opt-out system in 2007, the same year that both CKUT and QPIRG faced their last existence referenda. Previously, opt-outs were run by the organizations themselves, requiring students to opt out in person. In the fall 2007 SSMU General Assembly, students passed a motion to reinstitute the former system, as well as a referendum question the following semester mandating SSMU to lobby for an end to the online opt-out system. The administration ignored both decisions.

Co-chair of the CKUT ‘yes’ committee (and former SSMU VP University Affairs) Rae Dooley is a current news intern at the station.

According to Dooley, about 40 per cent of CKUT’s annual budget is derived from McGill student fees. The remainder is drawn from CKUT’s annual funding drive, which usually averages about $50,000, as

well as grants and ad revenue from community groups.

“We’re just seeing a system that wasn’t really informing students about what they were doing. We’ve had students come to us after the opt-out period saying, ‘Can I pay you a fee? I didn’t know what I was opting out of.’ We think that part of that is because CKUT has no power over the administration of our fee system anymore, because it was taken under the control of the [McGill] administration.”

According to Dooley, CKUT is the only campus-community radio station in the country that does not control the administration of their fees.

In an email to The Daily, McGill Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson said that the online opt-out system “was implemented to serve students in the first place.”

“The previous opt-out system was so cumbersome that students were not reasonably able to exercise their right to opt out,” wrote Mendelson. “Decisions about how the University collects fees are administrative matters that can’t, of course, be unilaterally determined by student referenda.”

According to Wheeler, another result of the 2008 referendum was communication from the administration emphasizing they would only consider a referendum decision to change the opt-out system if it was included in a student-approved exis-

tence question. This would ensure that students provide a clear mandate for the organization to exist under a new opt-out system.

“There are very specific legal requirements to the question,” said Wheeler. “Students need to mandate that our fee is renewed in a certain way… Its administration is also part of the same question according to McGill’s interpretation, and so the question has to be combined.”

Wheeler said QPIRG has been doing its “due diligence” in terms of presenting the clearest question possible to students.

Mendelson, however, said clarity is “clearly one of the problems” with the current question.

“Frankly, I find [it] to be put in a convoluted, confusing way, and it would, therefore, not meet the definition of a clear question,” said Mendelson.

“When questions cannot be implemented because they are not clear, they aren’t implemented – until the group gets a result from a clear question,” he continued. “Organizations are encouraged to submit their questions beforehand to avoid such problems. Many groups do, but some, unfortunately, don’t.”

There is not an established ‘no’ committee for either CKUT or QPIRG’s referendum. However, Elections McGill has served notice of illegal ‘no’ campaigning, notifying students on the online referendum ballot that the campaigning

was not subject to by-laws governing postering, campaign funding, and sanctions.

“As a result, any information that was disseminated was not verified as correct nor could Elections McGill ensure that a spirit of fair campaigning was upheld,” reads Election McGill’s statement on the online ballot.

Wheeler confirmed that a Facebook group – named “Vote No to CKUT and QPIRG” – had existed, but has been taken down. Wheeler added that there had not been illegal postering or flyering, and that he had noticed a recent decline in illegal ‘no’ campaigning. “[We’ve] noticed that, again, [it’s] consistent with other trends that we’ve seen about opt-out campaigning. It’s being done by a faceless group of students that is not even making efforts to make itself accountable, or accessible to the same students that it’s trying to win over,” Wheeler said.

Quorum for the referendum period is 4,000 students, or 15 per cent of SSMU membership. If the vote does not reach quorum, the questions could be passed to the spring referendum period.

Voting will take place online until Thursday, November 10 at 6 p.m. Polling stations are located in rotating locations throughout the week: in Leacock today, Bronfman on Tuesday, and the lobby of the Shatner building on Wednesday and Thursday.

Petition delivered to Di Grappa Photo by Henry Gass “We demand an end to the administration’s undemocratic and opportunistic use of the McGill listservs for the dissemination of propaganda.”

That was the message from 677 students and faculty, who signed a petition that was formally delivered to the office of VP (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa last Friday.

The petition was received by Di Grappa’s assistant, Julie Prsa, outside of the James Administration building.

Stephen Peters, a PhD candidate in the Education faculty and one of the petition’s organizers, said that he was motivated by the nowinfamous “We are all McGill” email, written

by Principal Heather Munroe-Blum on October 18. The email, sent to all students and faculty, accused MUNACA of “threats and vandalism.”

According to Di Grappa’s office, the vicepresident was at a meeting off campus at the time the petition was delivered. His office has not yet issued a response.

— Michael Lee-Murphy

Campus Eye

News

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

5

First AUS General Assembly in recent memory to be held on Tuesday Motions include a one-day student strike, support for MUNACA and QPIRG Queen Arsem-O'Malley The McGill Daily

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he Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) will hold a General Assembly (GA) for its constituents at 5 p.m. tomorrow in the SSMU cafeteria.

Motions to be debated regard a one-day student strike, AUS support of striking union McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA), and support for the McGill chapter of the QPIRG, among others.

Several members of AUS Council said that they were not aware of when, if ever, the last faculty-wide GA had been held.

The AUS Constitution includes one article on a faculty-wide GA, and outlines basic logistics for organizing the event. However, the five sections of the article do not provide detailed instructions for the procedure of a GA, and there are no by-laws on the matter.

Arts Representative to SSMU Jamie Burnett spoke to the content of the article.

“It’s not clear at all. According to the Constitution, you wouldn’t even know that General Assemblies were

something where motions were submitted – so there’s literally no procedure,” he explained.

AUS President Jade Calver said in an email to The Daily that bylaws would be necessary for the organization of future GAs. “I think a working group or another form of consultative body to assess the successes and the shortcomings of our GA will be necessary to help us determine the shape of the AUS GA by-laws,” she wrote.

Calver added that “the AUS is actually required by law to hold a General Assembly, so I think this a great start to institutionalizing the GA in the Faculty of Arts.”

She did not respond to followup emails inquiring as to whether AUS has been in violation of this law, as a faculty GA has not been held in at least three years.

According to Article 17 of the AUS Constitution, a GA can be convened “at the request of eight councilors or by a request signed by at least 200 members of the AUS.” Burnett said that, although some Arts councilors were involved in organizing the GA, the call for convening a GA came from a motion signed by over 300 students.

AUS represents 7,515 McGill students. Quorum for the GA is

set at 150 Arts students. SSMU GAs have quorum of 100 students; the SSMU Constitution stipulates a quorum of 500 students for strike votes. No such clause exists in the AUS Constitution.

Motions were due last Thursday, five days before the GA. Despite a notice on the Facebook event stating that motions would be released Friday, AUS Speaker Ben Lerer told The Daily that the eight motions would be published on AUS’ website over the weekend.

Amber Gross, U2 Arts, is one of the authors of the motion for a one-day student strike.

She explained that the motion is to “address the tuition hikes that are coming, and [it’s] sort of in line with all the other student unions across Quebec who have also voted to strike on November 10 to attend the demonstration that’s going to happen in Montreal.”

“So far, there’s 110,000 students who are in associations that have voted to strike and there will definitely be more to come, so the idea is just a one-day student strike that Arts students will be attending,” Gross added.

Concordia Arts and Science undergraduates voted last week for a student strike on November 10. At the time of

press, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) reported that associations representing over 130,000 Quebec students have strike mandates for November 10.

Sheehan Moore, a bargaining member for the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE) and former Daily Design and Production editor, submitted a motion regarding AUS support of MUNACA. The motion calls for AUS to officially support MUNACA during its strike and for the AUS Executive to be mandated to encourage members to support the union.

Moore spoke about a similar motion that was recently voted down by AUS Council.

“I was disappointed with the position AUS took at Council in September, particularly the number of ‘no’ votes that were entirely based on people claiming they weren’t informed about the strike – even though they knew the motion was coming, they didn’t bother to inform themselves,” he said.

“It’s now important that we, as students, do something about it, and I think it’s great that the GA will now give that motion another chance.”

A motion to support the ongoing existence referendum of QPIRG was submitted by Arts Representative to SSMU Micha Stettin.

“The AUS should be supporting initiatives that take student organizations back under student control,” Stettin said.

He added that the referendum question, which includes a change to the opt-out system, will “put QPIRG back in student hands, where QPIRG will be able to control the refund process, and students as a whole will be able to control the refund process through QPIRG’s democratic processes.”

According to Calver, AUS sent a message to Arts students over its listserv, and social media has been used to promote the GA. Postering and additional listserv promotion will begin November 7.

Burnett spoke to the importance of the GA. “With everything that’s been going on on-campus this semester, in terms of MUNACA, in terms of tuition hikes, in terms of all these conversations about student consultation… I think it’s really important that we have that sort of a forum within the AUS to talk about these things and make real, meaningful decisions,” he said.

Concordia students vote in favour of November 10 student strike Quebec students set to protest tuition increases on provincial day of action Queen Arsem-O'Malley The McGill Daily

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ver 24,000 Concordia students are under the purview of a one-day strike mandate for November 10 after a General Assembly (GA) vote on Thursday.

November 10 is set to be a provincial day of action for Quebec students to protest tuition increases announced in March by the Charest government. Multiple student organizations – representing over 100,000 students in the province – have already declared strikes for the day.

The GA was a collaboration between the Arts & Science Federation of Associations (ASFA), the Concordia Students’ Union (CSU), and the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA). The strike is not legally binding, meaning students who wish to attend classes on November 10 are free to do so.

ASFA represents nearly 18,000 undergraduate students at Concordia, while GSA represents close to 6,000 graduate students. CSU itself – which represents all Concordia undergraduates – does not have a strike mandate, but is campaigning against the tuition increases.

Graduate students reached their sixty-member quorum shortly after 1 p.m., and decided to vote on a strike mandate immediately.

There were a few questions from audience members, but no debate, before the graduate students voted overwhelmingly in support of a strike mandate.

GSA VP External Holly Nazar spoke to The Daily about the strike mandate. “[The strike] is not legally binding in any way, so it’s more of a statement that graduate students are also fed up and against the hikes,” she said.

ASFA students met their 371-student quorum just before 2 p.m.

CSU VP External Chad Walcott addressed the room, outlining to students why the government’s proposed increases are unnecessary.

“Telling us that there’s not enough money in the system is, excuse my language, kind of bullshit, because they’re not investing the money that they should where they should,” Walcott said. He was referring in part to the $295 million of government money – intended for student financial aid – that was placed instead in a consolidated fund this spring.

“It’s on us now to take a stance, it’s on us now to take to the streets on November 10,” Walcott contin-

ued. “I’m looking to Concordia, as an English school in the province of Quebec, to really show that we are knowledgeable about what’s going on, and that we care.”

After Walcott’s speech, despite offers from other student executives to provide more information on the issue, ASFA students called for a vote.

Alex Gordon, president of ASFA, read the motion aloud, which resolved that ASFA support its member organizations in accepting a oneday strike on November 10, and that ASFA make efforts to gain academic amnesty for its constituents.

The motion passed with only six students voting against the strike.

ASFA VP External and Sustainability, Paul Jerajian, spoke to what the motion mandates.

“A strike means that all of the Arts and Science students are aware of what is happening on November 10, and they’re showing their support for it, and so we’ll hopefully get as many students as possible out on the streets November 10,” he said.

Walcott described what action that CSU – and its “right arm,” Mob Squad Concordia – will be taking for the next week. “It’s really just going to be like logistics on November 10, so how we’re going to be shut-

Henry Gass | The McGill Daily

Concordia students voted to strike last Thursday. tling people to the location, as well as just that last push, so classroom speeches, flyering, just general oneon-one talks with students to get them to go,” Walcott said.

He added that CSU is “ecstatic” about the strike mandate of GSA. Nazar addressed relations between students and the administration in light of the mandate. “As we communicate with the university administration, we do have a formal mandate to say that graduate students are on strike, and to request academic amnesty,” she added.

Concordia Provost David

Graham previously granted academic amnesty in February for the “Wintery Hot Accessible Love-In for Education,” an event that drew 1,200 students to rally against tuition increases. “[Graham] has, I think, already indicated that that’s his position again this year, but [the administration] also can’t force the faculty. It’s up to each individual faculty member in the end, whether they’re going to penalize students for missing classes, and, in general, the faculty have been very supportive of that,” Nazar said.

6 News

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

State’s capacity for online surveillance to increase under proposed bill Privacy Commissioner of Canada concerned Steve Eldon Kerr

The McGill Daily

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he Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, has publically criticized plans to bring back legislation that would expand the legal tools of the state to conduct online surveillance.

The Canadian Government originally proposed the Lawful Access package consisting of Bills C-50, C-51, and C-52, during the last session of Parliament in March, but the legislation died when the federal election was called for May 2. Since then, no new legislation has been presented.

However, according to Michael Patton, a representative of the office of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, their office will be proposing similar legislation to the original Lawful Access package shortly.

The original package would have enabled state authorities to demand individuals’ basic personal information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) without a warrant. The legislation would also have required ISPs to upgrade their networks to permit real-time surveillance of their customers’ activities.

