vol101issue29

Volume 101, Issue 29

February 2, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

DAILY Not adding up since 1911

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

News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

2

AUS GA loses quorum after an hour Devin Kesner and Jordan Venton-Rublee The McGill Daily

A

fter losing quorum slightly over an hour into its proceedings, the second Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) General Assembly (GA) of the year saw multiple challenges to the Speaker’s authority, as well as to the representative ability of GAs in general.

Some of the issues discussed at last Tuesday’s GA included formation of a strike committee, tuition hikes, and reforms to AUS Frosh. The GA was held in the Stewart Biology building rather than the Shatner building, as it was last semester.

After reaching quorum, the assembly began debate on a motion for recognition of an AUS strike committee. Following a number of amendments and debate periods, and just prior to voting procedure on the motion, the GA lost quorum.

The loss of quorum results in all motions passed acting as recommendations to the AUS Council, as opposed to binding resolutions.

However, Council lost quorum at

its meeting on Wednesday before having time to vote on many of these recommendations.

The motion regarding the recognition of an AUS Strike Committee passed at the GA as a recommendation to Council.

The GA then passed a motion regarding accessible education, which would require the AUS to “adopt a policy in favor of accessible education and against all tuition hikes.”

Both of these motions were tabled at Wednesday’s AUS Council until the next scheduled Council meeting on February 15.

At the GA, one AUS member motioned to suspend the rules and indefinitely suspend AUS Speaker Ben Lerer, in which case AUS President Jade Calver would replace him.

Lerer noted that the motion to suspend the Speaker of the GA was allowed, but if there were a desire to suspend the Speaker as a position on AUS Council, “it would have needed to be added to the agenda [earlier].”

The motion was voted on, but ultimately failed without a twothirds majority.

A motion for the AUS to pursue membership of the pro-strike organization Coalition Large de

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Michael Hagner

Professor of Science Studies at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich

“Sex, Crime, and the Media : The Relevance of Scandals for Historical Epistemology” Friday, February 10, 2012 at 4:00 PM Arts Council Room Arts Building, Room 160, 853 Sherbrooke Street West The public is cordially invited. For further information, call the Department of Social Studies of Medicine : 514-398-6033 or visit www.mcgill.ca/ssom/upcoming-seminars-events

l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE) was tabled to be voted on at the next GA due to the loss of quorum.

A related special referendum will be held in February. The question to be voted on amends the AUS Constitution so that the GA is the supreme governing body of the Society. The amendment would make the AUS eligible to join CLASSE. The next motions passed called for the AUS to “be mandated to transform the current AUS Frosh model into a safe space,” and a request for the relocation of the historic Hochelaga Rock.

Both of these motions were passed with minor amendments by the AUS Council on Wednesday before it lost quorum.

Following the GA, there has been criticism regarding the conduct in which the assembly was run.

Jaime Maclean, one of the movers of the motion for recognition of an AUS Strike Committee, and a member of the AUS Mobilization Committee, stated that, while debate is important, at the GA, “The debate period and question period were used almost as stall tactics to avoid voting on the question and to lose quorum before we could actu-

Sam Reynolds | The McGill Daily ally have the chance to vote.”

Daniel Wolfe, another member of the Mobilization Committee, emphasized that part of the issue lies in the fact that the people do not have “the right to choose the Speaker,” as it is a hired position.

When questioned about the motion to suspend him, Lerer stated that he believed he performed his duties “without bias,” and that he “ensured that debate was not stifled by the majority” during the assembly.

Calver also weighed in with an assertion that “the motion [to sus-

pend the speaker] was invalid under the Robert’s Rules of Order.”

During the GA, Lerer referred to either Calver or the text of Robert’s Rules several times to look up procedure.

Following adjournment of the Council meeting, Mobilization Committee member Amber Gross called the two tabled motions “very disappointing” as they are “really important and time-sensitive” issues.

Calver and Lerer are looking into planning another GA within the next two weeks.

News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

3

GA loses quorum after passing two motions Newburgh and Steven motion to reinstate J-Board fails Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

O

nly two of seven motions were passed as binding decisions during SSMU’s 2012 Winter General Assembly (GA), as the necessary quorum of 100 students lasted for less than two hours.

SSMU Legislative Council will discuss all other motions passed next week.

Before the agenda was approved, students Zach Newburgh and Brendan Steven moved a motion from the floor “in support of an independent judiciary.” The motion sought to reinstate Judicial Board (J-Board) activities immediately.

The SSMU Board of Directors (BoD) suspended all J-Board activities last week citing a legal need to clarify their relationship with the J-Board in the SSMU Constitution.

The decision suspended a J-Board case Newburgh and Steven filed disputing the results of QPIRG referendum question last November.

During debate on the motion, Newburgh said he considered the BoD decision “entirely out of order, illegal, and an affront to democracy in our Society.”

“I am concerned about the faultiness of the advice that the SSMU lawyer provided to the SSMU, our corporation, our student union,” he continued.

After a vote and a reconsideration vote, the motion did not attain

the two-thirds majority necessary to be added to the agenda.

Following the executive reports, the motions “Regarding the Selection of the Financial Auditor” and “Regarding Student-Run Café” – both moved by VP Finance and Operations Shyam Patel – passed.

However, quorum was lost halfway through debate on the motion “Regarding Frosh Reform,” rendering the GA a consultative body with no binding decision-making power.

The Frosh Reform motion passed, as well as a motion regarding policy on negative corporative influence on campus moved by Clubs and Services representative Adam Winer, the latter after intense debate.

Winer responded to student concerns that severing ties with corporations could harm potential student employment.

“We live in a social context, and you cannot just abstract away from that and use finding jobs as a way to obscure that entire discussion,” said Winer.

The motion “Regarding a Student Strike Solidarity Fund,” which would provide assistance to students affected by an extended student strike, also fuelled extensive debate before passing.

“If you want to protest, fine… that’s your right. But ultimately, Gandhi did not ask for a handout and neither should any of you here,” said one member of the assembly, speaking against the motion.

The last motion to be discussed,

Blair Elliott | The McGill Daily

The GA lost its 100-student quorum in under two hours.

“Regarding the Commission of a Portrait of Karl Marx,” was the only motion that failed to pass.

Other motions passed by the consultative body included a motion “Regarding the Denouncement of Bill C-10,” and a motion to lobby SSMU Council to buy chess sets for Gerts.

SSMU President Maggie Knight spoke to The Daily after the GA about

the chronic lack of attendance at GAs. “We could have offered food, but you know that’s expensive, so people would get upset about that. There are tales about a lack of successful process out of the [Arts Undergraduate Society] GA last night – that may have put some other students that are not in the Arts faculty off,” said Knight.

Knight also referred to the exten-

sive debate at the start of the GA. “We were very bogged down in procedural matters at the start of the GA, which delayed things and probably made people a little bit more frustrated ... I think that there is also a responsibility for all students who attend the GA to act in good faith with the process and try to facilitate a meaningful exchange of ideas,” she added.

Board of Governors adjourned due to student protestors Discussion of Jutras Report recommendations on agenda Esther Lee

The McGill Daily

M

cGill’s highest decisionmaking body adjourned five minutes after beginning an open session to discuss the Jutras Report last Tuesday.

Following opening remarks from Principal Heather Munroe-Blum and Board of Governors (BoG) Chair Stuart Cobbett, a group of students in the gallery, most of whom were dressed in pirate costumes, stood and began to sing a rendition of “Barrett’s Privateers.”

After several attempts to call for order, Cobbett adjourned the meeting.

Speaking to The Daily, MunroeBlum said the goal of the open session was to encourage discussion on the Jutras Report and to incorporate the feedback into her own report.

Munroe-Blum has announced that McGill accepts all recommendations made in the Jutras Report, and that a report concerning the implementation of the recommendations will be forthcoming.

“What we were supposed to have [at the meeting] was lost, and that’s unfortunate,” she said. “I won’t get the benefit of consultation before responding, though I would encourage various communities to engage in conversation.”

Minutes after the students’ singing started, members of the BoG began to leave the room.

According to one student who participated in the action, “I acted to hijack the proceedings and plunder the macadamia nut cookies of the BoG. We committed mutiny and vanquished the scurvy scoundrels of the captain’s chambers.”

Several administrators and board members remained in the

room to discuss the demonstration with students who participated.

Sunci Avlijas, a biology graduate student, spoke to reasons behind the action. “[BoG] is a place where we don’t have real input – we just come here to listen and watch them make decisions for us... The point of the action was to delegitimize their power to make decisions for the rest of the University without any accountability to the student body and rest of the community.”

Gallery members do not have speaking rights in BoG meetings.

SSMU President Maggie Knight, one of two student representatives to the BoG, spoke to The Daily after the meeting was adjourned.

“I guess I’m not surprised, because [the students] want to pressure the system, and this was their way to voice their opinions,” Knight said. “But [the administration] didn’t have to hold an open session.”

BoG meetings are comprised of a public open session and a closed session in which only BoG members are permitted. On Tuesday, the closed session of the meeting took place before the open session.

PGSS President Roland Nassim, the other student representative to the BoG, said he was disappointed that the meeting was interrupted.

“This is not the student voice – 19 people hijacked the student voice; they eliminated it for thousands and thousands of people.”

“How am I going to approach the principal tomorrow and tell her we need to have open conversation [when] she asks me: ‘Are [students] going to come and sing again?’”

Nassim continued. “This is the ramification of these kinds of things: it loses our credibility as student leaders.”

David Kalant, administrative and support staff representative to the BoG, said he understood the stu-

dents’ concerns but had reservations.

“I was elected to represent similar concerns – to open things up, make things more transparent, but I don’t think this is going to achieve that,” he said.

Philosophy professor Alison Laywine, who is not a member of the BoG but was present for the open session, said that she felt energized.

“I think [the action] drew attention [to the need] for the conversation between the Board of Governors and the constituents in the University,” she said.

It was the second BoG meeting in a row in which students have staged protests.

At the time of press, it was unknown if an open session to discuss the recommendations of the Jutras Report will be rescheduled.

—With files from Queen ArsemO’Malley

4 News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

New research on biofilms could decontaminate tailings ponds Environmentalists skeptical of University of Calgary professors’ research Rachel Reichel

The McGill Daily

U

niversity of Calgary (UC) professors Howard Ceri and Raymond Turner have been working to develop a biofilm that will be able to absorb much of the toxic metal residue associated with tar sands’ tailing ponds, which store contaminated water from processing oil.

Turner, a biochemistry professor, explained that the technological discovery began as a side project, when the team decided to start researching biofilms naturally occurring in the tailings ponds ecosystem.

“What’s novel about what we’re doing,” Turner said, “is that we are growing these communities as biofilms.”

