Vol102Iss13

Volume 102, Issue 13

October 18, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

DAILY Varying degrees of competency since 1911

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

P. 10

PUT THE

You are cordially invited to

NEWS IN

The McGill Daily Meet and Greet

NEWSPAPER

Section meetings: Thursday, 5 p.m.

Daily Office (SSMU B-24)

news@mcgilldaily.com

Tuesday, October 23rd at 6 P.M. in the Daily office: room B-24 across from Gerts.

Meet the editors! Learn about the paper! Eat free coffee and cake!

Earn While You Learn MMPA Be the paparazzi.

Master of Management & Professional Accounting

t %FTJHOFE QSJNBSJMZ GPS OPO CVTJOFTT VOEFSHSBEVBUFT t 'PS DBSFFST JO .BOBHFNFOU 'JOBODF BOE "DDPVOUJOH t &YUSFNFMZ IJHI DP PQ BOE QFSNBOFOU QMBDFNFOU 5P MFBSO NPSF BCPVU UIF ..1" 1SPHSBN BUUFOE PVS JOGPSNBUJPO TFTTJPOT )ULday, 2FWREHU , 2012 11:00 am – 1:00 pm 3PPN #SPXO 4UVEFOU 4FSWJDFT #MEH .D5BWJTI .D(JMM 6OJWFSTJUZ )ULday, 2FWREHU , 2012 11:00 am – 1:00 pm 3PPN #SPXO 4UVEFOU 4FSWJDFT #MEH .D5BWJTI .D(JMM 6OJWFSTJUZ WHGQHVday, 2FWREHU , 2012 11: 0 am – 1: 0 pm 3PPN #SPXO 4UVEFOU 4FSWJDFT #MEH .D5BWJTI .D(JMM 6OJWFSTJUZ

www.utoronto.ca/mmpa

Squamosal. photos@mcgilldaily.com

healthandeducation@mcgilldaily.com

Earn your MBA while gaining valuable work experience with the DeGroote School of Business Co-op MBA program – Canada’s Premier Co-op MBA. To learn more, come visit us at your Graduate School Fair on October 22, 2012.

www.degroote.mcmaster.ca

NEWS 03 NEWS

The McGill Daily Thursday, October 18, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

3

McGill stands by asbestos research

Indigenous Studies program moves forward

Professor cleared of misconduct despite corporate funding and controversial methods

Fall SSMU GA held Manfredi releases report on Open Forum Occupy meets for one year anniversary Suzuki and Rubin visit McGill

07 COMMENTARY Why you are a racist We should encourage political involvement Students will never be involved Letters from the readers I love skateboarding

10

FEATURES

A short story about the 80 bus

12 HEALTH&ED Getting you high, getting you happy

13 CULTURE Talking about AsianCanadian stereotypes Review: Private View Discovering the history of radio in St. Henri

15 COMPENDIUM! Department wins misogyny award MudPack shakes Montreal

16 EDITORIAL Bullying must be understood in context

The Jeffrey mine in Asbestos, Quebec.

Laurent Bastien Corbeil The McGill Daily

D

ean of Medicine David Eidelman announced yesterday that after an internal review, the University will not be pursuing an independent investigation into allegations of research misconduct made against professor emeritus J. Corbett Macdonald, who conducted asbestos industry-funded research on the health effects of asbestos at McGill in the early 1970s.

The inquiry was launched in February after a CBC documentary revealed that Macdonald had accepted nearly one million dollars from the asbestos industry.

“Professor McDonald [sic] properly acknowledged financial support from the asbestos industry in his publications […] There is no evidence to suggest that the sponsors influenced the data analyses or the conclusions,” read a statement released yesterday by the University.

The report, prepared by McGill Research Integrity Officer Abraham Fuks, claims that Macdonald’s findings were often corroborated by others and that his research demonstrated a link between asbestos exposure and lung cancer.

The work of Brown University professor David Egilman – a vocal

critic of Macdonald’s research for over ten years – was cited numerous times in the report.

However, Egilman told The Daily that he was never contacted by the University during the course of its investigation, despite offering to meet with them.

“McGill has its own definition of an investigation,” he said. “You would assume that you would talk to the person who filed the complaint and published a peer-reviewed paper that laid out the issues.”

The report also acknowledges that asbestos companies exploited a distinction made by Macdonald’s research between chrysotile asbestos and other forms of asbestos, particularly his reference to chrysotile as being “essentially innocuous” at certain concentrations.