In anticipation of the potential proposed legislation, Stoddart wrote an open letter to Toews urging caution.

In the letter, Stoddart outlines her concerns that the previous bills would have expanded “the legal tools of the state to conduct surveillance and access private information,” while simultaneously reducing “the depth of judicial scrutiny” required to access such information.

Stoddart noted that such legislation goes “far beyond simply maintaining investigate capacity or modernising search powers,” because it adds “significant new capabilities for investigators to track, and search and seize digital information about individuals.”

“In the case of access to subscriber data, there is not even a requirement for the commission of a crime to justify access to personal information – real names, home address, unlisted numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, and much more – without a warrant,” her letter continued.

Patton, however, explained that the Office of Public Safety’s approach “strikes an appropriate balance between the investigative powers used to protect public

safety, and the necessity to safeguard the privacy of Canadians.”

“As technology evolves,” said Patton, “Many criminal activities – such as the distribution of child pornography – become much easier.”

“We are proposing measures to bring Canada’s laws into the 21st century and provide police with the tools they need to do their job,” he said.

In her letter, Stoddart acknowledged that “rapid developments in communication technologies are creating new challenges for law enforcement and national security authorities.” She went on to state that the Internet cannot be a lawless zone.

Scott Hutchinson, a representative of the Privacy Commissioner’s Office, explained that, despite repeated calls, “no systematic case has yet been made to justify the extent of the new investigative capabilities that would have been created by the bills.”

“When contemplating changes that would have such an important impact on fundamental rights and freedoms, the government needs to demonstrate the necessity, legal proportionality, and practical effectiveness of these new powers,” he explained.

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily According to her letter, Stoddart is worried that “Canadians have not been given sufficient justification for the new powers when other, less intrusive alternatives could be explored.”

Stoddart concluded by stating that “a focused, tailored approach is vital” if the new legislation is not to weaken the “long-standing legal principles that uphold Canadians’

fundamental freedoms.”

Hutchinson noted that other jurisdictions have explored options regarding checks and balances.

He noted several options, such as “annual reports on the use of powers being tabled in the legislature, external audits on the use of powers, and administrative or even criminal sanctions for the misuse of surveillance tactics.”

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Email news@mcgilldaily.com to get involved.

It’s true. We can do more than write.

Catch us if you can, every second Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. on CKUT 90.3 FM.

Letters

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

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You’re not going to land that internship at This American Life and be Ira Glass’s favourite protege unless you’ve worked at CKUT. If you doubt CKUT’s worth, ask yourself whether a university is still a university without a campus radio station.

Drew Nelles B.A. 2009

Learning beyond the classroom

QPIRG is integral to a green Montreal

Dear Editors, Universities are often criticized as an ivory tower, an exclusive institution that is not only separate from, but that looks down upon the rest of the community around them.

But, there are groups on campuses who actively work to build stronger links with those outside the walls of the university. QPIRG-McGill and CKUT Radio are two such groups.

Through projects like the Community University Research Exchange (CURE), the Study in Action conference, and their support of a wide range of working groups QPIRG-McGill creates tangible, informative and important links between students and their neighbours across Montreal. The Montreal Media Co-op is pleased to be one of those working groups, and to have participated in both CURE and SIA in the past.

Our links with CKUT are just as strong. Many of our members have had a chance to work with both organizations, we often share content and promote each others coverage of community issues important to a wide range of Montrealers, students included. The Montreal Media Co-op and CKUT recently collaborated on a live, two hour broadcast from the opening of Occupy Montreal, the only community news outlets to provide such extensive, on the ground coverage.

Out work with both QPIRG and CKUT has brought us closer to students in Montreal and helped us in our mission to create accessible, community journalism that reports on stories important to all Montrealers.

As a group, we have decided to endorse QPIRG-McGill and CKUT in their upcoming referendum questions that will ensure they remain vibrant and active examples of how students, faculty and Montreal community members can work together. We hope McGill undergraduates share in our support and vote yes for QPIRG-McGill and CKUT from November 4 to 10.

To McGill students and community members, Greening McGill, a long standing working group of QPIRG McGill, would like to emphasize that that QPIRG is a platform for justice and equality. Our society is set up in a way that makes social change difficult. QPIRG is a place for anyone to make a stand for their rights, even without the deceit of financial powers or funding for a large team of lawyers. Groups like QPIRG are vital for defending freedom within our community. Greening McGill has been able to start movements to make campus car-free, has played a key role in developing recycling processes, provides information and events to reduce energy consumption, the group is able to continue these efforts thanks to the support of QPIRG through McGill students. Social and environmental change cannot happen without the action of individuals.

An attack on QPIRG’s existence is an attack on the existence of its workings groups, the people given voices by these groups, and every community member. Through QPIRG, everyone is afforded the opportunity to express their concerns within supportive groups. These working groups include: Dignidad Migrante, B. Refuge, KANATA, Radical Reference, and many others. As an undergraduate student at McGill University, you can protect your voice by voting yes for the QPIRG Referendum November 4 to 11.

Greening McGill QPIRG-McGill Working Group

Keep CKUT alive At McGill, there aren’t many opportunities for students to learn journalism. The Daily is one place that fills this void. CKUT is another.

But, as a former Daily editor and a current magazine editor, I can safely say that CKUT is cool in ways that the Daily is not. Being a print journalist makes you kind of nerdy, whereas being a radio DJ makes you attractive. Playing vinyl records makes you attractive. Talking in a low, soothing baritone to thousands of listeners makes you attractive. Listening to noise music or community news or free jazz makes you slightly less attractive, but doing these things is important to your development as a well-rounded Montrealer. Also, you’re not going to land that internship at This American Life and become Ira Glass’s favourite protege unless you’ve worked at CKUT. If you doubt CKUT’s worth, ask yourself whether a university is still a university without a campus radio station.

Drew Nelles B.A. 2009 Former Daily Coordinating editor and News editor

QPIRG helps maintain Organic Campus

Queer McGill endorses QPIRG, CKUT ‘yes’ campaigns

The Organic Campus is a group of volunteers who run a co-op with a farmer and baker couple named Berhanu and Werke. We volunteer our time to provide healthy and affordable food to students, as well as promote greater farmer-consumer relationships, and help make ends meet for the farming family.

Anyone who has visited Farm True Ecostere (which we run worktrips to on occasion) is sure to be amazed at the incredible amount of food that Berhanu is able to cultivate from a very small plot (I’d say roughly two lower fields, plus orchards) – all completely free of chemical fertilizers, and utilizing extremely little added fertilizer at all. Looking forward at the food, fertilizer, and water shortages in the world’s future, it’s very clear that Berhanu is doing many things right with his farm – and yet the free market fails to reward him for his days after days of hard work, dawn to dusk.

Being an organic farmer is not an easy job, and our group provides an extremely important stream of income to this family’s life. We’re happy to do this work for the connection it develops and the lessons we can learn from Berhanu and Werke, but they shouldn’t have to depend (to the degree they do) on it. Farmers, particularly those who reject the industrial mass-production ‘modern’ model of agriculture, have no support in our society; they are kept constantly hanging by a harvest.

We are busy selling bread, and don’t have the time to advocate for a fairer world. QPIRG is a organization dedicated to giving voice to this trouble, and highlight the hypocrisy in the food system. For the short term, we will support this farmer, but in the long term, we need support, and right now so does QPIRG

On behalf of Queer McGill, we, the 2011-2012 Executive Committee, are writing to extend our unwavering support to QPIRG and CKUT during this referendum period and endorse the organizations’ respective yes campaigns.

Both QPIRG and CKUT are vital to queers and to campus life, and we urge all undergraduates to vote yes on keeping them alive and strong.

QPIRG has been and remains a forceful voice for queer students at McGill. We remember its early support for the Safe Space campaign and recognize its past and ongoing work in producing a guide to queer issues for instructors and a handbook for queer refugees, hosting the University’s first conference on transgender issues, and supporting qteam, a radical queer collective, as a working group.

But our endorsement extends beyond QPIRG’s support for queer empowerment. QPIRG shares our broader anti-oppressive mandate and is active in a wide range of social and environmental issues that queers care about, through supporting projects from sustainable urban gardening to KANATA, McGill’s only Indigenous Studies journal. In the struggle against all forms of oppression, Queer McGill and QPIRG are important allies.

Since the 1960s, CKUT-FM has been a part of our campus and our community. CKUT receives no corporate funding, enabling it to put the voices of students and marginalized communities at the forefront of its programming.

Valuing alternative voices, CKUT is a haven for queers on the airwaves.

Check out the shows QueerCorps, Venus, Dykes on Mics, and Lesbosons, among others, to know what we’re talking about. CKUT is an invaluable resource for queers and all McGill students, and Queer McGill supports it wholeheartedly.

Sincerely,

We hope you’ll vote.

The Montreal Media Co-op QPIRG-McGill Working Group

Organic Campus McGill Student Group

The Queer McGill Executive Committee McGill Student Group

Commentary

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

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What should your democracy look like?

Maggie Knight Hyde Park

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f you’re reading this article, then chances are you’re at least vaguely aware that the SSMU hosts a General Assembly (“the GA”) once each semester. You may have read editorials endorsing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on different General Assembly motions, or advocating for or against the SSMU General Assembly being abolished all together. Even if you haven’t, please keep reading, because we’re attempting to change your democratic forum and you deserve to be involved in the process.

The GA has the power to provide a forum for students to come together, debate, and decide what we want to see from our student society and on our campus. The SSMU political process can be dry at times, although those of you

who have attended GAs know that they are often host to impassioned speeches and substantive decisions (not to mention a lot of neon yellow voting placards).

It’s easy to critique the GA, which has had its fair share of problems – from low attendance, to motions some people find irrelevant, to controversial motions that have left the student body physically divided. What’s not as easy is to engage students in truly reforming the General Assembly into a decision-making body we can all be proud of and that can provide a central space for students across the downtown campus to make decisions about what SSMU should do.

Should motions “from the floor” be allowed? This would let any member show up with a motion on the day of the GA, instead of submitting it two weeks in advance; while there would be some logistical issues

regarding translating and checking for contradictions with the SSMU’s Constitution or bylaws, this could add to the flexibility and dare I suggest excitement of the event.

“Quorum” (the number of students who have to be there in order for the GA to make a decision) is currently 100 members, with the requirement that no more than 50 per cent can be from any one faculty. Should this faculty requirement be kept to protect against any one faculty’s students overwhelming others, or is faculty a poor proxy for a student’s ideology and best interests? Should faculty associations have a formal role in the SSMU General Assembly?

Should voting at the GA continue to be in person only, or should voting be moved online in order to ensure that every student has the opportunity to vote, regardless of scheduling and

space constraints? If the debate and collective process are a large part of what is most valuable about the GA, would allowing the assembled body to vote on the amendments, but then put the final motion to an online vote be a respectable compromise?

These are some of the questions SSMU’s bylaw committee is grappling with. We want to give the student body a stronger democratic forum, but it doesn’t make sense for us alone to decide what your democracy looks like. After a survey and two town halls, the bylaw review committee will be meeting this week to decide what proposals to ultimately put forward to SSMU Council. There will also be a town hall to discuss the proposed changes, but we encourage you to be proactive rather than reactive and to give us your thoughts now on how to reshape your GA. If you’re a downtown campus undergraduate, then the SSMU rep-

resents you. Each March, all of you SSMU members elect six student executives and numerous councillors to represent you. But of course in any robust democratic system, the voters doesn’t just ignore what these elected officials do until the next election – in SSMU’s case, the vast majority of executives serve just a single one-year term, which means we don’t face a second evaluation at the ballot box. This is where the General Assembly and the Referendum Period come in. At a GA, any SSMU member has the right to argue for their perspective and debate the opinions of other students. We hope you exercise your right to not only show up for your democracy but to shape it.

Maggie Knight is the President of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU). She can be reached at president@ssmu.mcgill.ca.

The big picture on voting ‘YES’ to QPIRG One student explains why your excuses won’t cut it, no matter what they are Hyde Park

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PIRG is asking for your help to be democratically approved to exist for 5 more years. Here are some reasons I will vote ‘YES’:

1. I don’t always agree, but that’s not the point I don’t always agree with what QPIRG says and does, but it puts my own opinions into perspective.

For students at McGill, it’s absolutely invaluable to understand what differently minded students are thinking and engage in discussion with them. What is university but a place for people to debate ideas? How else would we learn and grow as thinkers?

University is a time to discover what you really believe in. How would we do that without exposure to ideas we disagree with? What would the Tribune and The Daily write about?

Let’s make sure there is something for everybody on campus.

Additionally, I find it incredibly ironic that many of QPIRG’s opponents are strong supporters of “free speech” on McGill campus.

It seems to me that they should be promoting a wider range of opinions, not stifling them.

2. Opting out is no reason to vote ‘no’ I am not involved in the vast majority of clubs at McGill and I do disagree with a small number of them. But I would never actively try to end their existence or deprive them of funding.