When explaining the benefit of

using biofilms, Turner likens the communities to that of a city.

“We don’t have everyone in a city, every single organism, every human in the city, can do every job. We have the specialist; we have the plumber; we have the accountant; we have all these specialty organisms within a city community. Every individual species within the biofilm will only be able to degrade a certain amount of one kind of compound,” said Turner.

“As a community, in the biofilm, they are close together like we are in a city,” Turner added. “They can work together to get things done.”

Currently, remediation of tailings ponds occurs in a multi-step process.

“The tailings ponds have a lot of microbial activity. The problem is that, there would be metal contamination such that, with that metabo-

8 launch ways to

lism, [degradation] happens quite slowly. If you can isolate the community organisms that can process all the organic pollutants as well as deal with the heavy metal components, you’d have a super community, if you will,” Turner explained.

This led Turner to collaborate with Ceri, who has spent much of his career looking at metal tolerance comparison between bacteria growing in a biofilm versus other forms of growth. Together they are trying to develop seed organism inoculants to treat the water layer that could be integrated with traditional water treatment.

The goal, Turner said, is “to create metal resistant bacteria that would lead to better organic, and maybe metal remediation, and be able to generate a water treatment process for remediation.”

Biofilms have been used in water treatment and bioreme-

diation before. Water treatment plants in municipal facilities use some forms of biofilm in treating human waste. Other mining tailings have used biofilms for tailings, such as copper. But while a precedent has been set, biofilms are not widely used in the treatment of tailings.

There are many stakeholders who want to emphasize that the success of treating the tailing ponds doesn’t diminish the negative aspects associated with them.

Ramsey Hart, the Canada Program Coordinator of MiningWatch Canada, stated that while this discovery will improve the situation, it does not significantly alter the argument.

“If the water and sediments in the tar sands tailings ponds could be made environmentally benign then certainly that would improve the situation,” he said.

“However, there are still issues

of the amount of land and energy the whole system is using, but storing millions of meters cubed of clean water and sediments would be better than the status quo,” Hart continued.

He also expressed reservations about the large-scale application.

“I’m quite skeptical that this could be scaled up, but it’s kind of my job to be skeptical,” he said.

Turner and Ceri are nearly done their portion of the research.

Turner said they will soon pass the research over to a team of engineers at the University of Alberta, who will begin testing the biofilms in a water treatment system.

“We gave the project six months to see if it would work,” Turner said in an interview with the Canadian University Press. “I never thought it would work in a lab... Where we are now is where we thought we would be in five years.”

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

5

CKUT will run second referendum; QPIRG won’t Radio station wants fee to become non-opt-outable Tamkinat Mirza

The McGill Daily

W

ith the positive results of their respective existence referenda questions voided by the administration three weeks ago, CKUT intends to field another referendum question this winter. QPIRG, however, does not.

The administration cited a lack of clarity in both questions as the justification for its decision. In an email to The Daily, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson said that, in the past, “some fee referenda have not been implemented, because they also lacked clarity.”

Kira Page, a member of the QPIRG Board of Directors, said

QPIRG is still trying to get last semester’s referendum results recognized.

“We’ve just been sitting down with Mendelson and his negotiation team in the last couple of weeks to explore other options,” said Page.

“We’re not currently looking into the possibility of running another referendum,” she continued.

QPIRG’s referendum results have also been challenged by students Zach Newburgh and Brendan Steven in a Judicial Board (J-Board) case. In a press release, Newburgh and Steven said they shared “serious concerns about the integrity of the referendum process.”

SSMU Council suspended the case until further notice last week, however, citing a need to clarify the relationship between the SSMU Board of Directors and the J-Board

in the Society’s Constitution. “[The J-Board] is part of the student democratic process for people who want to challenge the referendum results,” said Page, who added that the administration has “no right” to void the results.

“We had 132 students on our campaign who worked so hard and tirelessly,” continued Page. “We think it’s very disrespectful to the work of those people to do it all again.”

According to Page, QPIRG is committed to its current funding model, and is not looking into other financial sources.

“We’re not interested in turning into an NGO that is always scrambling for funding and applying for grants,” said Page, “especially in the context of the kind of political situation we are in Canada, where fund-

ing is being cut anyway.”

CKUT Funding and Outreach Coordinator Caitlin Manicom said the radio station does not currently have the financial capacity to legally contest the University on the case.

Manicom maintained that CKUT’s referendum results were valid, however.

“The administration should recognize the results of that vote,” she said, “especially given the fact that the University…has no legal right to unilaterally interfere with the administration of [our fees].”

According to Manicom, CKUT will be running two questions in the winter referendum period. One question will seek to affirm student support for their continued existence, and the other will ask that their fee become non-opt-outable.

“It is crucial that we become non-opt-outable,” said Manicom. “It is otherwise impossible for us to balance our books, while offering the types of events and opportunities to students that we currently do.”

Differences between the respective organizations’ Memoranda of Agreement (MoA) with McGill underlie their respective strategies.

“We need to maintain a working relationship with the administration because we depend on them to deliver those fees to us, as per our MoA,” said Manicom.

In the station’s last MoA negotiations five years ago, McGill withheld CKUT’s fees until it agreed to drop “McGill” from its name.

McGill has given the two groups have until February 16 to submit student-initiated referendum questions.

CKUT November: CFRM switches from the AM to the FM dial to become CKUT Radio McGill 90.3FM

1987

SSMU takes over the role of collecting student fees from the McGill administration

1988

QPIRG holds first existence referendum; referendum questions asks students whether QPIRG should exist as student organization at McGill and receive fee levies

Fall: CKUT enters MoA negotiations with McGill; McGill withholds student fees until CKUT drops “McGill” from its name

1990

Spring: CKUT’s first existence referenda, students vote yes; SSMU approves referendum question, amending it to include online opt-outs

2003

QPIRG implements self-administered refund option for students

QPIRG

“Existence referendum” coined at McGill

Spring: Fees withheld until MoA signed; CKUT call it “11th-hour request”

Winter: Referendum question to increase student fee fails

November: SSMU General Assembly votes to mandate SSMU to end online opt-out system September: Minerva online opt-out system goes live

2007

2006 “Existence referendum” coined at McGill

August: CKUT drops “McGill” name; administration releases fees

For the first time McGill administration tells QPIRG they must pass existence referendum to renegotiate MoA

September: Minerva online opt-out system goes live days before opt-out season; QPIRG is not given any prior warning about online opt-outs

Organized opt-out campaigns begin

2008 November: SSMU General Assembly votes to mandate SSMU to end online opt-out system Fall: QPIRG existence referendum passes

Organized opt-out campaigns begin

Winter: Students vote against online opt-outs in a SSMU referendum question

PGSS announces anti-tuition campaign for 2012 Conference coincides with McGill email warning of potential demonstrations on campus Jessica Lukawiecki The McGill Daily

L

ast Tuesday, the Post Graduate Students’ Society of McGill (PGSS) announced its 2012 campaign to fight against the $1,625 tuition fee hike planned over the next five years.

The press conference – hosted by PGSS VP External Mariève Isabel and attended by eight people, most of whom were student journalists – took place on the same day that VP (Finance and Administration) Michael Di Grappa warned, in an email to all staff and students the day before, that tuition demonstrations could intrude on campus.

Di Grappa’s email specifically referred to demonstrations supposedly planned by the Fédération

étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) and the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) .

The email stated: “We are writing today to alert you to the possibility – however remote – of some turmoil on our downtown campus tomorrow.”

At the press conference, Isabel expressed concern that the message was directed toward PGSS, explaining that, as far as she knew, the press conference was the only event connected to FEUQ or FECQ that had been planned on campus for Tuesday.

According to Isabel, PGSS is the only McGill student organization that works closely with FEUQ. She added that FEUQ does not come onto campus for events or demonstrations. “[McGill administrators are] not defending this email,” said Isabel in

an email to The Daily. “Rather, they apologized for singling out FEUQ. They mentioned that they didn’t mean to damage anyone’s image.”

According to Di Grappa, the email “was not about anything specific, although there were examples given of some events.

We just were aware of a number of activities that were happening in the run-up to the call for the general strike in March, and in light of circumstances in the past, we thought it was important to inform members of the community about this.”

Tuition hike demonstrations have twice this year spilled onto campus: on October 4 and November 10.

When asked whether the University will continue to send out similar emails regarding demonstrations on and around campus,

Di Grappa said, “We’ll think about it on a case-by-case basis, depending on what’s being planned.”

According to FEUQ President Martine Desjardins, the group had nothing planned for Tuesday, although some of its member associations had independent plans for “symbolic action.” Among these was a delivery of 1,625 letters to the Minister of Education by Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) students.

Desjardins confirmed that the only event planned at McGill was the PGSS press conference.

Referring to the email, she said, “We’re not that kind of association.

It’s great visibility for us, but it’s not what we’re planning. We reserve the right to make the government back down, but it’s very pacific demonstrations and symbolic actions.”

This is not the first time McGill has been criticized for mass emails

sent to staff and students.

“During the MUNACA strike, there were a lot of messages that were sent that were criticized for being biased,” said Isabel. However, she pointed out that this is the first time she has seen a specific student group targeted.

At the press conference, Isabel laid out the PGSS’ plans for the winter semester. “We will continue to campaign against the raise in tuition fees – we are more convinced than ever that it is necessary.”

The campaign includes a conference in March about alternatives to raising tuition fees, and ongoing research on the effects of ancillary fees on students.

PGSS is also planning on participating in the March 22 one-day student strike, a demonstration Isabel hoped will be “peaceful and festive, and humongous.”

6 News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Who represents you?

LSA President Catherine Coursol Part of a series on faculty association presidents: LSA gets political Naomi Desai

News Writer

L

aw Students’ Association (LSA) President Catherine Coursol’s main job is to coordinate amongst the VPs, meet the dean weekly, and stay on-pace with SSMU and the administration. “The president last year convinced me to run,” said Coursol, who also served as LSA’s VP Internal two years ago.

Comparing the LSA to other faculty associations, Coursol said, “It’s easier because we’re smaller and people are just really involved.”

Although she sits on the presidents’ round table, Coursol admitted to not knowing much about the undergraduate side of McGill’s faculty associations, SSMU included.

The LSA does collaborate with the Medical Students’ Society during small events, because of their similarities in size and demographic.

Two years ago, the LSA tried to leave SSMU. Coursol insisted it is not a plan this year. “I think this year the faculty presidents are all really close,” she said.

She also describes the LSA’s relationship with the administration as positive. “We don’t agree about everything, but at least we talk.”