One of Macdonald’s studies concluded that “most, if not all” cases of mesothelioma were related to exposure to tremolite asbestos and not chrysotile.

The study described certain mines in Quebec as containing higher or lower amounts of tremolite – mines in area A and mines in area B – but MacDonald never refers to these mines by name.

“Their whole theory is based on comparing the mesothelioma rates and they don’t say which mine is which,” Egilman said. “If they didn’t make up the data, they hid information [...] That’s worse than scientific misconduct.”

Photo Peter Shyba | The McGill Daily

Fuks admits in the report that he could not “find direct identification of which specific mines were in areas A and B and all the published data are coded both for subjects and mine.”

“It is therefore not possible to make these linkages by name,” he concludes.

Despite this, Fuks argues that there is “no basis to presume that the analyses performed by [Macdonald] and his colleagues are flawed” because the data Macdonald used was consistent across his studies.

Egilman claimed in a paper published in 2003 that Macdonald did not use the right equipment to assess the levels of asbestos exposure.

Fuks’ report addressed this by stating that although Macdonald was aware of the drawbacks of his equipment, it was impossible for him to use the latest measuring tools because he was comparing his numbers with data obtained using older instruments. “[Macdonald] did not have the opportunity to carry out prospective measures of exposure and [was] forced to either use the data available or not initiate the study,” the report read.

Egilman also claimed that the relationship between Macdonald and the asbestos industry was greatly understated. “[The asbestos industry] said they were looking for Macdonald because they were looking for

someone who would want to be a champion for them, like the tobacco companies did with cancer,” he told The Daily.

Macdonald testified before the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1972 and proposed lowering U.S. safety standards, according to a 1973 book by investigative science reporter Paul Brodeur.

Eidelman said at a press conference on Wednesday that MacDonald’s public advocacy of the use of asbestos was not “germane to an issue of research misconduct.”

“We don’t regulate the speech of our professors,” he said.

Earlier this year, a group of Canadian scientists criticized McGill for its continued ties to the asbestos industry and called for the resignation of Roshi Chadha from the University’s Board of Governors.

Chadha is the director of an asbestos-exporting firm and the wife of Baljit Chadha, the president and founder of Balcorp Limited – a prominent exporter of asbestos to India.

Eidelman declined to comment on Chadha’s relationship to McGill.

The report concluded by recommending that McGill hold an academic conference on the topic of alternatives to asbestos and the challenge of asbestos removal.

—with files from Lola Duffort

4

NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Plans for North American Indigenous Studies move forward Foundational course and minor program in the works for next year

Speaker at McGill’s 11th annual Pow Wow during Aboriginal Awareness Week, organized by the Aboriginal Sustainability Project.

Annie Shiel The McGill Daily

P

lans for a North American Indigenous Studies program at McGill are moving forward, and those involved hope to have a foundational course – and potentially a minor – in place for next year.

Last Friday, William Straw, the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) along with Aboriginal Sustainability Project (ASP) Coordinator Allan Vicaire and Interim Dean of Students Linda Starkey, met to discuss the work done thus far, including preliminary research compiled by SSMU-hired researcher and Education student Brett Lamoureux.

Straw also confirmed his commitment to the North American Indigenous Studies program, which will be tentatively overseen by MISC. A forum is currently planned for November 15 to get community input on the program. Vicaire will meet with student leaders next week to solidify the forum’s details.

According to Straw, student interest for the program has been “enormous.”

“When I do advising in Canadian Studies and ask students what sorts of courses they want more of, Indigenous/Aboriginal studies is by far the area most often mentioned,” he wrote in an email to The Daily.

Lamoureux, who has been conducting preliminary research for the program since July, will continue researching until December, a date Vicaire cited as the deadline for his part of the preparations.

The Process Once Vicaire and Lamoureux have compiled data from preliminary research and from the forum on November 15, they will write a report and pass it on to Straw, who will write the actual proposal for the program.

According to Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi, a concrete proposal is the first step in the process of creating a new program at McGill.

In the proposal, applicants must “identify the purposes of the program, [adhere to] certain rules about how many credits are part of the minor program, demonstrate [they have] done appropriate consultations with the units that would be affected, identify the unit that’s going to be responsible for it…[and] provide a list of courses that are going to be part of the program,” Manfredi told The Daily.

From there, the proposal is reviewed by the curriculum committee and circulated among departments to make sure the program doesn’t overlap with existing programs. Once approved by the curriculum committee, it goes to the appropriate faculty council, then to the Academic Policy Committee, and then to Senate for final approval.