Similarly, voting ‘yes’ to QPIRG existing does not mean you support the organization, or even that you will not opt-out. If you want to optout every semester thereafter, you should. It’s your right. But don’t take away this activity so many students have devoted their entire University (and post-University) lives to in order to save yourself the walk to the opt-out table in the SSMU lobby.

Vote ‘yes’ for your classmates, then opt-out for yourself.

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Brianna Delagran

3. “I hate X about QPIRG” is simply not good enough Do something about it. Think it should be managed better? Run to be on their Board. Don’t like their events? Join a working group.

QPIRG is only as good as the people driving the organization. If you want to see something different from QPIRG, get involved.

4. We can’t ask the University to support Student Life if we don’t It’s true. If we opt-out as we have

been (around 12 per cent), and try to defeat student-run initiatives like QPIRG, what signal does this send to McGill? With money as scarce as it is here, the University funds everything based on its “priorities” (i.e. academic research). Meanwhile, it has slowly transferred all funding into its “priorities” and pulled out all funding in areas that don’t count on their scorecard. In this way, McGill can still compete with top-notch schools in areas

it feels are important, while leaving it up to students to pay for student life. If the students have no interest in funding their own initiatives, why would McGill? How can we ask McGill to help with student-run food services, the Quidditch Cup, or any other student initiative that requires McGill’s support, financial or otherwise, if we don’t even support each other? Let’s show them we care about maintaining and supporting a diverse

and vibrant campus.

This referendum question is much larger than $3.75 per semester.

It’s about our beliefs about student life at McGill. Go vote, and vote to keep our campus groups diverse, vibrant, and thriving.

Brianna Delagran is a U3 History student. You can reach her at brianna.delagran@mail.mcgill.ca.

Letters to the principal

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

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Dear Munroe-Blum, Dear Principal Munroe-Blum, I’m writing about a few things, but mostly regarding the unacceptable way that you and your fellow administrators have chosen to address McGill students, faculty, and workers over the last two months.

The majority of what I have to say has already been said over and over again, but I think it bears repeating (and repeating and repeating). Considering that just over a week ago the McGill Tribune ran an editorial denouncing MUNACA’s tactics with language taken almost verbatim from one of your emails, it’s clear that the words the administration chooses matter.

I think the instinct among the Tribune’s editorial staff, and likely among most of the community, is to trust the emails we get from you and other administrators. Past messages have seemed innocuous enough – reminders that it’s “Earth Hour at McGill,” or annoying but harmless propaganda about McGill’s international ranking. And the administration’s intention in September to keep us all up-to-date on negotiations seemed like a good idea at the time. But right away, you turned a vehicle for conveying information to the entire McGill community into a weapon against MUNACA workers.

One of the first emails, sent on September 8, cautioned us to call security if picketers made us “feel threatened or unsafe.” This, it turned out, was the beginning of an onslaught of rhetoric carefully designed to make us fear the library assistants and administrative staff dancing with tambourines outside the Milton Gates. That same email, and almost all that followed, have consistently misrepresented MUNACA’s actions and positions. Among the most notable and frequently distorted are the union’s demands regarding compensation increases.

The highpoint of these messages was the email you sent on October 18, with the subject line “We are All McGill.” In it, you claim that at a Homecoming event, MUNACA picketers vandalized a building, harassed elderly guests, and threw things at administrators. The next day, in an interview with CKUT, MUNACA’s VP Finance David Kalant specifically refut-

ed each of these accusations. I wasn’t at the demonstration, and neither were most of the students, but as my mother has said so many times to me and my sister: obviously one of you is lying to me.

I’ll take MUNACA’s word, and it isn’t because I like them better or because I work for another campus union: it’s because you’ve lost any credibility on the issue. Since the beginning of the strike, your administration has on many occasions distorted the truth or outright lied to us. You have failed to protect protesting students from harassment by security, going so far as to authorize McGill security’s filming of peaceful student demonstrations. And you have personally, Principal Munroe-Blum, reacted with astounding unprofessionalism to the concerns of faculty members, dismissing their comments at Senate and ignoring their mobilization through letters and organizations like the McGill Faculty Labour Action Group (MFLAG). Additionally, the administration has filed multiple injunctions reducing the ability of MUNACA to exercise free speech, and then claimed to be “astonished” when the union was forced to move to other sites like the hospital construction at Glen Yards. (Most repugnantly, Michael Di Grappa wrote that it was McGill who was astonished, as if his feigned shock at the peaceful actions of 1,700 scorned and desperate workers is shared by all of us.)

When you rob McGill workers of their picketing rights, intimidate McGill students, ignore McGill faculty, and send out emails dripping with sarcasm and untruths, this ceases to be a question of wage increases or pensions. As letters in this paper and elsewhere have demonstrated, you have lost the support even of those who would otherwise disagree with MUNACA’s position.

You have turned our University into a place of fear, hostility, and disrespect. You write of the “longstanding McGill tradition of respectful and civil discourse,” yet professors are afraid to speak out for fear of repercussions. You say this is a place “where people are free to speak, to disagree and voice their

views without harassment, intimidation, and insult,” but you simultaneously take legal action against workers and authorize the harassment and intimidation of students.

The effect this has had on all of us is indelible, but it’s not too late to salvage something. I urge you to issue an apology for your administration’s treatment of McGill workers, students, and faculty; to lift all injunctions and allow workers to return to their picket lines at McGill; to allow MUNACA an equal platform from which to address the McGill community; to encourage free and open discussion among the community; and to proceed in good faith at the bargaining table towards a fair agreement.

Sincerely, Sheehan Moore To Arts undergrads: Come to the Arts Undergraduate Society GA on Tuesday at 5 p.m. in the SSMU building cafeteria and vote on a motion to support the MUNACA workers and on a one-day strike opposing tuition cuts.

To all students: This isn’t an isolated issue – silence now gives the university permission to step on us in the future.

Speak out, and ask your parents to speak out. Email heather. munroe.blum@mcgill.ca and michael.digrappa@mcgill.ca, even if it’s just a sentence or two. Write to campus and local newspapers. Attend rallies. Support picketers when you see them. Encourage your faculty organizations and SSMU to be vocal and take action.

Sheehan Moore is a U2 Arts student. He is VP Internal of the Anthropology Students’ Association, Chair of the Board of Representatives of the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE), a member of AMUSE’s bargaining team, a former Design and Production editor at The Daily, and a director of The Daily Publication Society. You can reach him at sheehan.moore@mail.mcgill.ca.

10 Letters to the principal Dear Principal Munroe-Blum, I was amazed, in your last email to all McGill students and staff, to read the statement “we are all part of the same community.” It’s not that this claim is completely false – it’s true that McGill has a lively community.

Campus groups like QPIRG, the UGE, CKUT, and various theatre companies give students spaces to make friends, develop skills, and carve out a niche on campus. Professors, and the equally important TAs and course lecturers, help students academically and personally. Advisors help students to navigate through the potentially murky waters of the McGill bureaucracy. And service workers, administrative staff, and other employees interact with students every day, performing necessary tasks and allowing students to get an exemplary education at McGill (or, at least, they did until the start of the strike).

It seems, though, that you and your administration have worked actively since September 1 to undermine this community. Since I came to McGill in 2009, you have been removed from most facets of campus life, rarely talking to or interacting with most students. But, your isolation from those that make up the McGill community has recently become even more apparent.

Since the start of the MUNACA strike on September 1, you have made it painfully clear that you have little regard for MUNACA workers or for the others that make up the McGill community.

The administration has treated the strikers shamefully – creating what MUNACA has called a “No Free Speech Zone” by requesting injunctions barring them from picketing on campus and severely limiting their ability to picket in areas near campus, at McGill off-campus events, at the workplaces of members of McGill’s Board of Governors, and at administrators’ homes.

Similarly, TAs have not been treated fairly in AGSEM negotiations with the administration. The union has been in negotiations since May, but, this October, the administration rejected most of their demands. Although the demands are reasonable – they are seeking only a 3 per cent wage increase, an increase in TA hours (which would be in line with the growing number of students), and access to paid training – McGill seems unwilling to consider them.

Students are also being ignored by the administration. Despite an official SSMU policy against tuition hikes, and growing student mobilization at McGill (particularly by the Mob Squad) around the issue, the administration supported the provinces recent tuition increases of $325 a year for five years. They have said that fees should be set at the national average (significantly above the average in Quebec.)

Clearly, you don’t see these workers, instructors, and students as “community” members worth listening to. But we’re speaking up and making you listen. MUNACA continues to picket around campus, AGSEM voted on October 19 to authorize pressure tactics against the administration, SSMU is promoting the tuition rally on November 10, and the AUS is even taking a strike vote this upcoming Tuesday. The McGill community is strong, rapidly uniting, and ready to make their voice heard.

Sincerely, Joan Moses Joan Moses is a U3 Political Science and Literature Student and the Coordinating Editor of The Daily, and the opinions expressed here are her own. You can reach her at joan.moses@mail.mcgill.ca.

Fellow graduates, it is time for you to choose where you stand: up on the graduation stage with Heather Munroe-Blum or on the street with hundreds of MUNACA workers who have made your study possible.

Hariyanto Darmawan

Dear Principle Munroe-Blum, I cannot, in my good conscience, walk past the striking MUNACA workers to receive a degree that hundreds of them have parts in. It is the hard-working librarians who help me find the resources I need for my research. It is the kind-hearted departmental secretaries who do all the paper work for my study.

It is the lab technicians who fix the equipment I use for my experiments. It is all of the MUNACA workers who keep this University running. Thus, it is their degree as much as it is mine, and when they are forced to take strike action to struggle for a better working conditions, I am forced to take their side.

Until Principal Heather Munroe-Blum and her high-ranking associates resolve this labour dispute in a respectful manner and fulfill the just demands of the MUNACA workers instead of spewing anti-union propaganda through their public relation arms and engaging in legal maneuvers through their highly-paid lawyers, I cannot stand on the convocation stage this November. To do so is to betray my sense of justice and whatever values that make one an upright member of this community.

In making this decision, I am reminded of the words of a great Russian writer, Victor Serge – words that I would like to share with every one of you: “What do you want to be? Lawyers, to invoke the law of the rich, which is unjust by definition? Doctors, to tend the rich, and prescribe good food, good air, and rest to the consumptives of the slums? Architects, to house the landlords in comfort?

Look around you and examine your conscience. Do you not understand that your duty is quite different: to ally yourself with the exploited?”

Fellow graduates, it is time for you to choose where you stand: up on the graduation stage with Heather Munroe-Blum or on the street with hundreds of MUNACA workers who have made your study possible.

I call on other graduating students to join me in this solidarity action to show to the McGill administration that we find their anti-union actions contemptible. I call on my fellow students to walk the picket line during the convocation days and receive a lesson that you won’t be able to get from the comfortable seats of your classes: life is full of injustice and it matters where you stand.

Sincerely, Hariyanto Darmawan Hariyanto Darmawan is a graduating student from the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Dear Principal Munroe-Blum, I took particular offense when you wrote your “We are all McGill” email a few weeks ago. It is quite convenient for you to now say that “we are all McGill” when you have spent the past few years destroying any semblance of a campus community.

This is the same principal that has evicted students from space on campus, denied them the right to associate themselves with their own University, and made major cuts to funding and programs. Yet it is not in the least bit surprising to see the P.R. war that she has waged the past two months. As someone who was just approved for graduation, I had a chance to reflect on my time at McGill and on the McGill community as a whole. People often say that McGill students are apathetic and perhaps justifiably, but simply acknowledging the fact that many McGill students don’t care about what’s happening at the University misses a major part of the story. The relationship that the administration at McGill fosters with its students more and more reflects a patron-client relationship rather than that of an academic community. Many are proud to identify as McGill students, but the administration seems to want to deny us that right, or at least make us associate ourselves with the University on their terms.

Their most recent actions show how misguided their views are. Student protestors are clearly passionate about this University, yet the administration has attempted to silence them and treat some of them like enemies of the state. Likewise, MUNACA employees who are a major part of this University have been constantly disparaged and fallaciously portrayed as villains who vandalize buildings and terrorize elderly alums. It is evident that the administration plays a major role in the alienation that is endemic amongst the McGill community. When you write, “we are all McGill,” your actions are saying, “we, the administration, are McGill and you will do as you’re told.” These actions do not strengthen communities, but instead tear them apart.

Sincerely, Eric Wen Eric Wen is a graduating McGill Faculty of Arts student and a former Sports editor at The Daily.

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

We are not all McGill.

You are your McGill and we, along with MUNACA, are our McGill.

Esther Lee

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Dear Principal Munroe-Blum, Around this time last year, I was frantically going through university brochures, trying to decide what to do with the next four years of my life after high school. Despite the last minute changes and thousands of unanswered questions, I chose to come to McGill.

I have an immense amount of respect for this institution; for the professors, the support staff, and the administration. I respect that there must be logistical aspects of the strike that are sometimes invisible to the students and the public. I respect that problems must be “resolved at the negotiating table through dialogue and compromise.”