The LSA wavered between stances of neutrality and support for MUNACA during the union’s strike last semester. At first, LSA Council voted to stay neutral. In the LSA General Assembly, however, a motion to support MUNACA passed. Finally, another LSA student filed a petition that led to an online and offline referendum on the issue; the result was a renewed LSA stance of neutrality.

Although LSA executives were present at the protests on November 10, Coursol did not meet with Dean of Law Daniel

Jutras during the two months he worked on his investigation into the day’s events.

“Some people from other faculties were saying it maybe was not neutral, but…he’s really someone you can trust,” said Coursol. “I’m sure he did his best and that it was neutral.”

In Coursol’s last meeting with Jutras, she said they discussed the Jutras Report for “only one minute.”

Coursol explained that she is impressed at the level of political involvement within the faculty this year, having never seen similar levels of involvement in her four years in law. She said that she was surprised that the LSA came out against tuition increases.

Coursol insisted that this initiative was not about strikes or protests, however. “We gave solutions that weren’t, ‘We want free education.’” The LSA wrote a letter to the Montreal Gazette, for example, outlining their plan for increased bursaries.

This year, the LSA has also been advocating for renaming the undergraduate LL.B. (Bachelor of Law) degree to the J.D. (Juris Doctor). Coursol said the switch would benefit students who want to work internationally, where the J.D. is more recognizable. The name change could be accompanied with program changes.

Ultimately, the decision to rename the degree rests with the faculty.

“If the faculty knows it will benefit students, they will change it,” said Coursol.

This year, the LSA also introduced smaller initiatives to encourage faculty involvement, including an open-door policy and biweekly “breakfast with the execs” in the LSA office. Coursul said having two VP Internals also made things smoother this year, a success evidenced by 95 per cent attendance at LSA Frosh this year.

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

LSA President Catherine Coursol in front of the Nahum Gelber Law Library.

McGill launches new emergency notification system Erin Hudson

The McGill Daily

T

his past Tuesday, McGill’s Emergency Measures Office (EMO) launched its new emergency communication software, Alertus. The software is a part of McGill Attention! – the University’s mass emergency notification system.

In order to function, Alertus must be downloaded and installed onto a computer. When the program is triggered, pop-up messages appear on computers that

have it installed. Computer users must click an “Acknowledge” button in order for the message to disappear. According to Alertus’ website, the process is tracked by the system on a unit-by-unit basis.

McGill stated in an email to all students on Monday that Alertus would be activated only in the event of an emergency, evacuation, or University closure.

The email also stated that Alertus is part of the EMO’s ongoing efforts to improve emergency communications at McGill, based on the recommendations of Dean

of Law Daniel Jutras’ report on November 10.

The Jutras Report states that “Security Services should...establish fixed lines of communication with the different constituencies on campus, particularly with student groups and University community organizations.”

A major criticism following the events of November 10 was that McGill failed to communicate to students about what was occuring on campus.

Director of University Safety Louise Savard said that McGill was

made aware of Alertus a year and a half ago, when approached by the company, Alertus Technologies.

“It’s been in development here for I would say probably more than half a year,” she said.

Savard added that Alertus is “a complement to our mass notification tool kit…that doesn’t replace anything that we’ve previously been using.”

Alertus Technologies was founded in 2002 after a tornado killed two students at the University of Maryland. The company specializes in alert systems

for large-scale facilities.

According to Savard, most computers on campus will have Alertus software installed. The software was first tested on 1,413 computers. As of Tuesday morning, 3,625 computers are now registered with Alertus.

If activated, Alertus’ message can only be targeted to computers on McGill’s downtown campus, Macdonald campus, or laptops.

A valid McGill username is needed to install Alertus.

“The service is intended for the McGill community,” Savard said.

Commentary

7

Midori Nishioka for The McGill Daily

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Dresses, drinks, and misogyny A night at the annual rugby banquet Ayla Lefkowitz Soap Box

I

love getting all dressed up. I do.

I love my pretty dresses. I love the way my heels sound as I walk (or strut) around my apartment. I love the Beyoncé pump-up music my friends and I listen to as we get ready to head out. I feel carefree and unburdened by my thoughts and worries. I don’t see anything wrong with me sincerely enjoying these simple, gendered cliches of womanhood, as long as they don’t limit my self-expression. I understand where these norms originate.

Every so often, when I’ve decided to put on one of my sexy dresses and go out on the town, my critical feminist perspective slithers in unannounced and bites the head off my “carefree” night.

On one such day, my boyfriend, who is on the McGill rugby team, nonchalantly invites me to his annual formal rugby banquet. Unable to control my excitement, I enthusiastically try on every dress that I own. I decide on my sexy, low-cut, red prom dress that is much better suited to me now than it was back in high school.

I anxiously anticipate the ban-

quet for an entire week, imagining the pictures we’ll take and the time I’ll spend with my boyfriend’s rugby friends, whom I had only met a couple of times. The day finally arrives and I excitedly get ready while dancing to Beyoncé. Satisfied and filled with anticipation, we head out.

Sitting at the table with my boyfriend, some other rugby boys, and their dates, I relax and begin to enjoy myself. Everyone seems really nice.

Then I hear, “Hello rugby boys! …and their sluts!” I turn to see the MCs at the microphone. “You know girls, you don’t have to dress like that for your professors to give you good grades.”

Everyone laughs. My jaw drops. What?

I suddenly begin to wish I were wearing a less revealing dress. The sexist jokes continue and so do the laughs. I feel like I am the only one in the whole room of 100 people who finds these “jokes” offensive. I look at the faces of the dates at my table. They are giving that half-smile, roll your eyes look that you give when someone says something you shouldn’t think is funny.

As the MCs leave the stage, my boyfriend can clearly tell that I am distressed. He tries to cheer me up by reminding me that the food is incredible here. I don’t want to ruin his night, so I put on a smile and head to the buf-

fet. Food usually puts me in a better mood. The meal is as good as advertised, and I am beginning to forget the MCs and enjoy the banquet.

Just as the meal ends, the MCs take the stage again. “Now we’ve been scoping out the dates for the past hour, and we would like to announce the winner of the hottest date contest!” The rugby boys cheer, while the dates seem to squirm in their seats. I am pretty sure that I’m not going to win, but I decide to be prepared just in case I do. Should I get up there and rant about feminism? Or simply give them the finger? I am still contemplating when I hear them declare that the winner is the date of a first year player.

The MCs ask the rugby player and his date to come up to the front. The rugby boys cheer. I watch as a skinny, 17 year old blonde girl in a short dress and very high heel walks all the way to the front of the banquet hall. Every eye in the room is openly looking her up and down. Is there envy in the eyes of the other dates? At the front of the room, the girl stands quietly beside her date as he chugs a beer. The MCs don’t ask her name. They don’t let her say anything into the mic. The rugby boy got the prize, not his date. I feel absolutely disgusted by the whole thing. This girl and the rest of the

banquet hall is getting a very strong message that all that matters about a woman is her looks. She is blatantly turned into another person’s object.

I still have a hard time grasping how these kinds of contests can be common practice in our society.

At this point in the night, I can’t hide the fact that I am disturbed.

How is every other date not fuming?

It’s as if everything is just going on as normal. I guess it is… We leave the banquet hall and get into the school buses headed for the after-party. The rugby players begin to chant. Not surprisingly, every chant is sexual, which is not inherently a bad thing.

But the chants are not just sexual. “I wish that all the ladies / were like the statue of Venus / because then they wouldn’t have any arms… to shove away my penis!” Everyone laughs, and repeats the chant. Tears rush to my eyes. How dare they! I fight them back. I feel surrounded, like the world is closing in on me. All the stories I am confronted with working at the Sexual Assault Centre of McGill Student Society as a facilitator for the Outreach branch come rushing into my head. I want to run right into my bed under my covers and never see a man again.

This event was my breaking point.

Now that it’s over and the shock and fear have worn off, I simply feel anger.

The misogyny is so apparent and horrifying! I want to put on a boxing outfit, rather than my sexy red dress, and kick the shit out of the guy who jokingly sang about raping women.

I want to be powerful. I want to be strong, physically stronger than those rugby guys. It frustrates me that my petite body could never be.

So I admit it. I love getting dressed up, showing a little skin, and doing those “girly” things that I feel feminists are not supposed to enjoy. And I think that’s okay. But sometimes I am afraid of the misogyny I see around me. I feel as if I need to be tougher.

Boots instead of heels. Cargo pants instead of dresses. Angry female singers instead of Beyoncé.

And that’s too bad because I like wearing dresses.

In writing this piece, I did not intend it to be solely focused on the McGill rugby team, but rather, my hope is to spark a discourse that confronts all forms of rape culture in the McGill community. Ayla Lefkowitz is a U2 Philosophy and Women’s Studies student and you can reach her at ayla.lefkowitz@ mail.mcgill.ca.

8 Commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

It’s all connected How tuition fee increases are part of a larger issue Robin Reid-Fraser Hyde Park

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s you are probably aware, tuition in Quebec is slated to increase by $1,625 over five years beginning this September. Students across the province are mobilizing against the hikes with increasing enthusiasm, and thousands are preparing to walk out of classrooms for an unlimited student strike, likely beginning in the next few weeks.

Many McGill students seem on the fence about it all – international and out-of-province students especially, since $325 per year is proportionately a much smaller increase than it is for Quebec residents. Compared to schools of similar reputation in the U.S., McGill tuition for

Quebec students may seem minimal, and can lead to the question: why are they so upset about this anyway? And, why should we non-Quebec residents care about and support their movement?

I’m here to argue that fighting a tuition hike in Quebec by supporting a province-wide student strike could be your chance to help make the world a better place, for everybody.

This may seem far-fetched, but I bet anyone reading this has some cause they spend time and (possibly) money championing.

Whether environmental sustainability, women’s rights, food security, or primary school education for children in the Global South, they are all big, important issues that deserve all of that time and attention. This tuition hike would harm these issues by hampering

much student research on them, given that the fee increase would deny 30,000 people post-secondary education. Furthermore, tuition hikes are part of a global trend towards economic liberalization and private sector involvement that has created the majority of the world’s problems.

I aim to convince you that these issues are all related.

Just as people shouldn’t be living in poverty or hunger, and our planet shouldn’t be warming at unnatural rates or losing huge amounts of biodiversity, nor should students pay more money from our own pockets on an education that the province is perfectly capable of funding.

The Charest government and McGill administration tell you that there simply isn’t enough money to pay for universities any

other way.

What they don’t tell you is that the $620 million they tout as a “funding deficit” is actually calculated to be what Quebec does not gain in tuition compared to other provinces. Nor will they tell you that, since 2001, the Quebec government has cut taxes in a way that makes it lose roughly $5 billion of revenue per year. Nor will they tell you that thousands of students will be prevented from accessing university, making it harder to obtain a good job in this increasingly post-secondarydependant economy.