Manfredi pointed out that “at every stage of the process, there is student involvement in the body that has to make the decision.”

He also recalled that an Indigenous Studies program had been in the works for many years, but with little progress until now.

“This has been a long-standing thing, I think someone’s been talking to me about an [Indigenous Studies program] since I became Dean six years ago,” said Manfredi. “Every time someone came to me and said, ‘we’d like to put together a program,’ I said ‘great, go ahead, do it. Put the proposal together and bring it to the appropriate bodies,’ but for some reason it just never happened.”

According to Lamoureux’s preliminary report, the idea of an Indigenous Studies program was first initiated by former First Peoples’ House coordinator Ellen Gabriel in the early 2000s, eventually leading to discussions between the MISC and ASP in 2009.

More recently, members of Kanata and McGill faculty went on to form a subcommittee within the Social Equity and Diversity Education Office, which in 2010 submitted a proposal to the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity, Excellence and Community Engagement that resulted in the creation of a multidisciplinary Aboriginal Field Studies course.

Moving Forward Straw said that he plans to have a proposal prepared for next year.

“On assuming the Directorship of [MISC] in June 2011, I made working on [an Indigenous Studies program] a top priority. I was aware that others have done a lot of work on this, but aware as well that one of the problems has been finding an academic unit to administer the

program and usher through the proposal. I have consulted with those with a stake in such a program and have their agreement to go ahead with a proposal from the Institute,” Straw wrote in an email to The Daily.

“We have most of what is needed to support a proposal,” he added. “We will prepare the full proposal over the remainder of this term and submit it to the appropriate Faculty of Arts committee soon after. At the same time, we are developing a foundational course proposal for submission…so that, even if the program itself is delayed, the course may be in place.”

Straw said that he aims to submit the proposal for the first meeting of the Faculty of Arts curriculum committee in January.

“All these things take steps, they take time, and an actual major program might not happen for another five or six years,” Vicaire added.

“But we could have a minor…people entering first year at McGill may in a few years be able to do a minor in Indigenous Studies.”

The Program As it is currently envisioned, the program will cover Indigenous Studies within the North American context.

“One could well imagine a program dealing with indigeneity that covered a wide range of indigenous peoples from virtually all continents of the globe,” wrote Straw. “The shared (or majority) feeling about McGill’s program is that the distinctiveness

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

and shared experiences of North America’s indigenous peoples are clearly enough to warrant a program focused on them alone.”

Vicaire added that this did not preclude the inclusion of comparative studies with indigenous groups such as those in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, who have had similar experiences with British colonization.

Given that the current proposal will be for a minor program of study, it will likely require grouping together existing courses and putting a structure around them rather than creating new courses, according to Manfredi.

Lamoureux’s report cites a number of existing courses that could be cross-listed for a North American Indigenous Studies minor, including courses from Anthropology, Biology, Canadian Studies, English, Environmental Science, History, Geography, Law, Politics, Social Work, Sociology, and Education courses in languages such as Algonquin, Cree, Inuktitut, Mi’kmaq, Mohawk, and Naskapi.

Straw also cited a new MISC course on Aboriginal art and culture as a potential core course for the North American Indigenous Studies program.

“I think it’s a perfect fit, personally for me,” said Vicaire.

“An anthropology or history lens can be so limited…sometimes for indigenous people, we feel uncomfortable with that… like we’re underneath a microscope…. Something broader like [Indigenous Studies] helps to broaden that scope.”

NEWS

5

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

SSMU Fall GA struggles with quorum Ethical investments, war with Iran, and accessible education discussed Dana Wray News Writer

T

he Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) held its biannual general assembly (GA) on Monday to hear progress reports from SSMU executives and to vote on six motions concerning diverse issues from a bouldering wall to official stances on the threat of war with Iran.

Several procedural changes were implemented in Monday’s GA. Guides were tasked with helping students to participate and answering any questions they might have about GA procedures.

Former SSMU VP University Affairs Emily Yee Clare acted as “moodwatcher,” receiving text messages from students who felt threatened in the case of a hostile atmosphere.

In addition, this was the first GA since fall 2008 to include online voting. The motions that were passed at the GA will be eligible for online ratification for a full seven days. Elections SSMU will post online ballots for each motion along with recordings of relevant GA discussions “after a short delay,” according to the SSMU’s website.

SSMU President Josh Redel told The Daily, “I think a lot of people were concerned about getting quorum at all given that we have online ratification.”