But what I don’t respect, Madame Principle, is that this McGill is no longer the McGill University I chose to be a part of. I didn’t choose to attend an institution that denies the rights of the very people who make it work. And I can’t help but to think that neither you nor the administration care about students who can’t use McGill health services; or about the kids struggling to make ends meet because documents are not getting processed fast enough at the Student Aid office. And what about Service Point, and the postponed independent research, and the closed libraries? You may make critical decisions and act as the face of McGill – you may be credited for McGill’s academic standing or sign proposals into school regulations, but you and the administration are not the backbone on which this university is built on.

The fact that you’re choosing to frame MUNACA as a monster organization – when in fact, they’re simply asking for fair wages – is dividing the school community into pockets of hostile groups. We are not all McGill. You are your McGill and we, along with MUNACA, are our McGill.

The strike started on the first day of the first year of my first university experience. I, with hundreds of other first years, don’t know what we’re missing out on – we can’t imagine McGill without the picket lines outside of the Roddick Gates.

I stand by MUNACA because I thought I came to a school that encourages equality, fairness, and free speech. As someone who chose to make McGill University her university, I am asking you to give us back our school.

Sincerely, Esther Lee

Dear Principal Munroe-Blum, The undersigned professors, members of the Department of History, are writing to express our concern about the current labour dispute between MUNACA and the University.

Leaving aside the substantive issues under negotiation, we wish to focus on the conduct of the strike and the effect it is having on the atmosphere within the University and on McGill’s reputation in the broader community.

That the conflict has become so bitter can be attributed to a significant degree to the administration’s aggressive use of security guards and restrictive injunctions. Picketing in labour disputes typically involves some noise and disruption; certainly that has been a feature of strikes at other Canadian universities. By preventing customary forms of picketing, the administration has escalated and embittered the conflict.

Together with the reliance on guards and injunctions, the recent move to institute disciplinary proceedings against two student officials of SSMU suggests an administration strategy of silencing opposing views. We consider this repressive approach antithetical to the basic ideals and mission of the University.

In this context, we must object to the series of “strike news” bulletins we have been receiving in recent weeks from the Principal, the Provost and the Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance). Presenting a one-sided management view of the conflict at a time when other viewpoints are being suppressed, these communications are framed in the language of reason, virtue, and high ideals. We find it unseemly, under the circumstances, for the University administration to be casting itself in the role of defender of “our longstanding McGill tradition of respectful and civil discourse, where people are free to speak, to disagree and voice their views without harassment, intimidation and insult.” The implication that faculty, students, and support workers with a different view of the strike are somehow a threat to this “McGill tradition” strikes us as objectionable.

We understand that this conflict presents difficult challenges for all parties and we join you in hopes for a speedy resolution. Meanwhile, we ask for greater restraint in the administration’s conduct of the dispute and fuller respect towards the rights of our striking co-workers.

Sincerely, History Professors: Allan Greer, Faith Wallis, Daviken StudnickiGizbert, Jarrett Rudy, Suzanne Morton, Catherine LeGrand, Catherine Desbarats, Griet Vandeerberghen, Gershon Hundert, Brian Cowan, Malek Abisaab, Valentin J. Boss, Tassos Anastassiadis, Elizabeth Elbourne, Brian J. Young, Jon Soske, Brian Lewis, Nicholas Dew, Andrea Tone, Desmond Morton

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Esther Lee is a U0 McGill student. You can reach her at yoo.j.lee@mail.mcgill.ca

The implication that faculty, students, and support workers with a different view of the strike are somehow a threat to this “McGill tradition” strikes us as objectionable The undersigned professors | Members of the Department of History

Dear Principal Munroe-Blum, Although the learning experience has become more difficult on students during these times of strike, the McGillMUNACA conflict has certainly educated me on the ways in which education is being corrupted by universities in our time. The current conflict illustrates how McGill has continuously jeopardized the quality of its education in its pursuit for capital.

The McGill community should be concerned with the administration’s flagrant corporatization of education. And you, as a part of the current administration, are undermining the University itself by reducing academia to a simple economic good. By virtue of the immense social value that it brings, education transcends any monetary value; therefore, it cannot be treated like any other commodity.

Furthermore, McGill’s conflicts with unions across campus show that you prioritize financial endeavours above educational pursuits. Through this prioritization of financial endeavours, the strike has continued well into the semester, and is undeniably compromising the academic experience of all students.

Similarly, in the negotiations with AGSEM, you have continuously refused to give TAs several resources that would improve undergraduate education. As long as your administration refuses to meet these groups’ demands, you will continue to fail students by depriving them of an adequate education. And any amount of capital that McGill might be saving will never counterbalance the educational quality that has been lost.

I understand that McGill’s conflict with MUNACA comes

from the administration’s desire to avoid financial deficits or to have more financial responsibility. But McGill seems to be ignoring its ethical responsibilities in the process. As a centre of critical thinking, McGill cannot run on ethical deficits either, and the way in which the administration has treated groups that oppose their views is simply unethical.

If the administration continues to treat education like a market product, one can only expect the same from students.

And if students start to view their education in this kind of superficial way, they will let their academic experience bypass them without taking full advantage of it. It is through this process of commodification – led by the administration and followed by students – that academia is being threatened. And it is disturbing to witness how educational institutions are leading this charge.

With this letter, I ask that you take a lesson in learning and realize that teaching should be McGill’s top priority – not money. And in doing so, the administration ought to acknowledge that everyone in the McGill community, including support workers, is an important part of the educational experience.

McGill cannot continue to fail the test of providing quality education, because if it does it is failing society and the future.

Sincerely, Juan Camilo Velásquez Juan Camilo Velásquez is U1 Economics student. You can reach him at juan.velasquez@mail.mcgill.ca.

12 Features

Performance photos courtesy Clockwise from left: A scene from En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize; the lobby of th at St. Denis and St. Joseph.

Bilingualism Gets Stage Fright A theatre school tries to untangle Canada’s language politics

Naomi Endicott

I

t’s a cold evening, and I’m in the auditorium of the Monument National, a theatre nestled in the seediest part of the Lower Main. The floor throbs beneath my feet. A boy is dancing to repetitive house music on the promenade that juts into the audience.

His t-shirt tells me he just Facebooked my mom. The next time I look at him, it’s on the floor. A throng of performers shares the stage with several standalone kitchen units, a drum kit, and a couple of tents. One actor is doing squats, another is wrapped up in a blanket, sniffling. Once the audience has settled down – by which point the shirtless dancer is drenched in sweat – the cast stands together, as two performers, one French and one English, exuberantly recount the fifty-year history that led up to this single sold-out performance.

On November 2, 1960, the ribbon cutting of the National Theatre School, or École National de Thêatre (NTS/ENT) was marked with the words, “I declare the National Theatre School ouverte.”

That was fifty-one years ago. The school was, from its founding, supposed to be “truly bilingual.”

Now, to mark its demi-centenary, students in this year’s graduating class staged the school’s first ever bilingual production, En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, an edited version of several works by playwright Jacob Wren. Described as a “neo-post-digital-clash-reality-based performance,” it ended up being a confused diatribe about the state of theatre, what theatre is, capitalism, totalitarianism, the family unit, overpopulation, the current economic crisis, and, of course, Quebec’s language divide. As you learn when you spend any amount of time around NTS/ENT, that awkward, double-barreled acronym is not the only sign that the school’s bilingual project has been about as succesful as that of the country it represents.

I spoke to the school’s CEO, Simon Brault, on the phone about the school’s approach to language.

“It was always meant to be – since the very beginning – a place where Francophone and Anglophone would study and train and experiment and develop their capacities of doing theatre at the same time in parallel,” Brault explained. “It was always understood that these two communities would be in Montreal in the same building, sharing the same space.”

NTS/ENT was created in response to the Massey Report of 1951. A survey of the state of the arts in Canada, the report highlighted many shortcomings in the country’s cultural sphere – and in particular, in opportunities for Canadian students to study arts in Canada.

The report suggested state funding to remedy the situation. This funding was meant to be be regulated by the autonomous Canada Council for the Arts, and to prevent talented Canadian artists from leaving the country to study – and never coming back. This brain drain was a problem for many art forms. But theatre, where cultural capitals were already well established in New York and London for Anglophones and Paris for Francophones, was particularly hard hit. Under these conditions, it was hardly surprising that theatre people were leaving the country. As the Massey report noted, “facilities for advanced training in the arts of the theatre are non-existent in Canada… Young actors, producers and technicians[...]must leave the country for advanced training, and only rarely return.”

So, in 1958, the Canadian Theatre Commission (CTC) struck a committee to found a bilingual school in Toronto. They soon realized that Montreal, as a bilingual city, made more sense as a location. Over the years, the school tacked on programs that cover every aspect of the theatre: acting, playwriting, directing, set and costume design, and production.

However, in many ways, the school has fallen short of true bilingualism. The French and English sections are socially and pedagogically separate, save for one class (set design). The two language groups sit separately in the cafeteria, by and large, barely making small talk.

The English section has classes on Saturdays, while the French section does not. The English section recruits theatre professionals from all over the country to teach. For the French section, recruitment is limited to French-speaking professionals. No one I talked to seemed to think there was anything wrong in this stark separation.

Brault defined the school as “more co-lingual than bilingual… In the sense that each language has its own territory.” It’s hard not to imagine that Brault is talking about something larger than the school here.

Chris Abraham, co-director of En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize and an NTS/ENT graduate in Directing (1996), agreed with Brault’s description of the school as “co-lingual”. “It’s definitely not a bilingual school,” he told me on the phone. “Language on

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com pedagogy is. I think classes do see each other’s work, especially the public components. The divisions are not by design.”

Darcy Gerhart, a second-year in Acting, concurred: “It’s strange because their program is completely different... We operate in the same building but it’s sometimes like two different schools. [Language] is a hard barrier to break, especially socially.” ***

En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize presented language as a field of conflict. “You will see,” Brault promised me, “the play is really a dealing with the differences and critics and challenges of translation, and of living together when you are different.”

The performance lived up to its billing in this respect, at least. The audience was summoned to its feet for the national anthem in English and French. A whimsical reenactment of the story of the Tower of Babel – the biblical fable of man’s attempt to reach God, resulting in divine wrath and the separation of humanity into distinct linguistic groups – was meant as an ode to the richness and poetry of mistranslation. But it devolved into a cacophony of yelled complaints about language, hurled between the English and French performers. “[The fight scene] was created through improvisation,” Abraham explained. “It was interesting because there wasn’t a lot of explicit tension within the group over language. We had to really ask people to give voice to the things they sometimes thought.” The things they thought of had an unnerving ring of truth – they frequently triggered a “someone else thinks that too?!” epiphany in me. For example, does “I try to speak French, I do, but you always reply to me in English!” sound familiar? Or the Quebecker plea for immigrant Anglos to at least try to engage with a culture that increasingly defines itself by its language? y of the NTS/ENT; other photos by Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily The play, as its title promised, swiftly launched he NTS/ENT; a scene from the performance; the front doors of the school, into a discussion of criticism. At first, the theory that when you critique something, you are supposing the French side is a political entity. The fact that students are there is a better version of it somewhere – an idyllic version there training to speak French on stage is connected to the that is attainable only if the criticism is heeded. The words politics of the day in Quebec, and certainly we experienced of Leszek Kolakowski rang loudly through the theatre while projected images of war and destruction flashed across the that in the project.”

To be fair, the logistics of organizing a bilingual produc- screen above the actors’ heads. “We need a socialist tradition are formidable, by all accounts. Because the two sec- tion that is aware of its own limitations, since the dream of tions function so differently, the process took a considerable ultimate salvation on earth is despair disguised as hope – amount of time and compromise. “If you want to be seri- the will to power disguised as a craving for justice.”

Message after ideological message bombarded the audious you need a much longer process, because French and English don’t have same training – not only taught but prac- ence. Don’t have children! The nuclear family is the root of all evil! Theatre is dead! Somewhere within this, the lanticed,” Brault explained.

Abraham encountered this in the day to day business of guage issue got lost. Every speech was translated immediproducing the show. “As much as there was excitement… ately, but instead of resolving the question of bilingualism it there was also apprehension,” he said. “Not just because seemed to accept its failure by presuming the need for transof the political content of the piece that we were working lation in one of Canada’s few truly bilingual cities. on, but the prospect of working…in two languages.” He *** described it as “very, very difficult initially, when everything had to be translated into two languages... But over the year When I heard this was the first bilingual production the we spent working together we found an equilibrium, we NTS/ENT has ever staged, my reaction was predictable: what found what needed to be translated and what didn’t.”

By virtue – if it can be counted as one – of its location in took so long? Isn’t it supposed to be a bilingual school?

When I put the question to him, Brault replied, “I don’t a province where language is so politicized, the NTS/ENT has to deal with conflicting ideologies, not simply adminis- think it took so long. If it had been a goal of the school, it tratively, but in the context of each individual’s relationship would have happened fifty years ago.”

Despite Brault’s insistence that a bilingual production with language.