The tuition hike is part of a trend of government austerity measures in which progressive taxation is reduced, the powerful minority increases their profits, and ordinary people must pay for previously available services

such as health care and education. It is the same system of economic liberalization that created unequal trade deals with the Global South, trapping vulnerable citizens in cycles of poverty; the same system that treats the planet’s resources as market commodities, rather than the foundations to our very existence.

There are a lot of scary problems in our world. Many of them happen far away such that we can do little to make an impact.

But the tuition hike is here right now, and this is our chance to stop it and begin to change the world.

Robin Reid-Fraser is a U2 Environmental Studies student.

She can be reached at rkeifra@ gmail.com

Is McGill really progressive?

The need for radicalism Balaclava Discourse Davide Mastracci

balaclavadiscourse@mcgilldaily.com

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niversities are places of higher learning, knowledge, and debate. They also tend to be dominated by left wing politics. At least that’s what I was told before I arrived at McGill. When I came to this University, I wasn’t let down, at first. Institutions like Safer Spaces: Allies on Campus, QPIRG, and the diversity university brings were quite new to me.

As such, I was impressed. On its surface, McGill seems to be quite a progressive school. But after a year and a half as a student it has become quite clear that this is hardly the case.

In terms of allowing people on campus to feel comfortable with who they are, McGill students do a decent job; at least from the view of a straight white male. From my interactions, most students seem to display tolerance and acceptance, some out

of genuine belief, others likely out of fear for the punishment or social stigma that comes from breaking Safe Space. In this sense, McGill isn’t bad because those who aren’t tolerant of others should feel uncomfortable expressing their views on campus. Yet this is hardly progressive – it is merely what should be the standard. And judging by the public perception of most universities across Canada, this is the standard – despite the cries of the privileged students who feel inconvenienced by the fact that they need to think twice about what they say out of concern for offending someone.

Beyond this bare minimum of decency and humanity, though, the nature of McGill students is quite detestable. By virtue of McGill’s high academic ranking, a great deal of McGill students, simply by being McGill students, think that they are superior to their peers at other universities.

From my interactions, I’ve seen that many McGill students are also wealthy or have access to greater financial resources than students at other universities may

have. These students believe that because they, or their ancestors, have accomplished something in the liberal capitalist society, all others would be able to do so as well, if only they had the talent or the work ethic to do so. What these individuals fail to recognize is that this is a great myth of capitalism, and if this system ensured financial success for all who worked hard or had talent, it could not function. McGill students are a bright bunch, but despite their inflated egos and sense of accomplishment, most are not particularly special and are at McGill largely due to the financial well-being of their parents. This is not to say that McGill students aren’t talented, but rather that many are at McGill simply due to their financial background. Essentially, many McGill students were born on third base and believe they hit a triple.

This belief, which is prevalent in “elite” universities, is what fuels the reactive nature of many McGill students, especially those who are wealthy. There is nothing inherently wrong with being well-off, yet it seems as if most McGill students

who are well-off have bought into the capitalist status quo entirely.

McGill students may encourage reforms to the capitalist system, but they’ll rarely call for it to be replaced. Even the few students who have fought for basic reforms such as free education, with pretty standard tactics such as sit-ins, have been labelled as “radicals,” “thugs,” and “lunatics.”

While these students aren’t thugs, they’re the closest thing to radicals McGill has. And this is a compliment, not a criticism.

Universities should be radical.

The status quo of our inadequate society should not be safe in universities. Universities should be pushing new “radical” ideas into the mainstream with the goal of eventually having them embraced. University publications should also be part of this process, and lately, The Daily has been lacking, as it has been filled with conservative articles defending capitalism, tuition increases, and the police on November 10. However, university should not be a high priced assembly line, building the perfect product to be exported into

the cruel nine-to-five world upon graduation. If you are attending university for this reason, fine, but your journey to the posh law firm or business shouldn’t be shielded from the factory of injustice surrounding it.

University students have a long history of leading and participating in various struggles and forms of activism. McGill seems to have lost this fighting, radical spirit. As the possibility of an upcoming general student strike against tuition increases, the student body has a chance to become progressive and embody the role that universities should play as institutions serving the public interest. I can only hope that this opportunity to become a truly progressive student body will not be squandered.

Balaclava Discourse is a column written by Davide Mastracci on the structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in society. It appears every other Monday in commentary. You can email him at balaclavadiscourse@mcgilldaily.com.

9 Art Essay

LUKE THIENHAUS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

10 Features

SOCRATES LIKES YOU FOR YOU RYAN HEALEY ON NORMAN CORNETT’S DIALOGIC HEMLOCK

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et’s start with a composite of his “Dialogic sessions.” Through the vestibule in Birks and down into the basement, Vegetable Lasagna asks, “Where is the balance between Britney Spears and Darfur?” This is answered in its way and seven unique fingers soon spear up, and oh is that, yes – Infinite Wonder? Infinite Wonder stands: “Do we have free and fair media anywhere?” Some oral hot air rolls around to a gamy No. A mustachioed man in a well-weathered, all-purpose sweater vest moderates. Sometimes he goes by Destiny’s Child, sometimes Lumière, sometimes Carole K, but mostly he’s Bubba.

Bubba looks across twenty engrossed students in the very gray room #017, his own private Akademia, and says something like, “Think what you want, write what you want, say what you want. There is no right or wrong, true and false, bad and good.” (His expressive hands ping-pong for these binaries as if nursing a mildly live grenade.) “All of it’s open. This is open learning.” Another question, this time from The Gift of Love: “Why can’t journalists take more responsibility and try to drive the public agenda?” The Guest gathers his thoughts, and like a buoy, tide-rooted and mute, Bubba nods.

I THINK:

There is a robust consensus on the extraterrestrial qualities of Dr. Norman Cornett.

The Dark Motorcyclist, the imitable occasional Daily letter writer from 2008 to 2011, once claimed that he was “privy to certain information that is withheld from the wider McGill community, and the withheld infor-

mation is this: Norman Cornett landed on our planet in the spring of 1992.” While still teaching at McGill, Cornett/Bubba fittingly referred to himself in the plural, as his person is sharp split between two ontological modes: a very kind and quotidian vanilla warmth; and then the side exclusively reserved for his classes – the celebrated and maybe brainsick dialogic mode. In dialogic mode, Dr. C talks as if in communion with Hegelian forces, in oneiric jazz cadences that command attention. People liken this guy to both evangelical preacher and 19thcentury-artist-at-work, and he acts the part in class, prophetically aflame.

His sizable fan base lionizes this steep Jekyll/Hyde division as fitting for a subversive in active infiltration mode.

Some assessments by former students: “Dr. Cornett’s mild appearance is deceptive, because he is a rebel through and through.” “A revolutionary in the staid world of academia.” “An exemplar of the Montreal state of mind.”

Certain classes would begin with the arena rock anthem Raise a Little Hell, while Cornett avoided the full word himself, preferring to spell it out H-E-L-L. Ratemyprofessors. com comments underscored his physical likeness to Ned Flanders and John Cleese, while elsewhere pedagogical comparisons were often made to Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and Socrates. Many speak of coming across him in a Montreal art gallery, a “quiet man sitting unobtrusively in the corner, writing notes,” “a quiet man really looking at paintings…from different points of view, slowly, and coming back to it.” And he’s a real habitué: go to a vernissage this semes-

ter and he’s definitely there – just look for the sweater vest.

But his real genius lies in arrant self-marketing, the Cornett phenomenon as the intellectual equivalent of the Slendertone Flex Pro Ab Belt. When the time comes to scramble together guests for his dialogic sessions, he is squirrely industrious with varying degrees of success. Christina Colizza, a Daily Culture editor, receives a lot of these oddly formatted, vaguely personalized e-mails of roundabout self-promotion that tend to close with, “Perhaps it will interest you?” (And I’ve begun receiving the same.)

David Amram, a pretty esteemed jazz composer and pianist, told the McGill Reporter that Cornett “called me up about 11 times and finally inveigled me to come to his class. He was so nice and so enthusiastic – I liked his spirit.” There is acute energy around this active verb of a man, his educational project and sad story. Oh come let us adore him.

I REMEMBER:

Dr. C is an American protestant from Oregon. Upon moving to California in the late 1960s, a young Norman quickly ran for student president in a new school and town, and won. He spent his summers working in American national parks to save up to attend Berkeley. He started studying at McGill in 1987 to dog after a Ph.D. while supporting his family by working for Air Canada. His thesis was on Lionel Groulx, our favorite Catholic crypto-Nazi with an eponymous metro station. (Groulx’s bilious

hatred of Jews was documented by Esther Delisle in her The Traitor and the Jew). For his thesis defence in May 2003, Cornett used the allocated 25 minutes to turn to the audience and tell them why he immigrated to Quebec. He had been saddened by the American contempt for black people, and moved to Québec only to become saddened by the contempt for French Canadians.

He became interested in studying Groulx because the latter was a great defender of French Canadian identity.

He started lecturing in religious studies in 1992 with “the usual suspects”: quizzes, midterms, final exams, one-way pedagogical flow, teacher Upon student. He did this until, several years later, a 21 year-old student came to Dr. C and had a nervous breakdown in his office. An ambulance was called. Dr. C regularly relates this breakthrough: “You say to yourself, there’s got to be a better way. I saw this again and again, I would see people absolutely paralyzed, just in agony.”

His solution was to radically redesign his teaching practice into squirreled-away McGill havens that accommodated words like “open,” “freedom,” “dialogue,” “community,” “human,” “creative,” “as an artist,” “my vernissage,” and “experience.” Each class had a theme song and everyone required a blindfold, earplugs, and reams of paper to write Reflections. In Cornett’s Eden, the students gave themselves “Off-World” names that he never forgot even years later. Classes convened with eighty students called things like Unintentional Matchmaker, Lieutenant Dan, Jacko Jonestown, Stork of the Future, Warrior Heart, Fascinated Peeker, Ghost of Storytime, Tragically Gabriel, Karma

The McGill Daily | Thursday, Fenruary 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Karmeleon, Spice Spears, Jefferson Cake.

(I could go on.) Class would consist of art consumption followed by writing stream of consciousness Reflections in response.

Much of the class was field trips to galleries, theaters, and concerts where students would write furiously en famille into Reflection notebooks. People often wrote poems for Reflections, which I really want to avoid quoting. The stress fell on Honesty above everything: the Reflections were submitted anonymously and he would read them aloud in class and point-blank to relevant Guests. Over the years he perfected a reading voice of great élan, like an off-Broadway Shakespeare monologist challenging a parking ticket. “Upon hearing your piece, you would sit there bubbling with pride, wondering, ‘Wow, did I really write that?’” said student Emily Rose Antflick. Robert Verall, a former National Film Board producer, once told The Daily, “Dr. Cornett is a dream teacher for a filmmaker.”