Lois Lorimer started studying Acting in 1978. For such a was never a goal of the school’s, the CTC’s mandate was to tumultuous period of Quebec’s political history – the prov- create a bilingual school. In this respect, the school has not ince’s first separatist Parti Quebecois government had been succeeded.

However, it has to be asked, does that matter? Is it even elected two years earlier – Lorimer recounts her time at the school as one that somehow lacks concrete political context. practical to have a bilingual theatre school? For the majority “It was exciting, and even though much was happening in of students, an imposed bilingual pedagogy would comproQuebec politics, being theatre artists bonded us in a way,” mise learning: in such a high-intensity program, starting on she wrote in an email. “We were running around in our leo- a new language would seriously detract from getting ahead tards from class to class with no time even to do laundry, in the cut-throat world of theatre. Abraham sees this as the training our bodies, our voices, dealing with texts in differ- reason for the bilingual production’s fifty-year wait: “It’s ent languages but still were part of a universal alchemy of more to do with [the fact that NTS/ENT is] a training institulive theatre. It was thrilling to us English students to live in tion, it exists for that.”

“Entertaining the idea of classes together is dangerous,” Montreal, where actors and artists seemed respected.”

Among the students I spoke to, the general consensus Gerhart echoed. “It’s a little scary to me because it could get is that the language divide is more practical than politi- in the way of the work.”

“We’re learning how to act, we’re not learning French,” cal. Abraham echoed Lorimer, saying, “I think the divisions within the school are largely to do with the fact that she said. “That’s maybe the flaw, maybe the beauty of the the students are kept incredibly busy in their time at the school. It’s not and I don’t think ever will be a bilingual place school. The moments for social interaction tend to happen because the number of bilingual actors out there is very outside of school... There’s always been a curiosity about small. I don’t know if it should be really, in terms of the what the other program’s doing, what the nature of their training. I’m going to work in English Canada, or parts of the

13

world that speak English. As much as I aspire to be bilingual, English is my first language.”

Anyway, the notion of “bilingual” is ambiguous: does it mean fluency in two languages, or respectful accommodation of two languages? Within the Quebec school system – which requires all students to attend French-language schools, unless their parents have been schooled in Quebec in English – NTS/ENT’s system is very accommodating. My impression of the linguistic divide within the school is that it’s a constructive exposure to another culture, rather than a restriction on communication.

This is most likely why the school has shifted to billing itself as “co-lingual.” As Brault explained, “The notion of ‘co’ means the goal is not to integrate everything… There is constant conversation exchange.”

For students like Lorimer, the resulting atmosphere was exciting. “I found my experience of actor training at The National Theatre School enriched by Quebec culture and language, and I like to think we got along and learned from each other,” Lorimer wrote.

But, for Gerhart, this isn’t enough. She lamented that “the school doesn’t make a huge effort to integrate the programs,” saying it’s something that often comes up at student association meetings. One thing Gerhart said she and other English students wished for was “a chance to see [the French program’s] work. We get very little notice about the French shows that are going on, and I think that would be easy to integrate, and we wouldn’t need to speak the language to appreciate the theatre.”

The same applies outside the school: the English program works its schedule around major English-language productions in Montreal, but makes it difficult to attend French-language ones. “There’s something about theatre that transcends language,” said Gerhart. “It’s not a necessity [to understand]. If the acting is good you don’t need to know the language.” *** It seems telling that Canada’s preeminent school for performing arts should grapple with the French-English divide this way. Such struggles are at the heart of Canada’s national identity. Brault calls the school “a real microcosm of this country, [and] of the arts sector.” With the dominance of Anglophone art in Canada, and the corresponding determination of Francophone art to assert itself, Brault is certainly on to something. Art in this country is not bilingual – neither in execution (granted, books alternating between French and English would be impractical), nor in appeal or intention.

However, the numerous successes of the NTS/ENT should not be underestimated. It was formed to keep Canadian artists in Canada, and over the last fifty years the resulting talent has reinvigorated Canadian theatre. If the school does not represent what bilingualism “should” be, it may be because Canada doesn’t. The Anglophone Ontarian who feels herself vaguely “enriched” by Quebec’s presence in Canada is much more common than the truly bilingual Montrealer who straddles both cultures with familiarity and ease. After all, the majority of the country is English, and so is the majority of arts exposure, funding, and creation. In Quebec, the roles are reversed. As Gerhart notes, “we’re in their city, we’re kind of the minority.”

In the Youtube trailer of En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, a girl crouching in a porta-potty explains, “This play is about translation and the relationship between French and English in Canada, and the art in Canada, as far as theatre goes.” While the play’s tangled political soapboxing could be analysed far more deeply, its biggest success may have been the implicit significance of its very existence. “It was a big thing for the school to do,” Abraham, the co-director, said. “Supporting this project from both sides of the administration and being engaged in a very technically involved show required a lot of conversation between both sides of the school, and I hope that will have a positive impact.”

If the school is indeed a microcosm of the Canadian arts world, then this production has some interesting things to say about the divide within our national culture – and even about whether we even have one. The show made it to the stage: that is no small feat, and a step forward, no doubt. But in its confusion and dissonance – and the persistent problem of translation – the performance, like the school itself, reminds us that we have a ways to go.

As Lorimer, class of 1981, put it: “I thought it a tribute to the school, which is a co-lingual institution, and would have been surprised not to have both languages. It was thrilling to see the two classes merged together and working collaboratively. Also amazed that this was the first time this was done in the history of the school.”

Sports

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Ian Mu rph y

| Th eM

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Runner’s high The rewards outweigh the risks of running a marathon Lucile Smith

Sports Writer

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n Sunday September 25, 24,000 runners participated in the Montreal marathon, half-marathon, and ten kilometre runs. One of these runners, Jean-Francis Presseau, died tragically after running over twenty kilometres, only one kilometre away from the half-marathon finish line. This death – along with the four other deaths that have occurred in the Toronto marathons between 2002 and 2006 – has sparked serious debates regarding the health risks associated with long-distance running.

With almost every major city in the world now hosting a marathon, the races have become somewhat of a trend. While there is a professional and competitive side to the sport, its

popularity comes principally from the personal euphoria and sense of accomplishment achieved after completing a 42 kilometre run.

Mya Sherman, a U3 McGill Environmental Sciences and Latin American and Caribbean Studies student, who ran the Montreal half-marathon last month, explains that it was the surroundings and atmosphere which allowed her to complete the race. She says, “The entertainment on the road really pumped you up. I also definitely pretended that everyone on the sidelines was cheering specifically for me. Adrenaline really gets you going on race day.”

“I think overall it was a great experience and finishing was fantastic, I had such a runner’s high,” she continues.

It is no secret that exercise yields plenty of health benefits. It lowers the risk of coronary heart

disease, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels. Dennis Barrett, McGill’s Cross Country and Track and Field coach, confirms, “Running releases a lot of good hormones and makes you feel good about yourself, and it’s a terrific way to bring down the costs of our health services.”

But is 26-miles too far? The death of Jean-Francis Presseau garnered a lot of media attention, and Dennis Barrett admits, “I am not a big proponent of the marathon, it’s not something I recommend to people, I think it’s excessive, just because of the impact on the body.”

Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a professor at University of Toronto, ran a study that looked into 26 American marathons in the past thirty years. It found that only 5 per cent of deaths occurred in the first half, whilst 50 per cent occurred in the last 1.6 kilometres.

Dennis Barrett explains, “What I’ve looked at in the past years is that marathon runners don’t last that long.” However, he also admitted that it may just be his philosophy since he suffered from bad shin splints when he started running.

However, the health consequences which occur after longdistance running are usually linked to personal previous medical conditions that the runner was unaware of. While the autopsy is yet to reveal the exact cause of his death, it is important to reiterate that JeanFrancis Presseau died during the half-marathon (21 kilometres).

The deaths surrounding marathons have not deterred people from participating in long-distance runs. Tens of thousands of people successfully complete marathons every year. For Christopher Barrett, a U3 Finance student at McGill, who ran the Montreal marathon this

year in 4 hours, 1 minute, and 42 seconds, the health fears and recent deaths have not been discouraging.

“The marathon was definitely not a one-off for me, I’m planning to run the Montreal and New York City marathons next year,” he says.

Nevertheless, marathons are not for everyone. Dennis Barrett would not expect or encourage his own athletes to compete in marathons until after they have left university.

“They need to have enough volume and mileage behind them,” he says.

But, with the right training, cross training, medical advice, and nutrition, these deaths should not deter people from running. The race day alone is not the only achievement.

The training is an equal laudable accomplishment. For those looking to run a marathon, you need only look to the thousands of runners who make it through the finish line for inspiration.

Sports

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

In defense of “we�

15

www.mcgilldaily.com

Fans are a key component of any sports franchise A Fan’s Notes Evan Dent

afansnotes@mcgilldaily.com

T

here’s a large faction of sports fans out there whose blood boils when they hear one simple word spoken by a fellow fan.

That word is “we.� As in, some fan might say, “man, we really need a new quarterback.� It’s common parlance among fans, to use the word “we� when they talk about their favourite team, but it just rubs some people the wrong way. They’ll sneer and say, “You are not affiliated with the team in any way – you don’t play for them, work in the front office, or have anything to do with the makeup of the team. You are just a fan.

You are on the outside.� Fine.

This is a completely logical argument. Fans aren’t a part of the official team and don’t have anything to do with its operation, besides showing up to games and buying merchandise. This puts them on the outside. The thing is, though, that there is no logic to being a sports fan. Being a fan is about wanting inclusiveness, about being part of something greater than yourself, about putting the weight of the world behind what is, ultimately, a game. There’s something intangible and bigger that links the fan and the team. “We� doesn’t make sense logically, but it makes sense as a fan.

The reasons people root for certain teams makes almost no sense. Most of the players on any team aren’t actually from the city itself, so civic pride and regionalism

aren’t valid explanations. The players are impermanent. If they don’t move to a new team in free agency, they’ll retire eventually. In essence, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, we’re “rooting for laundry,� because only the jerseys remain constant.

The truth to being a fan, then, is assigning meaning to the team.

Teams can come to represent something much bigger than they logically should: the Montreal Canadiens represent the whole of French Canada, even though only two players on the roster are actually from Quebec. The fans choose to use the sports team as a representative of their city and region in spite of any real connection on the part of the players.

This is mostly because fans are looking for a connection to something greater than themselves: to see an awesome play, and have it mean more than just athletics. It’s the triumph of whatever you want it to be.

The triumph of one team becomes the triumph of one city, one culture, one way of life over the ambiguous “other,� which ends up being whoever we want the enemy to be.

This desire comes from the fact that fans are separated from the action. They can’t actively participate. There is no way to affect the game other than cheering. So, what do fans do? They stand up, cheer, without any pretence of logic. It is a beautiful delusion, stripped of any semblance to reason. Fans of the St. Louis Cardinals think that a squirrel running across the field during a playoff game propelled them to a World Series championship. Fans burn jerseys. Fans adhere to ridiculous superstitions in an attempt to supernaturally aid their team.

There’s no thought behind it, but it doesn’t need rationality. The fan clings to the culture of the team, becomes part of the greater community, and creates his or her own “we� – the players, the organization, and the fans.

The fans of any team are an integral part of the community created around a franchise. The die-hards live to follow the team, buy the merchandise, and show up to games (or, at least, monitor the game on TV or the internet). They assign meaning to the actions of the team, choosing to allow the franchise to represent the city, an attitude, or a way of life that appeals to them. Sure, there are teams that exist without many fans, but these are largely unsuccessful teams. The teams that exist without many fans don’t feel right: there is a conspicuous absence at every game, an eerie silence that is impossible to ignore.

Most fans don’t consciously use the word “we�. It just springs up when talking about the team, and I don’t think this assigns the speaker an active role within the team. Rather, the use of the word designates the speaker as an active member of the community created by the team. When a fan says, “Man, we could really use a new quarterback,� they could just be saying the team could really use a new quarterback, if only to make the team they invest so much energy into – and therefore their daily existence – better. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “well, we could really use some more offense,� because, sometimes, we really could: the players, the owners, the administrators, the front office, the fans, everyone.

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The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

16

Lucky to be born Giving away babies in radio contests Raisin Brain Anthony Cotter

raisinbrain@mcgilldaily.com

S

ometime this week or year – depending on whether you trust the U.S. or the U.N. – the world’s seventh billion baby was born. A lot of those babies were probably conceived in some pretty weird ways, but, as far as I know, none of the seven billion babies born in the last 120-odd years were won in a contest or lottery.

Until now.

This October, Ottawa radio station Hot 89.9 set a controversial precedent when they awarded babies to five infertile couples in a contest called “Win a Baby”. The contest was launched on, pun intended, Labour Day, and over 400 couples and individuals filled out an entry form that allowed them to make their case in 100 words or less. Reasons for

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

infertility ran the gamut: some were queer, some had slow swimmers, and some had paraplegia or uterine cancer. The station picked five finalists, posted their stories online, and then let its listeners – known as ʻ“Hotties” – play stork by voting to decide which couple would go home with the prize money for fertility treatments.

Hot 89.9 isn’t even the only group to try to give away a baby as a prize this year. The U.K.-based website To Hatch, which describes itself as a “fertility advice and online community clinic,” launched a similar, though less saucy, lottery on its website in July. In the To Hatch lottery, twenty pounds bought you a chance to win 25,000 pounds to put towards in vitro fertilization, donor sperm, surrogate mothers, or donor embryos.

The To Hatch website itself appears to be a shill for infertility-related products, like a fertility consultation

iPhone app and a portable fanny-pack to keep your fertility drugs cold, both of which can be won in a separate Luxury Fertility Hamper sweepstakes.

Both groups are not exactly shining examples of upstanding citizenship and morality. The profit motive behind these conteswts is not hard to see. The radio station makes headlines, picks up a few listeners, and its ad revenues get a boost. The online community clinic takes a portion of the twenty pound entry fee, puts it into its website or directly into its pocket, and cuts another ad deal with fertility product makers.

But infertility, and how people can and should deal with it, is a touchy subject with all kinds of attendant financial, ideological, and religious questions that are not openly talked about, but need to be.

I can’t pretend to understand what kind of psychological trials people go through when trying to reproduce, but I have a strong gut feeling that that struggle should not be subjected to the wacky world of commercial pop radio.

So here are some questions that these contests invite: is it

all right for a kid to be able to say he or she was conceived thanks to the Morning Hot Tub with Jenny and Josie? That is, do contests like these reduce stigma around infertility and provide genuine, benevolent opportunities for infertile couples or individuals, or are they capitalizing on desperate people to score ratings and free advertising? Is it overly sensitive or puritan to think there’s something wrong here?

Those looking to vilify this practice have plenty of grounds. Jenny and Josie gave away $35, 000 in fertility treatments to all five of the final couples, despite initial plans to choose one winner. This “everybody wins” finale was not in the original script. This made the tens of thousands of listener votes, which were pleaded for or self-contributed by the couples (one of the participants stayed up all night for a week before the contest closed voting online), entirely irrelevant. It’s hard to interpret the decision to have multiple winners as anything other than a guilt-assuaging apology for milking five emotionally wrecked couples for a month of national media coverage.

The station looks benevolent for having too much heart to turn somebody away, but nobody remembers the three hundred and ninety-five non-finalists that didn’t win.

But it is also hard to make the case that the contest didn’t do something good. After all, five couples, some of whom had been trying to conceive for over four years, and none of whom could afford the treatments on their own, now have the chance to have a child.

No human being who aims for empathy or decency would tell those couples they shouldn’t have entered the contest because the contest contributed to the profits of a big broadcasting corporation.

And, inarguably, Hot 89.9 shoved in people’s eyes, ears, and noses the fact that not everyone can afford infertility treatments. One of the winning couples, after all the hugging and crying and Cast Away soundtrack-

esque music, profusely thanked the station for raising awareness that infertility does not discriminate young from old, and for making them feel like their struggle was not just a personal one.

So, are all the twisted knickers justified?

Not to me. I think the critics who are tut-tutting and railing against the depravity and wickedness of the station are missing a larger point.

In the end, I think that the contest has more to do with what results when health care is left to the logic of a free market and less to do with the morality of radio personalities. If a couple is desperate to conceive, but can’t afford the treatments, and someone can profit off that desperation, then that’s what will happen.

I think it feels icky because the lack of universal access to infertility treatments means that emotional desperation becomes a kind of commodity, and that commodity is thrown into a system that is more than willing to freely exploit it.

Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty was invited to discuss on air why the Ontario government’s health plan doesn’t cover such treatments, but declined. Quebec, in January of this year, became the only province in Canada to publicly fund infertility treatments. There are a lot of reasons for, and as many against, governments paying for the procedures. One of the reasons for public funding is that subjecting bodies and babies to market forces leads to all sorts of weird reproductive tourism industries, like communes of hundreds of surrogate mothers in India and fertility clinicbeach vacation combos in Barbados.

In my mind, the Hot 89.9 contest and the To Hatch lottery are pieces of evidence in the case for universal access to fertility treatments, not examples of willful moral turpitude.

So, if you feel offended at the “Win a Baby” contest, consider that, maybe, radio contests are not the place where one should look for moral standards, but, instead, reflective of social or economic conditions. Whatever the commodity is – reproductive desperation or otherwise – somebody, somehow will turn it into cash, and we shouldn’t wag our fingers at the outcome before addressing the cause.

With almost one in every seven couples struggling with infertility, prize babies may not be just a pop radio fad.

Raisin Brain is a column written

by Anthony Cotter about how science infiltrates our society. It appears every other week in Sci+Tech. He is feeling nostalgic for the days of Z95.3 bumper stickers. You can email him at raisinbrain@mcgilldaily.com

Science+Technology

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

17

The bullshit detector Prose Encounters of the Nerd Kind Andrew Komar

proseencountersofthenerdkind@mcgilldaily.com

T

he basic idea behind scepticism was perhaps best summarized by the physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” This principle is exponentially more difficult to uphold in the modern era, where information of all degrees of truthfulness can flow without limit. To further complicate things, there are whole industries based on pseudoscientific nonsense that are more than willing to take your hard-earned cash from your gullible hands.

So how do we protect ourselves from the unscrupulous people who brazenly lie to enrich themselves?

We need a bullshit detector to separate truth from their profitable claims. Luckily for us, the scientific method provides us with exactly the tools for the job! A brief review: any claim must be backed up with clear, inarguable, and reproducible evidence. Furthermore, this evidence ought to be free of the various cognitive biases that humans bring into the picture unintentionally. This includes conflating correlation and causation or interpreting data in a way that favourably confirms your presuppositions.

Although this sounds simple in principle, it is nearly impossible to consistently apply.

In fact, in many situations, we actively wish to suspend these principles of scientific methodology.

Magicians, for example, perform very convincing illusions to delight and mystify their audiences, all the while obstructing the methods behind their act. This is entertainment and it is harmless and fun – the audience is in on the lie, paying to escape to a fantasy world. But, a serious problem arises when either party is not privy to the fact that illusions are lies.

In 1913, Harry Houdini, arguably the greatest magician from the 20th century, experienced the traumatic death of his mother. Although he wanted to believe in the ability of psychics to contact the dead – who wouldn’t after losing a loved one? – he realized that so-proclaimed psychics used the same tricks to bluff to their customers as he did in his magic shows. The difference was that the psychics’ customers truly believe that they are contacting their loved ones – and are forking over cash for a service that they are not getting.

Houdini spent much of his career using his knowledge to debunk psychics. The tradition of magicians using their experience in trickery to expose duplicitous frauds continues to this day, most notably with James Randi. He started the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) which says that it’s purpose is “to expose charlatans and help people defend themselves from paranormal and pseudoscientific claims”. The JREF puts its money where its mouth is, and offers a million U.S. dollars for any claim that holds up under

double-blind testing. The foundation takes every claim at face value, and asks the question: “If this is true, then how can we prove it?”

The JREF has seen hundreds of people attempt to claim the prize, many of whom genuinely believe that they have paranormal powers. Before every test, the JREF and the claimant mutually agree upon exactly what would constitute a proof of their ability, such as successfully guessing cards at a rate above chance. It is this mutually agreed upon starting point that is the true power of the million dollar challenge – it removes the excuse that the sceptics are somehow interfering with the “true’’ powers of the claimants.

The million dollars remains unclaimed, even after being up for grabs for decades. The fact of the matter is: the claimants are con artists (possibly self-deluded ones) preying off the gullibility of people for their own personal gain. If psychics or any other paranormal phenomenon do indeed exist, then the scientific process should be friend and not foe, as it exists to properly identify them.

Those who falsely claim to have psychic abilities are frauds who could potentially to cause great harm. Take the case of Shawn Hornbeck, a child that went missing in 2003. A celebrity psychic named Sylvia Browne told his parents, on national television, that their son was dead. She was wrong, and Hornbeck turned up four years later to parents who had believed their son dead. Browne

is also notable for agreeing to the JREF million dollar challenge on the radio, then running away from her agreement. It’s been ten years, and she still hasn’t taken it.

Of course, as an author of dozens of books, videos, lectures, and owner of an exclusive “Inner Circle” with memership fees of up to $50 per year, maybe Browne is not in need of a million dollars.

Especially a million dollars that might well expose her moneymaking “abilities” as a fraud.

Still, her services can offer people comfort. This is the true crux of the issue: is the fact that a person’s false delusions give them comfort sufficient justification to allow predators to take advantage of them? James Randi explains the answer to this in the frequently asked question section of his website: “The potential harm is very real, and dangerous. Belief in such obvious flummeries as astrology or fortune-telling can appear – quite incorrectly – to give confirmatory results, and that can lead to the victim pursuing more dangerous, expensive, and often health-related scams. Blind belief can be comforting, but it can easily cripple reason and productivity, and stop intellectual progress.”

Prose Encounters of the Nerd Kind is a column written

by Andrew Komar on various subjects: nerdy and otherwise.

It appears every other week in Sci+Tech. You can email him at proseencountersofthenerdkind@ mcgilldaily.com

Sci-DE BAR

Why scepticism is a necessary application of the scientific method The 2011 Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium Monday, November 7, 7 p.m.

Tueday, November 8, 6 p.m.

Centre Mont Royal, 1000 Sherbrooke West What is alternative medicine?

Right now, it just seems to refer to practices that are not taught in conventional medical schools, largely because there is not enough statistically significant evidence to show that it is effective. Physicians Paul Offit and Harriet Hall along with physicist Robert Park will tackle a variety of issues, such as acupuncture on Monday. On Tuesday, Edzard Ernst, a trained homeopathic doctor turned homeopathic critic, will discuss dubious homeopathic claims.

The brain reward system in addiction, obesity, and eating disorders Tuesday, November 8, 12 p.m.

Montreal General Hospital, Livingston Hall, Rm L7-140, 1650 Cedar Avenue Luis F. Alguacil from the Translational Research Unit from the Hospital General de Cidad Real in Spain will be in Montreal discussing how the brain’s reward system – part of the brain meant to enforce positive behaviour – is involved in addiction, obesity, and eating disorders.

The science of meditation Wednesday, November 9, 5 p.m.

University Centre, Lev Bukhman, 3480 McTavish What exactly is meditation, and how does it affect your being and your brain? Meditation will be explored from a scientific viewpoint where evidence will be presented that may elucidate the remarkable effects of meditation and how they occur.

Primate conservation: is the cup half empty or half full?

Edna Chan | The McGill Daily

Thursday, November 10, 6 p.m.

Redpath Museum, Auditorium, 859 Sherbrooke West There are almost 600 species and subspecies of primates on our planet today, and almost half are in danger of extinction. Although disease and climate change were not historically relevant, they are becoming increasingly worrying. Colin Chapman from the McGill School of Environment and the Department of Anthropoloy will examine if the situation is hopeless, or if there is room for optimism.

18 Science+Technology

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Plastic fantastic Has this polymer’s reputation been stretched out of proportion?

Science+Technology Writer

W

hat comes to mind when one hears the word “plastic”? Is it a heaping pile of empty water bottles, the notorious clique of Mean Girls, or a synthetic material constructed from a wide range of organic polymers? While the third is technically the most accurate, it is hardly the most common conception of plastic. Nowadays, the word plastic implies environmental degradation, toxicity, and artificiality. But, has plastic actually earned its bad rap?

By definition, plastics are materials that can be moulded or extruded into objects, films, or filaments. They are made of polymers – giant molecules of interconnected monomers. These monomers are molecular building blocks linked in chains that can be branched or linked in countless ways to create various physical properties, like malleability and elasticity.

Over 150 years ago, Parkesine, named after English inventor Alexander Parkes, was the first plastic to be synthesized. The development

of plastics was inspired by natural plastic materials, and plastics come in varying degrees of “naturalness”.

From naturally-occurring products, like chewing gum, to the use of chemically-modified natural materials, like rubber and collagen, to completely synthetic molecules, like polyvinyl chloride plastics have a extremely wide range of artificiality.

Each decade of the 20th century saw the introduction of newer and more versatile plastics. In 1909, Dr. Lee Hendrik Baekeland introduced phenolics, the first plastic to achieve worldwide acceptance. He developed techniques to liquefy the material so that it could be moulded into various shapes under heat and pressure.

In the 1920s, colour came into the picture with the development of cellulose acetate, which allowed the use of coloured articles — a much more attractive alternative to the black and brown phenolics. Other groundbreaking creations included vinyl in 1913 and nylon in 1935.

The plastics industry took a great leap in the 1960s, when the material began to infiltrate people’s daily lives.

Plastics were used for everything from

car dashboards and suits to dishes and tablecloths. Plastic dolls were the envy of every schoolgirl, as they didn’t break like older porcelain dolls, and they came in an assortment of colours.