He based grading entirely on participation – no papers, no exams. Everyone began with 100 per cent and lost 5 per cent with every missed Reflection, absence, and cellphone ring. There was homework every day, hundreds of pages to read weekly, but most students got As. You could occasionally tell him you were too busy or strung-out for his class, and there was no fear of penalty. A corner of McGill was beginning to be coloured by the teen emancipation/kids rool the skool themes of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and “Max Keeble’s Big Move.”

The courses inevitably came unmoored from their titles – “Religion and the Arts” or “The Soul and Soul Music” instead housed a table d’hôte menu of topics: First Nations land rights, the Holocaust, the status of witches in Ghana, the relationship between music and medicine, the truth about death and dying. (I could go on.) But the selling point of these classes was the notable Guests that would come to class and field student questions.

Topics began to revolve around whatever Guests Cornett gathered by tapping into

his oceanically near-bottomless network.

And what a network it was – the McGill Reporter just salivates as it reports his lineup between 2002 and 2007: archbishops, imams, rabbis, monks, the composer of the Sesame Street theme, Balkan ethno-trance singers, novelists, the producer of Chicken Run, former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard (who enjoyed having to prepare nothing), actor Ethan Hawke (who was there to talk about his um, second novel (?)), and former Prime Minister Paul Martin. Cornett told the prime minister to put in a good word with Bono.

The Tribune ran a headline in 2006 that read, “Religious Studies prof has a cult following” – dialogic education was catching on, kind of. At least an affected cabal of disaffected McGill students was huddling: “It was like a slumber party you know, sooner or later the parents are gonna knock on the door and say, okay, that’s it, enough, like everyone pipe down, it’s done,” said Leon Mwotia, who, as a Daily columnist in 2007, went by The Armchair Potato. “I was wondering, I’m sure everyone was wondering, how does this guy have his job? How is he able to teach in the McGill environment?” said Planting Roots (née Jesse Gutman).

His students were beginning to smile and behave like his courtesans, sounding exactly like him, fluent in his argot, empowered and ready to strike when threatened. Per one person who Rated Their Professor, “This is one of the greatest teachers in the history of the modern institution we call university. He inspires, he engages, he electrifies.” Cornett’s wife said to him before his last class, “You are having so much fun.” He replied, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

On the last day of the winter 2007 term, there was a note from the Dean, which Cornett paraphrased as, “Empty your desk.

Remove all your personal effects from the building. You’re not coming back. You’re not teaching.” An outcry from the citizenry was raised. Cornett’s network reared its ambiguously sublime/creepy head. Letters came in cultishly coordinated scattershots,

as if crop circles were threshed into the pages of The Daily. The quantity got so bad that The Daily started smirking at the spam with headlines for the letters like “I’m compelled to write because Norman Cornett probably told me to”, “How many Cornett jokes can one editor make?” and, “Do you people have a newsletter or something?” A petition was signed by 13 filmmakers and published in the Gazette in June 2007. 747 students and professors signed a petition online. Cornett’s lawyer Julius Grey wrote an editorial for Le Devoir with a subsequent response from Provost Anthony Masi that was an opus of casuistry. (Masi also refused to speak with me about any of this.) A National Film Board-sponsored documentary entitled Professor Norman Cornett: “Since when do we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?” was made and given a modest distribution.

Even now, McGill has never issued a formal explanation of Cornett’s dismissal and that only spurs a lot of vague, unsubstantiated talk of the administration enacting pro-Zionist policy or bludgeoning students into conformity.

But there are some more plausible explanations out there. Norman Miller, the ombudsperson at the time, told me that some students were dissatisfied with his unconventional approach to grading, that their grades were a mystery until it appeared on the transcript, and they were left without any way to challenge that mark. And there were always some heretics hiding behind ratemyprofessors.com: “unique methodology. but you’ve done one you’ve done them all. he might seem available and present but actually will not ever help you. apart from ‘discovering’ we are all unique in our own precious and special way it’s a major waste of time.” “He is never shy to ask students for favors but he never reciprocates. He is ‘too busy’...” (His overall rating stands at 3.5.)

The most viable explanation is also the blandest – Ellen Aitken, the current dean of Religious Studies, told The Tribune that she would prefer giving sessional lec-

turer positions like Cornett’s to doctoral students. It’s not like he was a tenured professor or anything. He may have just been a dude, four years after getting his doctorate, hanging around.

I WISH:

McGill definitely has a pedagogical problem. The general mass class product is like Starbucks coffee beans universally burnt and drained of quality in order to homogenize the taste. I mean, I’m meeting tomorrow to facilitate a class as part of the Alternative Learning Project, a group of dissatisfied students taking their classes off-campus to learn stuff not offered at McGill, or offered poorly. Norman Miller told me that the cardinal complaint of students was that they “feel that they’re not cared for.” This is commonplace enough a sentiment at McGill, even a platitude, and it drove students in herds to Cornett’s classes. A YouTube comment on the Cornett documentary trailer: “That sounds awesome. I kinda wish I could have that experience since lectures nowadays are just boring.” Emily Rose Antflick wrote in to The Daily, “I despised the formulaic, institutional learning style that was being imposed upon my once-agile mind.”

Cornett’s “theater of learning” was an answer to this. It fused affect and entertainment: students were to laugh and never get bored. (A student wrote microscopically of Cornett’s laugh, that it “resides in the strange no-man’s land between a full-blown guffaw and a wheeze.”) Dr. Cornett said in an interview with The Tribune, “My goal became to figure out how we can put delight back into education. That became a mission, a pedagogical spirit-quest: how could we love learning, so that knowledge became a natural high?” Student Madina Baxindall says with a laugh in the documentary, “Who ever said education should be a bore?” Alongside entertainment, issues were brought up in class with a real sense of moral weight and CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

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12 Features CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 students had to take positions fixed in their actual sentiment, moving from distant theory into visceral praxis.

Now this is where I ruin everything by taking Cornett’s cue and getting honest myself. I cringe at a lot of the language around Cornett, specious shit like “I feel privileged and inspired to have met and listened to Dr. Mendez,” or, “Dialogue with it.

Answer it. Question it. Challenge it. Accept it. Reject it. Dialogue WITH that medium.” I dislike seminars for the very reason people love Cornett’s classes – I really do think there are stupid questions and right/wrong answers, and if you’re an existential asshole like me who measures out his life in coffee spoons, (you really might be if you think about it), hearing out even 15 minutes of airy questions feels like an error. I am in many ways McGill’s ideal student: comfortable, even happy in crowds as a selfish autodidact left to my own devices. I prefer the authoritarian lecture format that holds me fast to books that don’t immediately compel – when I get bored, I want the professor to bite, not sing.

Cornett’s classes are admirably passionate and alive and somewhat revolutionary.

I submit that they are also completely perfidious and bad. The dialogic sessions ache to avoid becoming a boring automaton in a market system, but in practice it’s not just that anti-conformity conformity you recognized in high school emos and goths, but also an insidious grooming for company boardrooms and versatile cable news shows, an education in sophistic, insipid Dialogue qua Dialogue that cuts deals and networks well. Consider the people skills.

Something striking among Cornett disciples is that while half go on to become Artists, schoolteachers in the selfsame Cornett vein, or organic farmers somewhere, there’s another half in MBA and Juris Doctor programs that seem to take his gospel to the market. (Leon Mwotia, in a gasp of weirdly privileged anger over Cornett’s dismissal, says in the documentary, “But when I’m a rich man, McGill, I won’t give them anything. Not a dime, McGill.”

Mr. Mwotia is now a Manager at RBC.) Rousseau in Émile: “Count on its being more important to be a charlatan than a capable man.” Cornett student Sara Gidding actually said this: “At most universities, they celebrate the authority of reason and logic, and a paper that I turn in to a professor is guided only on its rational aesthetic, its logical symmetry. You know, it fits with the exact format of a thesis paper, and it’s all proven, rationally. How it affected me is totally irrelevant to the final product.”

What sometimes pisses people off in faculties other than Arts is how subjective and relativized the labour is in the humanities – their essays, their interpretations, their feelings. Intelligent Arts students know that the internal logic and rational process of their thesis is what supersedes the relatively unscientific grounding of their work, but here we have the radical abjuration of even that credit. Following this, Cornett becomes a connoisseur of the near-nothing who peddles a solipsism that mistakes selftruth as truth. This is why Cornett’s principal question, “since when do we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?” is so disturbing to me. For Cornett, real truth terminates in honesty.

So what happened when Cornett’s students got honest? In the documentary, they write their Reflections with brio and one says, “It’s the way I write now. When

The McGill Daily | Thursday, Fenruary 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

I write emails or letters to my friends, it’s the way I write in my journal, and that raw reaction to the art, or the situation, is just so incredible.” I paused the film on a chance shot of a Reflection and it read: “My mind was everywhere! When I heard that flute type instrument I pictured it like: [here’s an image of a bar graph in decrescendo], and a train playing it dancing around.” A lanky man with a mustache, Dr. Cornett looks nothing like Socrates.

I WANT TO KNOW:

I gathered in the chancel of St. James United Church with 36 other congregants to have a dialogue about a film about dialogue.

Dr. Cornett now conducts dialogic sessions throughout Montreal for sometimes upwards of $300. Dr. Cornett introduces me to Nine Lives, who is the only person within five years of my age, and talking to her I briefly apperceive the two of us as volunteers assisting an enlightened retirement home activity. We all take scrap paper and a pencil from the top of a grand piano. We watch a documentary on the BouchardTaylor Commission and the issue of religious accommodation in Quebec, which is a good watch that’s sure to provoke divisive emotions. As soon as the film ends, Dr. Cornett gives us prompts that he demands we treat absolutely honestly: “I remember—,” “I think—,” “I feel—,” “I wish—,” and “I want to know—.” I wrote about my ambivalence, which was honest. Then there’s a sophisticated question and answer series between the film’s director and a transcultural psychiatrist, all chaperoned by Dr. Cornett.

Off-stage, Cornett has been all bonhomie and warmth, but once the session kicks in, there’s a metamorphosis. He is demonstrably louder than everyone else and seems aggressive in his responses. He’s in good dialogic form and allows only interstices of silence, with shifty eyes that don’t really seem to alight anywhere. The audience is impressive – a young Frantz Fanon scholar and other overall articulate people. It’s an affecting scene, an earnest, dedicated body politic. The name of the game throughout has been Dialogue, and here it is at last: Q: How is it that French-speaking Quebecers don’t relate to being a minority to other minorities when they come to Quebec, how is it that they don’t relate to this larger context, you know, am I making myself clear? This is what is problematic to me.