Cling wrap and Tupperware revolutionized food storage. People even enjoyed plastic clothing (although, thankfully, this is a fad that has not survived). Plastics began being used in such a wide range of products that one would be hard pressed to find something that didn’t contain some kind of plastic.

There is no denying that plastic has utilitarian value. However, it comes at a price. As with most industrial processes, the production of plastic involves toxic chemicals, requires energy, and releases greenhouse gases. However, perhaps the most pressing concern is the overwhelming amount of plastic waste.

This waste is not surprising considering that many of us feel that, because plastic does not seem as durable as things like metal or glass, it is temporary, easily disposable, and easily replaceable. Plastics engineer Mike Biddle has set out to find a solution to the problem of plastics waste.

In his recent TED Talk, he claims that most people think plastics are a throwaway material that has very little value. In fact, plastics are several times more valuable than steel, which is recycled at a much higher rate.

The fact of the matter is that plastic is an incredibly versatile and useful substance. While it may seem like a simple task to ban substances such as bisphenol A (BPA) because of its health concerns, finding a replacement is no small feat. And this difficulty is not necessarily due to a lack of effort as the creation of products with less, or no, plastic would generate a small fortune – especially given the bad repu-

Ian Murphy

Coffee and cigarettes

Art Essay

tation plastic has. For now it looks as though plastic is here to stay and, in the meantime, it is critical that we reduce our consumption of plastic. It goes without saying that if the demand for plastic is decreased, then the supply will also decrease.

As a result, this brazen attitude of viewing plastic as something that is easily disposable cannot continue.

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Jane Zhang

Culture

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

19

What comes after C.R.A.Z.Y.?

Quebec directors latest film shows the broadening scope of our province’s cinema Bipasha Sultana

The McGill Daily

I

f you’ve taken the metro since the beginning of the semester – especially the orange line – you might remember the posters displayed at every other station advertising Quebec filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée’s most recent drama, Café de Flore.

The film relates two distant tales: that of Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), a headstrong and passionate mother, and Laurent (Lucas Bonin), her son with down syndrome. Set in 1969 Paris, Jacqueline battles against the statistics that limit Laurent’s life expectancy to 25 years. Fast forwarding four decades, the film then transports us to present-day Montreal where Antoine (Kevin Parent), a successful DJ and father of two is in the midst of divorcing his first – and what he once believed to be his last – love. The film progresses by showing us how these two ostensibly distant scenarios – in time as well as in place – converge and relate to one another. It shows us, in essence, how Jacqueline and Laurent’s past permeates the present and unfolds into the life of Antoine’s family.

Vallée’s successful career took off with the highly acclaimed box office hit C.R.A.Z.Y in 2005 and continued to gain momentum with the generally well-received period piece The Young Victoria in 2009. Unlike the linear plots and biographical style of these earlier films, Café de Flore stands apart as a more surrealist work. The fragmented narrative jarringly shifts

between 1969 Paris and present-day Montreal throughout the film.

The film’s style veers towards the edgy realism characteristic of Vallée’s work. His previous two films counteract the lull of realism through the use of first-person narration, non–diagetic sounds, technical lighting (C.R.A.Z.Y), and a yellowish tint to connote historicity (The Young Victoria). In comparison, Café cuts through its raw realism with savvy but subtle editing techniques that enhance the film’s surreal undertone.

In Café, Vallée forgoes linearity to present us with a jumbled sequence of events, aiming to merge the past with the present, and future. As the narrative unfolds, the characters rebelliously insist on looking backwards – by remembering, retelling, and reliving remnants of their past while feeling, at the same time, a necessary pull towards the future.

As Antoine tells his therapist in an early scene, he can’t help but feel that, despite his current happiness, he has, “fucked things up.” He feels compelled to move away from the life he’s known for twenty years, but is guilttripped into not doing so by memories of his ex-wife and the memories they shared. Similarly, Jacqueline resents the disruption of her intimate world with Laurent brought on by Laurent’s new friend, and seeks passionately to restore things to the way they were.

Especially after the release of C.R.A.Z.Y, which garnered an unprecedented amount of positive attention, Vallée was largely responsible for intiating the international and commercial recognition of the Quebec film

Edna Chan | The McGill Daily industry, and paved the way for directors like Denys Arcand and Denis Villeneuve, who directed the film Polytechnique. While these directors situate their stories in Quebec, many of the past decade’s films made by Quebeckers address topics and issues that move beyond the local scene.

Moreover, collaboration with international filmmakers has become increasingly common, as The Young Victoria and Café have demonstrated.

Award–winning names like screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), Graham King (The Departed), and Martin Scorsese approached Vallée for Young Victoria, while Café features the famous French model and actress Paradis as one of its main – and arguably most memorable – characters.

The very fact that half the film takes place in France and was co-produced with a French production company – (Monkey Pack Films) – raises the question of the film’s national identification – namely, is it exclusively in a Quebec context? Not quite, most would probably conclude. Yet, raising this question about a film industry that sought, from its earliest days, to distinguish itself culturally and linguistically from the rest of the world, demonstrates just how far along the industry has progressed from its separatist origins.

Perhaps Café can be said to illustrate this progression, one that is desired, necessary, even inevitable, but that is also irrevocably intertwined with its past and cannot exist without it.

As one IMDB reviewer rightfully

pointed out, Café de Flore might not be for everyone. Its raw tell-it-likeit-is portrayal of life feels depressing and hopeless at moments, and Vallée’s stunning cinematography can be under-appreciated by those more accustomed to the formulaic narratives and techniques of mainstream cinema. What one cannot deny, however, is the effect that the film has on its audience. Whether we agree with the character’s choices, or whether film seems relevant, we cannot but help feel the movie. We feel emotionally connected to the characters, regardless of our position for or against them. The emotional response that the film effortlessly elicits from us is what makes Café de Flore worth watching.

gist at Université de Montreal and a relatively new patron of the pool, said that keeping the pool open was a way of defending the small town lifestyle, something that Luc Ferrandez, the mayor of the borough, professed to support in an interview in the film Republique: Un Abecedaire Populaire.

Though Toledo had moved to the neighbourhood only one month beforehand, his was one of the signatures on the petition that was so integral in keeping Schubert Pool open. When asked why he signed it, he replied that “keeping this kind of lifestyle should be a priority, not just a minor aspect of the budget. Otherwise we are leading to the development of a gentrified neighbourhood.”

Add into the mix the rich history of Schubert Pool itself, from its beginnings as a bath house in the Great Depression to its conver-

sion into a swimming pool during WWII, and it becomes clear that the permanent closure of this facility would have wide-ranging effects.

For now, this is no longer an imminent danger, but the low numbers and budget deficits will surely keep the council’s eye on this cultural landmark. Much of this is due to the lack of awareness that this pool exists; Guay herself said that she “was surprised when I first discovered there was a pool on St. Laurent and Bagg.” She is surely not alone amongst McGill students, but, between the free swimming and the community atmosphere, Schubert is definitely worth a visit.

For many, the free swimming is what draws them in, but the sense of community that keeps them coming back to Schubert Pool.

Guay phrased it perfectly when she said, “Schubert is definitely not just a place to swim.”

Staying afloat Community solidarity keeps a Plateau pool from drowning Anqi Zhang

The McGill Daily

B

etween the first year haven that is Korova and the television screens and sports fanatics at Champs sits a building that is not altogether discreet, but that, somehow, manages to escape the attention of students as they skip from one bar to the next. It is a stone building on the corner of St. Laurent and Bagg, with the word “Bain” faintly etched above the high doorway – a far cry from the neon signs that surround it. But this building, and the swimming pool contained within its 1930s exterior, is of distinct importance to the residents of Plateau Mont-Royal. The pool’s value became particularly evident in September, when the borough council suggested closing Schubert Pool, citing financial difficulties.

Residents wrote letters and collected 4000 signatures within 10 days, reversing the council’s decision by late October. When considering the strong historical and emotional ties that link this public pool to its patrons, this sudden response begins to make sense.

Johanna Guay, a swimming instructor at Schubert Pool and student at McGill, told The Daily in an email: “I coach adults [who] used to swim at Schubert when they were younger with their parents.” The sense of community is palpable.

On the wall in the viewing area are photo displays that display synchronized swimming and water polo teams, skating patrons and children’s events. Above these photos rests the title “Club Schubert”.

Despite how tight knit the Schubert Pool community appears, “Club Schubert’s membership is not very big. The 25 meter pool is fair-

ly empty, with less than 15 people attending the free swim.

Schubert pool’s importance to the Plateau community is twofold.

First, there is the necessity of having an accessible pool. Schubert’s free swims certainly satisfy the accessibility criterion. For children, the pool offers private lessons as well as the aforementioned synchronized swimming and water polo teams.

Guay said that “the kids are taught water safety skills which make them aware of risks in everyday life.” She also made clear that the presence of a pool and of accessible lessons is important for more than just youth.

Had the pool closed in January as was originally suggested, Guay predicted that many of the adult beginners who currently swim at Schubert wouldn’t have kept taking lessons.

Schubert pool also contributes to the community in a broader way. Francisco Toledo, a sociolo-

20 Culture

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

Art: a cure for the crisis YAHAnet gets creative in the fight against HIV/AIDS Anna Silman

The McGill Daily

I

n recent years, HIV/AIDS activists have been faced with yet another in a long sequence of obstacles in their fight against this devastating global epidemic: the rising tide of public apathy.

Although HIV/AIDS has become increasingly controlled in the developed world, and antiretroviral drugs have become more accessible in developing nations, the social momentum that once propelled the HIV/AIDS crisis to the forefront of public awareness has dwindled. The increasing incidence of “HIV/AIDS fatigue” has been detrimental to both funding and awareness efforts.

A 2006 study at a Quebec highschool indicated that students’ knowledge about HIV/AIDS had decreased in the past decade. Even more alarmingly, over 70 per cent of grade eight students believed that there was a cure for AIDS. But this HIV/AIDS fatigue is not just afflicting those in the West.

A study done at the University at KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa found that most of the students appeared apathetic to campaigns by NGOs aimed at HIV/ AIDS awareness.

Enter Claudia Mitchell, a professor in McGill’s Department of Education. For the past decade, Mitchell has been studying the relationship between creative arts and HIV/AIDS awareness in young people, primarily in a South African context. In 2006, Mitchell was approached by UNESCO, who asked her to do a study on the online presence of arts-based youth groups. Along with her McGill colleagues Dr. Bronwen Low and Michael Hoechsmann, Mitchell conducted a study to examine the use of artistic methods amongst 300 youth groups from across the globe.

The results of this study revealed the profound potential in using creative projects as tools for educating young people about HIV/AIDS. As Mitchell explained in an interview with The Daily, almost half of all new HIV infections in Africa occur in people under the age of 24, so it is essential that new tactics are developed in order to combat the threat of HIV/AIDS fatigue within this high-risk group.

“There’s a lot of work that sug-

Image courtesy of YAHAnet. gests that, in the past, there have been a lot of things developed by adults for youth and this seems to be almost like the ‘kiss of death’…

There was an interesting study done in about 2002 by UNICEF that says that unless young people are involved in developing and having some agency in terms of the programs and materials that are available to them to address HIV/AIDS, the programs are almost surely doomed to failure,” Mitchell elaborated.

In 2007, with the help of funding from UNESCO’s HIV/AIDS division, Mitchell and her team at McGill University partnered with the University of Toronto and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa to create YAHAnet.

YAHAnet, short for the Youth Arts HIV/AIDS network, is an online educational tool that connects youth groups worldwide in order to initiate the conversation amongst young people about HIV/ AIDS. Emphasizing the importance of artistic expression in “getting the word out,” the goal of YAHAnet is to encourage young people to be leaders in the dialogue surround-

ing the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The site features online galleries that allow youth from around the world to upload and share their creative works, including everything from paintings and poetry to rap videos and graffiti. The site also serves as a social networking tool for users to share ideas in online forums and provides users with a variety of online resources to educate themselves on how to effectively use art-based approaches to further HIV/AIDS advocacy and counter discrimination.

In Mitchell’s view, the type of reflective thinking and critical engagement that the arts encourages provides a platform for young people to get involved and express their views on what can be a difficult issue to discuss. “When you add on this layer of sexuality, [as well as] HIV/AIDS stigma, these are areas that are quite difficult to talk about,” explained Mitchell. “But, somehow, you can talk about these things both indirectly and more explicitly by doing it through fiction or photographic representation and so on. It allows

people to put into words things they actually aren’t very comfortable talking about.”

YAHAnet is currently maintained by a team of interns at McGill, led by project co-ordinator John Murray. Emily O’Connor, a U3 International Development Studies student at McGill and a current intern at YAHAnet, said she was inspired to get involved by the creativity-based, youth oriented mandate of the site inspired. “I really liked the mandate of focusing on youth and using creative methods to bring awareness…

Especially for young kids. They won’t really listen to a boring speech or something like that – they need to have their hands in a project to engage in it better.”

YAHAnet’s newest project, the “Turn the Tide to Zero” Podcast Contest, challenges young people to create a podcast of up to three minutes based on the theme behind the contest’s title.