CORNETT: As a historian of Quebec society, allow me to say, yes indeed they have. How do we understand the work of Pierre Vallieres? Les nègres blancs d’Amérique. Why did the Quiet Revolution take place in the fifties and early fifties?

Because it is Quebec’s version of the Civil.

Rights. Movement. WE CAN only understand what happened here in Quebec when we see the big picture of the Civil.

Rights. Movement. As a PARADIGM. Q: The civil rights movement in the United States?

CORNETT: Yeah. Listen. I’m quoting the translation, it’s not an expression I want to use: the White Niggers of America. This is a seminal text. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior is a MODEL for the Quebec nationalists. And keep in mind, GANDHI, who we ALL see as PEACE loving, is the FATHER of what? Indian NATIONALISM. Some snicker almost imperceptibly when they realize his answer is over and then more hands are raised. Everyone gets their

dialogue on and their intelligence flattered.

Dr. Cornett asks us to place our Reflections on the piano and promises to use them in his next session. There is something singularly terrifying about the thought of him reading my bare honest Self alone at home.

According to Planting Roots, his office in Birks overflowed with these Reflections, which he always kept in large boxes vertically stacked. Because of the structure of the dialogic sessions, Dr. C is the antenna for the most deep-seated political gripes, private idiosyncrasies, and harrowing psychodramas of every student’s naked Id. I was terribly honest in my Reflection, and if he hasn’t read it yet, he’ll certainly read it after this sentence, and he can do whatever he wants with it.

I FEEL:

But I myself have spent a lot of invasive mental/emotional time with this man, and to read the last lines of his 438 page Ph.D. dissertation makes me incredibly sad, after all this Reflection’s unstinting honesty: By the end of his polemical career, which spanned more than half a century, Groulx had taken on the aura of a sententious prophet of doom, leftover from a troubling era which Quebec sought to put decisively behind itself. Groulx’s once prophetic stance in French-Canadian society now seemed nothing but irksome, unreasonable railing against Quebec’s long overdue modernization. Painfully conscious that many dismissed his message as a throwback to French Canada’s dark ages and considered him obsolete, Groulx’s memoirs attest that the last years of his life brought home to him the bitter truth that “a prophet hath no honor in his own country” (John 4:44).

Pages 10 and 11: Stills from the documentary, Professor Norman Cornett: “Since when do we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?,” courtesy of YouTube. Cornett in Dialogic extremis (10); The essence of Cornettian thought, boiled down to Comic Sans (11).

This page: Letters the Daily received in early 2010, sparked by the seminal piece of the Cornett insurgency, “Paging Dr. Cornett” by Emily Rose Antflick. Also a template for the inevitable hordes of letter-writers we’re expecting to saddle up once this piece hits stands.

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Ian Murphy

13 Art Essay

Health&Education

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

14

Weyburn Mental Hospital

All photos by Peter Shyba | The McGill Daily

Health&Education

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

15

We flew over the cuckoo’s nest Peter Shyba breaks into an abandoned mental institution

Courtesy of the Soo Line Historical Museum

W

hen you’re a teenager in a tiny Saskatchewan town you are bound to get into trouble. A sheer lack of things to do leads young people in these towns to do stereotypically devious things like making crop circles in cornfields and joyriding while drinking Pilsner. In the case of my own brief time in a small town a few summers ago, this troublemaking came in the form of an attempted break-in at an abandoned mental institution.

I should contextualize. My mom grew up in a town called Weyburn, Saskatchewan, about an hour and a half south of Regina.

My nonagenarian Oma and Opa still live there – and have for nearly fifty years, since they moved from Germany to Canada. A couple of times every year – usually in the summer – various family members trek ten hours east from Calgary to visit them. It was during one of these trips, two years ago, that I found myself in the company of my sister and older cousin. Slipping away after the traditional German afternoon snack of coffee and cake (which my Opa always prefaces with “how about a cup coffee and piece cake?”), we found ourselves victims of our own curiousity.

Driving aimlessly around town looking for something to do, we soon found ourselves on the outskirts of town, turning down the thin, tree-lined road to the Weyburn Mental Hospital, colloquially known as just “the mental”.

The treed road to the hospital provides a bizarre introduction to the main building. Over

a kilometre long, it’s lined with overhanging deciduous trees, creating an aura of Transylvaniacum-Saskatchewan, almost like a cartoon-like image of something haunted. At the end of the long road, there is a clear view of the imposing turreted entrance, evoking the overused – but here apropos – theme of Foucault’s panopticon.

We neared the building and parked the car around back, hiding any evidence that we might be illegally trespassing. Walking around the building, we made jokes about the horribly done graffiti (“GoD HAtEs YoU”? Really?) and periodically looked into open windows.

Through one of them we saw a cell with peeling blue paint, filled with garbage, the door askew. We had trouble deciding if it had been a prison cell or a patient’s room.

We talked about how scary it would be to actually go in and explore the building. Very gradually, these ruminations became more serious plans. It was in this stage of mounting seriousness that we came across the open door we would use to try to get into the Weyburn Mental Hospital.

*** The hospital was opened on December 29, 1921 with a capacity of 900 patients and sixty live-in nurses. The initial building was roughly 275,000 square feet, which costs the equivalent of $27,000,000 in today’s dollars. It was demolished in the winter of 2009 after being unused for almost twenty years, the advent of modern psychiatric drugs

making the treatment of mental illness increasingly focused on outpatient, rather than inpatient, therapy.

In a period spanning the latter19th century, formal pyschiatric institutions like Weyburn became widespread. Early psychologists like Thomas Story Kirkbride founded what would come to be known as the Kirkbride plan for building psychiatric hospitals, which dictated that hospitals be built in a staggered V, with the most “troubled” patients being housed in the wards further out. The Weyburn hospital, although not an archetypical Kirkbride, was obviously inspired by such a plan.

The treatments at the hospital, while often at the forefront of contemporary psychiatric research, were troubling. They included electroshock therapy, lobotomies, insulin therapy, and hydrotherapy. A history of the institution describes the latter process as follows: “The patient was restrained in a bathtub by means of canvas sheets, then ice cold water was run into the tub… In some cases, ice was added directly to the tub to further lower the temperature.

Naturally this caused hypothermia in the patient and no doubt would dramatically reduce the activity level. Without doubt they were in a state of real shock.”

But what “the mental” is most famous for is that it was here where Dr. Humphrey Osmond first tested Lisurgic Acid, or LSD, on patients.

Osmond, a Cambridge trained biologist, hypothesized that psychological disorders like schizophrenia were caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain. Since the

effects of Lisurgic Acid (LSD) mimicked that imbalance by increasing levels of dopamine in the body, it could possibly assist in treating the disease. According to “Under the Dome: The Life and Times of Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn,” an almost yearbook-like account of life at the hospital, “such exotic drugs as LSD, peyote, muscatel, and magic mushrooms were used in these experiments”. Indeed, according to an article in the Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, the taking of LSD by hospital staff was seen as a rite of passage.

While one would likely not describe the Weyburn Mental Hospital as “groovy”, it is interesting to note that because of Osmond, Weyburn is considered to be the birthplace of the term “psychedelic” due to his experiments with LSD. *** We came back at night with a crowbar stolen from my grandpa’s garage, a screwdriver, a flashlight, and a renewed sense of courage. We were really going to do it.

We parked the car near the entrance we had found and walked to the plywood door, armed with a flashlight and sweaty palms, our fight or flight responses on red alert.

Thus began the effort of opening this portal to the hospital. We started by attempting to remove the many green screws holding the plywood, which boarded the door to the hospital shut. Being successful with some and stripping others, we felt confident enough to bring in my grandpa’s blue, rusted, foot-

long crowbar to finish the task. We gained leverage, and the plywood began to peel back.

We slipped a wooden block behind the plywood to secure the leverage we had gained. The wedge created a roughly 15 degree angle, and a promise that entrance was close. I began to work again, lower on the board, to gain the final pry.

As I was about the deliver the final hard thrust, we heard what sounded like water rushing in the pipes above us, bizarre for a building that had been abandoned for twenty years. Then suddenly, a magnificent, visceral, booming SLAM came from behind the plywood. The plywood snapped back into its original position, shutting the entrance with a gust of air.

And we ran.

Throwing our tools into the back of the car and flooring the gas, we maintained our blood-curdling screams until the end of the road.

Stopping the car at the downtown 7/11, there was a period of detente.

Adrenalin production stopped; we began breathing more slowly, and we began to reflect.

What had we just seen? Could it have been just a force of physics, slamming the plywood back onto us? We went back to the picture evidence. From the photos, we could see that there was a blue light behind the door, and it was fucking spooky. There was no reason for there to be any light on in that building.

To this day, we still have no idea. It makes a better story that way. The summer we broke into “the mental” will sit in our reperhtoires for some time.

Culture

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16

Culture Essay

More blood than honey Lela Savic provides a Yugoslavian perspective on Jolie’s new film

I

t was at the AMC theatre that I gathered the courage to watch Angelina Jolie’s new film, In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Let’s all be honest here, Angelina Jolie makes a film about the Bosnian war? Now we’ve heard it all. During the shooting, a great deal of controversy surfaced based on the rumoured plot. I had read in an article in February of last year, that stated that Jolie wanted to make a film about a Bosnian woman who falls in love with her Serbian rapist. I could not believe that someone could be so insensitive. Being from the former Yugoslavia, I felt that this would do nothing but serve as an insult, both to those involved in the conflict, as well as to any rape survivor.

“Does Angelina Jolie think that by giving some nonsense portrayal of what happened in this war from her ignorant perspective, we should feel thankful for adding the war in Bosnia to her list of philanthropic efforts?” observed one of my Bosnian friends when she found out about the film.

I wasn’t too excited about the film even before walking into the theater. I felt as though she made this film without thinking about the effect it would have on the locals. I was not wrong.

Yet it seems she did revisit the plot to an extent. While the film was marketed as a love story between a Serbian army officer and a Bosnian prisoner who knew each other before the war, I personally did not see how this could be the case. The film is rather about the tense relationship between a captor, a Serbian army officer responsible for rounding up Muslims in Bosnia, and a female prisoner, a woman he was interested in prior to the war and who he is now able to exploit while simultaneously protecting as his “personal property.”

Ajla, the Bosnian woman is not really depicted as having feelings for her captor. Rather, it seems that she feels abused and responds to his “love” out of fear rather than romantic feelings. Danijel, the Serbian army officer, is portrayed as a caricature – a very aggressive, self-centered man, with no remorse except for the very little he shows to Ajla.

The film could have done more had we seen the two characters share passion, and in doing so, subvert discrimination, especially in Danijel’s case. But his abusive character and his violent response to her confrontations destroy this possibility. At the end of the film,

I wished I could have seen more remorse – a more nuanced portrayal of Serbians. A balance between nationalists and non-nationalists would have been more fair and would have had a positive effect on the relationships between the people of the former Yugoslavia.

Being from the region, I was particularly concerned about the consequences of such a film for all the people in the former Yugoslavia.

I must admit that the film was very well shot, the actors were great, and I particularly appreciated that it was filmed in the local language. What was portrayed in the film was true.

During the war, ethnic cleansing and mass rape were common, and many people were killed.

My issues with the film do not stem from any feelings of Serbian nationalism. I am not a Serbian nationalist, as are some who want to deny what happened and call war criminals heroes. Being from Serbia, I am actually very much against Serbian nationalism and dream of days when we could all go back to being the same in the beautiful country of Yugoslavia. Some Bosnian women I spoke to after the film agreed with me, they, too, lamented that the country had, at one point, been together, and had to descend to that point. But they seemed happy with the film, and felt more comfortable that an outsider made such a film (instead of a person who had been a part of the conflict).

I agree with their point of view.

But, while Jolie said in an interview that she thinks this film will help people in the region to move into transition, I think it will do exactly the opposite. A film that focuses on a conflict’s atrocious events, with only a shallow historical background does not help people move into a transition, nor does it help the rest of the world understand what happened. Like one of my friends from Sarajevo said, “Westerners have to understand why these types of movies annoy us locals. There is rarely any historical background provided as to why any similar events would’ve taken place. Then there are always some dramatic scenes to make it look better. They just always show a black and white story.”

Today, I still see some anti-Bosnian, anti-Croatian, and anti-Serbian comments on many social media outlets from all regions of the former Yugoslavia, particularly in the trailer of the film on YouTube. The tension is still there. And the worst part of it is that these nationalist sentiments are often advocated by youth, which did not live in the Yugoslav era and don’t know what happened. They represent our future. The future who

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily will decide if we will unite and make peace or keep fighting and make more wars. It’s very unfortunate that a person such as Jolie, who commands so much of the international media’s attention, and is often seen as a role model, did not think about the consequences of her film on – I dare say – the present and future of those who live in the former Yugoslavia. With her film, Jolie only nourished the conflict. She could have done a lot of good for today’s political situation in

all parts of former Yugoslavia had she just shown a little bit more nuance.

Had she portrayed some characters in the film with Yugoslavian values, she could have reached the hearts of many more. Today, we need to reestablish those values so that we can avoid another war, another massacre, another tragedy.

People today are in post-war transition and are slowly trying to get past their differences so that conflicts do not re-surface. Hence, creat-

ing a graphic reminder of the events without providing appropriate context can only aggravate the situation.

When making a film about a political conflict, one factor that many directors disregard is the consequences their film will have on the people who actually lived it. Though her film represents a harsh reality of what happened in Bosnia, Jolie – like many other directors who are strangers to the conflicts they portray – failed to consider this too.

Culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

CULTURE BRIEF Leonard Cohen’s new album, Old Ideas I spend my evenings wandering St. Denis near Marie-Anne, pining for a glimpse of the tall man in the flowing dark overcoat. The confluence of snow-capped pavement, drunken revelers, and store lights in the vast darkness of the Montreal night might as well be humming, “So Long Marianne,” as I am told Leonard Cohen, poet and prophet, sometimes sleeps nearby. As of yet, the exact location remains a house of mystery.

Fans of Westmount native and McGill alumnus Leonard Cohen have a new way to lift their spirits from the annual winter gloom. Old Ideas, released January 31, is Cohen’s first album of new material in eight years. Cohen – an incessantly mythic figure, born before Elvis, who came to light only after more than a decade as Canada’s favourite poet, merely adds to his mystique with age. Old Ideas is no exception to that habit.

Featured as a poem and sound clip in the New Yorker two weeks before official release, the opening track, “Going Home” is an instant masterpiece, and undoubtedly the finest gem on the album. At a CD-launch gathering in London, Cohen said, “I think this particular album invites you to be swept along with it.”

Cohen leads you on the journey, as he has with earlier efforts, but now he’s seen more of the road­­­­- and has aged during his travels.

In Going Home, we hear the Cohen who led us down to the river in “Suzanne,” the Cohen whose name claims ancestry from priests in the temple of Jerusalem. Here, Cohen is both Moses and Odysseus, in per-

manent exile from a home that in fact may never have existed.

While critics and listeners hail Old Ideas as a return to form, the songs are consistent with Cohen’s early songs only in theme – love, sorrow, sex, pain, and prostration, the idea of a return to form is as illusory as the concept of homeland. Going Home offers an illusion of home, but the home we remember is never the one we experienced; one can never truly return home. The chorus, where Cohen sings, “going home without my burden/ going home behind the curtain/ going home without the costume that I wore” is like Moses accepting a life of wandering for salvation, or Odysseus, whose return home after ten grueling years at sea. is as cultural critic Svetlana Boym writes, “about nonrecognition.”

Cohen might return to old ideas, old forms, the scraps of songs and broken love, but he will never be old Leonard, as his gradually deepening voice confirms. Without a vision of the future, and unable to decipher the past, Cohen opens up the cavernous grace of his voice and says, “follow me.”

Nonetheless, like the melodious promise of a return to home, it’s a song I can’t stop listening to, and can’t get out of my head. You wouldn’t need to know that an entire album follows Going Home. After all, the Ten Commandments have kept people spiritually and intellectually stimulated for thousands of years.

Cohen’s 1960s-era music is unparalleled, but these are more developed musically, they are sharper, as is Cohen’s wisdom.

Today Cohen offers a wider musical palette, more crisp production than when he was younger. Even as he’s matured, Cohen is still haunted poetically by all the things in the world which make him feel small.

Hailed by NPR as a “unique sound that brings the temple to the cabaret,” Old Ideas

is as eminently cool and intensely poetic as Cohen’s ever been. At the release-party, Cohen also said, “I was like Ronald Reagan in his declining years, who had a vague memory of playing a really great role of the president in a movie. I’d forgotten I was a singer so it felt good to feel like a worker in the world again.”

Another song, “Darkness,” could stand in for the entire album: part eulogy, part lament, part victory march, part party, and if this is Cohen, perhaps an orgy too.

In “Anyhow,” a song which rings heavy with the phrase, “both of us are guilty anyhow”, every word, like an onion, has hundreds of layers, and the more you pull each layer back, the more you can’t keep your eyelids dry.

While many critics note similarities to Bob Dylan’s 1997 record, Time Out of Mind, described as the “beginning of Dylan’s epic lion-in-winter phase,” Dylan’s roots are in early blues singers and guitarists. Alternatively, Cohen’s musical roots are in poetry and early folk music. Cohen came of age before rockand-rollers perfected the formula for preteen screams, and he’s always been an elder statesmen not because he came before the others, but – with the exception of the embarrassing 1980s – he has always seemed wise beyond age. Unlike Dylan, who has become earnestly morose – and wacky – with age, Cohen, for all his prophetic attributes, won’t let you take himself too seriously.

The closing track, “Different Sides”, with its opening organ shots like the opening of a new world or dawning of an age, seems based on a ridiculous erotic premise, but we might have to take the Ladies’ Man at his nearly octogenarian word. Cohen moans, “you want to change the way I make love, but / I want to leave it alone.” It seems less about resistance to change as about the desire to explore the same hallowed grounds that inevitably change with time.

— Matt Herzfeld

17

Caravel Rinsed, simply, in water. Shining and white As a tooth.

A farther sea. The distance from Maine to Wyoming.

When the grass hisses like rising seawater.

A caravel on the rising sea, a sleek hull and sea-worthy spine. A Portuguese flag.

Rolled and eggy, yellow and smooth. Slipped Into the hold.

White, island weather.

A history, Barbadoed, Black and Irish as slaves, as tropically, brown, mixed Children of finally painless sex After long caravel rides. An all-white crowd, Grilling bratwurst at Coney Island, except Blacks cleaning brass, like rubber and gold, The little unseen tasks of little black men.

Broken and bent, like a tailpipe in a scrap yard In Scranton. Rusted and red.

On the thin, watery wind, the words of Gullah Bringing news of blackened reefs of Congo and Carolina, A history suppurating in sugar And lost in the wash of time and in the losing sea.

— Eric Andrew-Gee

Inkwell

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18 Culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

These boots are now made for walking The advantages of repair over retail at Imperial Boots Mercedes Sharpe Zayas Cuture Writer

A

s fleets of trucks armed with salt and sand disperse through the Montreal streets, it’s inevitable that your soles will fall victim to a ruthless combination of saltwater stains and gritty wear-and-tear. By the end of the season, most shoes serve as dilapidated reminders of strolls through the city, and have been trudged beyond salvation, or at least beyond looking publically presentable. My own have been reduced to: vintage suede converse with stuffing bursting at the seams, scuffed-up leather lace-ups with worn down heels, and unstitched lining, salt-lined oxfords with a hole in the toe.

Nothing is more aggravating than having to shoe shop when your perfectly-worn-yet-slightlydamaged kicks support your feet better than a grandmother’s orthopedic loafers. So, instead of tossing out your old shoes and dropping cash on a new pair, it’s time to start considering a smarter alternative.

This year, when my recently purchased pair of leather boots began detaching at the sole, I decided that it was time to seek out some repair expertise. This brought me to Imperial Boots, an old shoe repair shop below the intersection of Bleury and Sherbrooke, easily

distinguished by its cowboy boot window paintings and timeless shoe displays. The store itself bears the atmosphere of a place frozen in time, with its dated red and yellow paintjob blending into the classic wooden backboard, setting the retro tone. Handmade leather boots of all styles line the room, matching the colorful myriad of leather swatches hanging from the back wall. Sturdy metal sewing machines and sanding devices hide in the back room, their labels more than a half-century old.

When I first entered the store, the elderly Greek owner was bent over on all fours, carefully examining a pair of handmade boots on one of his patrons. “This is too long for you, madame,” he insisted, and began taking intricate measurements of her feet to craft a custom pair. The man behind the business, who prefers to remain anonymous, not only sells his own styles of boots, but also takes custom orders. Just bring in a design of your ideal leather footwear, and he’ll see what he can do.

Of course, this luxury comes with a cost. Prices for custommade boots start at around $200, and while this is a stretch for most students, it could be a worthy investment for quality and longevity. Unlike the shoes in a retail store, which often distance the consumer from the manufacturer, having your own personal cob-

bler would not only bring support to a local business, but also slow down your annual trend of mass consumption and disposal. “I’ve owned this shop for 42 years,” he often reassured me, “these shoes will last you a long time.”