“Turn the Tide Zero” combines the World AIDS Conference title of “turning the tide together” and the World AIDS Day theme of “zero.” The podcast contest

will run until December 2, and is designed to coincide with the 2011 World AIDS Day. As O’Connor explains, this contest is in keeping with YAHAnet’s goal of providing new, fresh approaches to keeping the HIV/ AIDS issue in people’s minds.

“YAHAnet is this new thing that’s using these new methods to keep the word out there. For example, if we did another photo contest, its almost like people get desensitized to things like that. They’ve seen that before. Yet if you show it in a new way it almost seems like it’s a new thing” described O’Connor.

“The way we are going about it is to keep it current and keep it out there so people are staying aware and spreading the message.”

For Mitchell and her team, YAHAnet opens up a much-needed space for young people to make their voices heard. “Now isn’t the time to be saying ‘We’re adults, we know better.’ Now is the time to be saying ‘What’s needed?’” explains Mitchell.

“And what’s needed, I think has been demonstrated in a lot of research, that young people can have a voice, and should have a voice.”

Look how happy we are!

Come to our meetings, every Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in Shatner B-24, and you too could have a smile this wide!

Culture

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

21

Just like the 90s at 90.3FM CKUT mixes up music-listening with new website initiative Zoë Robertson

The McGill Daily

F

or all who deem the technologies of pre-digitized life archaic: at the very least, do not doubt the lasting power of the mixtape. The newly-launched website www.campusmixtapes. org gives students the opportunity to publish and stream their own mixtapes in a public forum. The site is a CKUT – McGill’s independent radio station– initiative, and is aimed at McGill students and CKUT members.

Tim Beeler, a McGill U2 Arts student and CKUT’s campus events coordinator, explained the premise of the site in an interview with The Daily. “It’s a brand new – wildly new – paint-still-fresh website that allows students to upload mixtapes. You use a basic program like Audacity or Garage Band and you make a mixtape. It’s basically like the same constraints of making an old-fashioned mixtape (with a real tape) in that you can’t skip through tracks. You listen to the whole thing, so it kind of brings back the art of making a mix.”

Niko Block, now in his third year as an undergraduate student representative on CKUT’s board of directors, developed the site with the help of some staff members and students. He explained how the idea for Campus Mixtapes arose. “We’d had this idea kicking around for a while of having sort of an ulterior radio station online.”

Block cited inspiration from themixtapeclub.org, a similar style of website that publishes a set of 10 mixtapes at time. It is “very simple and it’s streamable. It’s really slick and highly accessible,” said Block. However, it doesn’t let users upload their own mixtapes.

Unlike The Mixtape Club, Campus Mixtapes, is “a website where students will be able to upload any sort of audio mixtape that they’ve made,” Block said. For example, “if you take a bunch of tracks that you mix into a playlist or something like that, and you stitch them into a single mp3 using a program like Audacity, you can just upload it onto your profile.” Anybody with an active McGill email address or who is a member of CKUT can create a profile on the site.

Campus Mixtapes will hopefully bridge the gap between the McGill community and that of CKUT, groups that Block perceives are too often disconnected. “It’s

Alyssa Favreau | The McGill Daily a really consistent problem for CKUT when it comes to the question of reaching out to the mainline of the McGill student body...

There are a lot of students who already do volunteer at CKUT or know about CKUT just because they’re sort of in the scene of going out to music shows. Unfortunately, however, “there’s also a lot of students who aren’t really up on that scene quite as much, and who just don’t listen to CKUT,” Block explained. It’s ironic, Block added, that CKUT is one McGill’s primary avenues for representation to the Montreal community, even

“A mixtape is more than just a tracklist...”

Tim Beeler | CKUT campus events coordinator

though so few McGill students are actually involved. Block hopes that Campus Mixtapes will ultimately bring students more into the fold of CKUT, an organization he feels, “has so much to offer students.”

The website also offers a good place for amateurs interested in a range of related productions to starts off. “We definitely wanted a way to bring McGill students into experimentation with audio,” explained Block. He hopes that students “know what kind of opportunities are available at CKUT, particularly in terms of the fact that, whether you’re a journalist or a pundit, you’re interested in audio, or if you’re a band, CKUT offers opportunities specifically to McGill students to get on the air.

It’s it’s played a huge role in building the careers of McGill students who have gone on to become fairly successful, including Grimes and Arcade Fire.” Certainly, site users

are experimenting with more than just music. “You can do some fun things,” explained Beeler, “a couple of the mixes on there are mashups, and you can talk in between the tracks.”

“The way that people receive music is such a big part of music-listening culture, and this is a way for people to kind of creatively express their interactions with music that they really enjoy,” noted Beeler.

Most importantly, it’s a lot of fun.

“You start doing it and it’s just wildly addictive. I made one last night, I was up till like 3 a.m. making one and I already started another one in class. Don’t tell my prof.”

The mixtape holds a unique value that much of our generation – and certainly future ones that are likely to fall further away from outmoded technologies – don’t really know. Beeler explained how “a mixtape is more than just a track list.

You kind of have to listen to it as a

whole product… It’s got the same appeal of a record in that you have to do some dedicated listening.

You sit down and put on a mixtape instead of just skipping through your iTunes.” But, the mixtape is versatile and has a more casual use, too. “If you’re working on something, you can just, you know, throw a mixtape on,” Block pointed out.

Beeler summarized with a sentiment similar to Block’s, expressing that this project is great for engaging students and creating connections on campus and in the greater Montreal community. As Beeler enthused, “Campus Mixtapes is a great part of a larger initiative from groups like CKUT and Midnight Kitchen to accentuate the fact that McGill is a student community.

There’s a lot to be gained from students interacting and sharing with each other – sharing knowledge, and sharing music, and sharing fucking awesome mixtapes.”

CompendiuM!

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

22

Lies, half-truths, and inappropriateness!

McGill erections office imposes hard by-law Students react by Ivanna Hardie and Zee Loo Green The McGill Daily

After worries about increased campus bonnheurs, the McGill Erections Office has sexually sanctioned any male who happens to pop a hard one during lectures.

Many male students are worried about the prospects of these stiff restrictions. Some have decided to march at the XXX intersection. The poles have shown many will be coming to support this demonstration.

Woody Hardstones a U69 Genetics student had these comments “I’m really distressed about these new bylaws. I have a hot prof teaching my 6:30 a.m. Freudian psychoanalytic theory class and I’m usually asleep during this class. I should not be struck down for my morning wood.

Tightening up on these regulations will be hard for all of us”

erecting protest

Hardstones contiunes “I usually go to the pub-ich library of science and engineering. I go to the single person washrooms where I lock the door, turn off the lights, and express my inner convulsions.”

“This will be a long hard struggle for students. It might get hairy.”

Hardstones went on The erections office released no explanation regarding these restrictions. John Longjohn, an Erections Office spokesperson, had these comments “to be honest I’m not quite sure why we brought in this bylaw…

It just makes sense” Hardstones was not the only student to express anger. There have been multiple complaints on campus about Erections McGill sanctioning students wishing to rise up.

Arnold Bone, a long time campus activist was quoted “we should not be penalized. We must lend each other a hand.”

Bikuta Tangermann | The McGill Daily

One annonymous student daydreaming at Leacock 132.

Buy a poppy The Crossword Fairies The McGill Daily

Across 1. “Sails of a ship” constellation 5. ___ beans (Feves au lard) 10. Hair smoother 14. Dastardly 15. Unchanging, abbr.

16. Iridescent gem 17. Country dance 18. Brazilian aardvark 19. Baptism, for one 20. Belgian cabbages?

23. Water carriers 24. Not fulfilled 25. Elevator precursor 28. Greek earth goddess 30. Baby powder 31. Man-made pile of stones 33. Acid 36. Varsity 40. Density symbol 41. Gothic bay window 42. Glance over 43. Nell ___, Restoration heroine 44. Woe 46. Sierra ___ 49. Japanese verse 51. Swappable 57. Start to freeze?

58. Noise of frustration 59. Anagram of smelling appendage 60. Regrets

61. Lab dropper 62. Applaud 63. Lancelot and Mix-a-Lot, for two 64. Foxily 65. Countercurrent

Down 1. Action word 2. Eternally 3. In ___ of (instead) 4. Gingerbread flavouring 5. Arm muscle 6. Green North American lizard 7. Fermented rye beverage 8. Vittles 9. Leak 10. Slice of lime beer 11. Codeine source 12. Kind of finish 13. Sanctified 21. One of Arthur’s knights 22. Present participle of 60 across 25. Ado 26. Hyperbolic trig function 27. Voice below soprano 28. Fish lung 29. Exist 31. Invent a phrase 32. A pint, maybe 33. Shoestring

34. Asterisk 35. Disavow 37. Crew member 38. Bawl 39. Act of issuing 43. Don’t take ___ for granite (haha) 44. Great 45. Tina T.’s man 46. Perjurers 47. Boredom 48. Aquatic mammal 49. Nasty bird-woman 50. Gabriel, for one 52. Beanies 53. Acclaim 54. Fearless 55. Detective’s need 56. Catch a glimpse of

The McGill Daily | Monday, November 7, 2011 | mcgilldaily.com

EDITORIAL

volume 101 number 18

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

Joan Moses

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com coordinating news editor

Henry Gass news editors

Queen Arsem-O’Malley Erin Hudson Jessica Lukawiecki features editor

Eric Andrew-Gee commentary&compendium! editors

Zachary Lewsen Olivia Messer culture editors

Christina Colizza Fabien Maltais-Bayda

science+technology editor

Jenny Lu

health&education editor

Melanie Kim sports editor

Andra Cernavskis photo editor

Victor Tangermann illustrations editor

Amina Batyreva production&design editors

Alyssa Favreau Rebecca Katzman copy editor

Peter Shyba web editor

Shannon Palus le délit

Fight the hikes: march on November 10 For decades, the Quebec student movement has been among the most active in the country. At the same time, Quebec students have enjoyed the lowest tuition fees in the country. This is no coincidence – it is in large part due to students consistently demanding accessible post-secondary education.

But, in recent years, the Liberal government of Jean Charest has attempted to undercut the painstaking work of Quebec’s students. In 2007, the Liberals unfroze tuition levels that had been capped for thirteen years allowing them to rise by $100 a year for five years.

Now, those five years are up, and Charest is at it again. This time, tuition will jump by $325 a year for another five years. Average tuition for in-province undergraduates in Quebec is currently $2,168, the lowest in Canada. When Charest and the Liberals are done with this round of hikes, the average Quebec student will be paying over $3,793 a year.

Recognizing that these are hard times, provinces like Newfoundland and Saskatchewan have been acting to ease the burden on students by freezing tuition or promising grants. Quebec’s Liberals seem to be choosing exactly the opposite path for our province. As tuition creeps upward, it will become harder and harder for students to afford a post-secondary education, which should be a basic right, and which has become an almost indispensable prerequisite for prosperity.

Fortunately, students still have a voice. Quebec’s student movement has been impressive in recent years – drawing big crowds and national media attention for their resistance to Charest’s policies. On Thursday, November 10, thousands of students will march will take to the streets to show the Charest government that tuition hikes hurt students and need to stop. Join them by going to the Roddick Gates at 1:00 p.m. Join the movement that’s responsible for Canada’s most accessible universities, and is still fighting to keep them that way.

Editors’ Note The Daily strongly encourages all members of the Arts Undergraduate Society (including Arts & Science students!) to attend the AUS General Assembly on Tuesday, November 8. The GA will be held in the SSMU cafeteria from 5 to 7 p.m.

Among the eight motions is a vote on an AUS strike on November 10 in support of the Day of Action against tuition hikes. At the time of press, associations representing over 130,000 Quebec students have voted for the one-day strike.

Bring your Arts student ID to be eligible to vote!

Anabel Cossette Civitella rec@delitfrancais.com cover design

Alyssa Favreau Contributors Organic Campus, Alex Chalk, Edna Chan, Anthony Cotter, Evan Dent, Clara del Junco, Jane Gatensby, Naomi Endicott, Juan Camilo Velazquez, Brianna Delagram, Richard Greer, Maggie Knight, Andrew Komar, Esther Lee, Austin Lloyd, Ian Murphy, Emma Mungall Sheehan Moore, Zoe Robertson, Anna Silman, Lucile Smith, Bipasha Sultana, Eric Wen, Anqi Zhang, Jane Zhang

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.

3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-26 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6790 fax 514.398.8318

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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

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.

Errata The article “Smart Sports Statistics” (Sports, Page 22, October 31) incorrectly identified Michael Schuckers as Michael Shuckers. The Daily regrets the error.

23

On November 10th 1PM, Roddick Gates: March for accessible education.

March against tuition hikes.

March with US!

The Quebec government has announced that tuition fees are going up at least $1625 over the next five years.

Come protest against this unnecessary and unfair decision which will exclude thousands of students from university, and sentence thousands more to years of debt.

For more information, contact external@ssmu.mcgill.ca