Shoe repair is an economically friendly venture for students – the cost for my boot repair was only $5. Rather than stretching your credit limit for replacements, repairs allow you to maintain the

balance of durable footwear and the familiar feel of broken-in comfort. Pay a little extra for reconditioning and protection, and your shoes will last you as long as a new pair at a sliver of the cost. However, you must remain mindful of the condition of your shoes before you bring them in. The owner is known for abruptly turning down customers that have shoes that he deems hopeless cases.

So, for those of us who prefer to

Camille Chabrol | The McGill Daily explore the city by foot, it’s time to find preventative measures against the deadly streets and put an end to the yearly boot casualties. Think twice next time you are about to throw out those winter-worn shoes.

Instead of burning a hole in your pocket, you could mend those holes in your soles for the price of a cup of coffee.

Imperial Boots is located at 2117 Bleury.

Holy chip!

Fishing for deep sea deliciousness at Comptoir 21 Steve Eldon Kerr

The McGill Daily

B

eing stood up on a date is probably not the best experience. However, while waiting for my friend to join me, I concluded that Comptoir 21 is exactly the type of friendly establishment that would soften the blow. Why? Firstly, all the customers sit elbow-to-elbow along two wooden bar tops, so you never feel too alone. This pseudo-table also makes up the most prominent decorative feature of the restaurant. It is a long, horseshoe-shaped bar that juts out from the kitchen area at the back of the building up to the window, which looks out on the corner of St. Viateur and Clark. Secondly, the mise-en-place is simple: a knife and fork in a paper napkin. Condiments are in large sharing bottles dotted around the bar. It would be quite simple to pass off your unfortunate lack of company as a preplanned solo meal. Thirdly, Comptoir 21 is a fish and chips restaurant, which should provide, in your lonesome hour

of need, a timely reminder of a useful phrase concerning the sea and the number of its scaly inhabitants.

I won’t lie. I’m British. One of my favourite meals is fish and chips. I love few things more than eating cod and chips from a seaside “chippy” while being sheltered from the wind along a waterfront. Keeping the chips (there will be no “fries” in this article) away from the seagulls is half the fun. So when The Daily asked me to review the relatively new fish and chips restaurant, I agreed, but sharpened my critical pencil. A couple of obvious criticisms to begin with: First, Comptoir 21 is a boring name. A good fish and chip shop name ought to be a pun. It is difficult for me to trust a non-punning chippy.

My personal favourites include “Lord of the Fries”, “Moby Chip”, “A Salt and Battery”, “The Codfather”, “The Frying Scotsman”, and “Batter the Devil you Know.” I understand these names may not suit the hip mile-end scene, but sometimes it’s necessary to take a stand for what is right.

Secondly, the beer selection is

poor. I concede that most chippies in Britain do not have alcohol licenses, but Comptoir 21 does, and it must try harder. “Brit and Chips” in the Old Port not only wins the game of puns, but serves London Pride: a proper British ale. Boreale Blonde, Boreale Rousse, and Guinness out of a can does not constitute a “selection” of beer.

Nevertheless my companion – who did eventually show up – and I made do with a couple of canned Guinesses and waited for our meals.

I ordered the $9.95 small fish and chips, and my friend the $5.95 fried calamari. All the fish meals come with coleslaw, a slice of lemon, and your choice of sauce.

We didn’t have to wait long for our meals, but they were definitely freshly cooked. The batter on my fish was exquisite – a gorgeous dark golden hue. It fractured crisply at the touch. There was neither too much nor too little of it. The mark of high quality battering, nuggets of honeycombed batter at the tip of each end of the fish, was clear to observe and

pleasing to taste.

The fish itself was more disappointing. My cod was a touch watery and bland, although it still flaked off in pleasingly large chunks. Given the overwhelming flavour of deep fried batter, the cod used should be firm and succulent.

In light of the fact that I was served the blasphemous “fries” and not proper thick-cut chips, the chips were excellent. The hand cut potatoes, still with the skin on, had absorbed just enough oil to remain warm and tempting without succumbing to the disastrous hollow and crunchy cardboard sticks that characterizes far too much of the fried potato world on this side of the Atlantic.

I was delighted to have a very generous portion of creamy tartare sauce to dip both my fish and chips into, and the coleslaw was fine.

I did not try whatever weird “paprika” or “jalapeño” sauce my friend had ordered because I am an upstanding member of the Commonwealth and will not mix such foreign plants with my

fish’n’chips. Yet, he did assure me the sauce was more than passable.

The same could not be said about his calamari batter, which was soft and bland. The squid itself was actually fresh, moist, and well cooked. The same care that went into the cod batter was unfortunately nowhere to be found with that of the calamari.

All in all, not a bad fish and chips, despite the numerous and overt blasphemes. I thought the batter outstanding, and although the fish neared mediocrity, these problems can be easily fixed or could have been supplier or seasonal issues. Or perhaps the issue is that we have over fished the cod stocks to near extinction. Meh. In any case, if you like fish and chips or will probably be stood up at your next date and need a backup plan, I’d give Comptoir 21 a go. Try and sneak in some real beer though.

Sheesh.

Comptoir 21 is located at 21 Saint Viateur West.

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volume 101 number 29

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EDITORIAL

More than a month This February marks Canadian Black History Month. There is a common misconception in Canada that racism and the oppression of people of colour are mainly American issues.

Canadians tend to point to their role in the Underground Railroad and the fact that slavery was outlawed much earlier than in the States, while stressing the obvious atrocities violating human and civil rights that black Americans have endured. Indeed, Canada didn’t even have a Black History Month until Jean Augustine, an Etobicoke-Lakeshore MP, proposed it in 1996. Augustine was the first black woman elected to Parliament, and later the first black woman in the federal cabinet.

Canadians are by no means innocent. Not only did slavery also exist in Canada (it started to be phased out in 1794; and most slaves were freed by 1834), there is also an alarming amount of systemic oppression still present in our country. Systemic racism, unlike individual racism (which occurs when a person or a small group of people participate in racist activities), is present when larger societal structures such as governments, corporations, and educational institutions discriminate based on race. Furthermore, while schools in the US dedicate sections of history classes to America’s racist past, Canada often ignores black history in its textbooks. Black history is Canadian history and although it is marked by oppression and racism, it is also a story of monumental accomplishments, made against the odds, and without which Canada would not be the country it is today.

Oppression faced by black Canadians is both institutional and systemic. An obvious example of this institutional oppression is the racial profiling by the SPVM, who continue to target people of colour. A leaked internal Montreal police report revealed that between 2001 and 2007, out of a sample of 63,000 records of police identity checks, 30 to 40 per cent of these checks were done on black males. Only 6 per cent, however, were done on white males.

Another example of this systemic oppression can be found on our own campus. In 2009, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum launched the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity, Excellence, and Community Engagement. The goal of the task force was to produce a comprehensive report on diversity at McGill in the winter term of 2011. The report’s findings indicated that “minoritization and marginalization are endemic to the fabric of Western educational practice and are a historically engrained and ongoing problem.” Furthermore, the task force noted that many argued “McGill’s record of faculty diversity – where the number of people of colour, women, and LGBTQ persons are limited and where many individuals from these groups feel excluded – points directly to a culture of institutional exclusion and racism.” Despite these findings, McGill has yet to implement any real changes that could create a more inclusive atmosphere.

While celebrating Black History Month is certainly a step in the right direction, we should not limit this celebration to a single month. Moreover, by talking about racism as solely a historical issue, it’s too easy to make it someone else’s problem or someone else’s past. Canadians tend to think of discrimination as a thing of the past, and that needs to change. Historicizing racism obscures contemporary problems of racial discrimination.

While there’s unquestionable value in celebrating Black History Month, reflecting on the past should not be an excuse for us not to demand change now. Munroe-Blum’s task force explained that, “the structural aspects of this ongoing problem need to be addressed swiftly, dramatically, and universally, throughout the University,” and The Daily agrees.

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Compendium!

The McGill Daily | Tuesday, February 02, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Lies, half-truths, and see ya l8er.

AUS and SSMU GAs struggled with quorum

Minus 10 Students

Minus 108

The Help was nominated for best picture

I’ll miss you guys. You have no idea what you’ve meant to me. Love, Liv.

So was The Artist and Midnight in Paris

Plus 216

Reading week is in less than four weeks

Plus 78 Awkward

Herman Cain endorsed Newt Gingrich People are still talking about Normand Cornett

20

PLUS 3 PAGES PLUS 45

The Super Bowl is coming up

Minus 38

Watching it is gonna put me behind on my readings

PLUS 193

TOTAL

I was more concerned with pretty fonts than getting the crossword right MEA CULPA, Here you go The Crossword Fairies The McGill Daily

Across

1. “Beowulf,” e.g.

5. Office papers 10. Kind of school 14. Bananas 15. Vital 16. ___ Against the Machine 17. Deutches lady 18. ^ 19. Diva’s solo 20. Hitchcock direction 23. Put one’s foot down?

24. In the near future 25. Computer symbol drawing 28. Boozehound 30. Blue-book filler 34. Soup dish 36. Cabernet, e.g.

38. Cousin of an ostrich 39. Boxing buddy 43. Comics shriek 44. Drag queen accessory 45. Fails to 46. Bell Centre, e.g.

49. Gert’s Thursday special 51. Middle English gift 52. Church arch

54. What Jay-Z does 56. Pedagogical placement 62. Aromatic balsam 63. Curie or Antoinette 64. Britich comedian Eric 66. “... happily ___ after” 67. Japanese port 68. Caboose 69. Initiated into the mob 70. Flower part 71. London art gallery

Down

1. Wee person 2. Pocket pool material 3. Passport standard setter 4. Royal attendant 5. Hairy-chested 6. African antelopes 7. Catalan painter Joan 8. Go too far 9. Begin 10. Scampi 11. Pink, as a steak 12. Protection: Var. 13. Bog mummy preserver

21. Judge 22. Clod chopper 25. Befuddled 26. Man or woman?

27. Oryx and ___ 29. J. S. Bach instrument 31. Intuit 32. Alter 33. Mongolian homes 35. Pen part 37. The old man 40. Billfold 41. Frolics 42. Souvenir shop item 47. Character 48. 30-day mo.

50. Soviet triumvirate 53. Japanese wrestlers 55. Pinocchio wants to be ____ boy 56. Thing 57. PBS science show 58. Toboggan 59. “Shut your ___!”

60. It comes to mind 61. ___ du jour 65. Before, to Burns