Quorum – defined as 100 students with a maximum of half from any given faculty or school – was

reached for the first two motions.

The motions regarding the installation of a bouldering wall and regarding changing the name of the SSMU Breakout room to the “Madeleine Parent room” were passed with quorum and are thus binding. They will move to online ratification.

The GA lost quorum right before voting on the motion regarding ethical investments at McGill. A consultative forum was subsequently formed, in which procedure ran as normal but votes were not binding. SSMU Legislative Council will vote on the motions that passed during the consultative forum.

The motion regarding ethical investments called upon SSMU to oppose the development of Canadian tar sands by “[lobbying] McGill University to divest from companies engaged in the Tar Sands as well as other companies that have impacts on their social, political, economic, and environmental surroundings.”

The motion passed as a consultative body.

The next motion advocated the renewal of support for accessible education, particularly in the form of universally accessible postsecondary education.

The motion – moved by three SSMU executives and one councillor – also extended the student movement in Quebec by resolving that “the SSMU specifically oppose any tuition hike proposed by the Quebec government that targets out-of-province or international students.”

The motion passed as a consultative body with 52 votes in favour and 14 opposed, and will thus move to a vote by the SSMU Legislative Council.

One of the most hotly contested motions concerned Canada’s military involvement in Iran and McGill’s involvement in the war industry through weapons research.

The motion resolved that “the SSMU firmly oppose Canadian aggression toward Iran and oppose any military action that may be taken by Canada alone or in concert with other countries.”

Several students expressed the concern that SSMU did not have the mandate to take a position on such a politically divisive issue. Others argued that an official stance would not have any impact on the real issues.

U3 student Lily Schwarzbaum disagreed with these concerns, saying, “[The GA] is not just a discussion that we have where everything stays the same.

Bodies like this are the kind of grassroots initiatives that result in larger movements.”

The motion finally passed as a consultative body with 32 votes in favour and 14 opposed.

The GA ended with a studentinitiated motion from the floor, which proposed that SSMU actively oppose Plan Nord – the provincial government’s economic development strategy – and take an official stance of solidarity with the affected indigenous people.

The motion passed as a consultative body with 44 in favour and zero against.

Motions discussed at the GA = 10 votes

Bouldering Wall Favour

82

Oppose

3

Abstain

16

Madeleine Parent Room Favour

83

Oppose

3

Abstain

15

Support for Accessible Education Favour

52

Oppose

14

Abstain

0.6 per cent of SSMU members attended the GA

11

Canadian Military Involvement in Iran Favour

32

Oppose

14

Abstain

8

Plan Nord Favour

44

Oppose 0 Abstain

2

Graphics Rebecca Katzman | The McGill Daily *Lack of data for motion re: investment in tar sands.

The End of Growth lecture tour hits Montreal David Suzuki and Jeff Rubin discuss economics and the environment Jessica Lukawiecki The McGill Daily

S

tudents and community members gathered on Monday to hear environmentalist David Suzuki and economist Jeff Rubin deliver a clear message: human beings have come to the end of an era of unprecedented growth.

The sold-out event, which took place at Pollack Hall, was part of a multi-city lecture tour launched on September 23 at Toronto’s Word on the Street literacy festival for Rubin’s new book, The End of Growth.

The lecture, which was moderated by CTV news anchor Tarah Schwartz, opened with a standing ovation as Suzuki and Rubin

walked on stage.

Suzuki, co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation and long-time academic, science broadcaster, and environmental activist, told the crowd that he was very happy to finally be sharing the stage with an economist who was bridging the two generally conflicting fields of environment and economics.

“Environmentalists have been told that they don’t know economics,” Suzuki explained. “And it’s true, environmentalists don’t know economics – we just use common sense. But when economists started warning about the end of growth, I knew I wanted to be part of this.”

Rubin, who served as chief economist at CIBC World Markets for over twenty years, opened the

talk by explaining the importance of the two critical fuels that drive our economy: oil and coal.

“We attribute the last thirty to forty years of economic growth to our own brilliance,” said Rubin, “when really it has been because of cheap fuel – of which we are out.”

“We can no longer afford the oil that is coming out of the ground. What we’re talking about is not just another recession, it is not twenty to thirty years from now. Our rendezvous with tripledigit oil prices is now.”

“I think from the environmental standpoint I’m bringing some very good news,” Rubin said. “I think we’re talking about a major deceleration in economic growth. Those triple-digit oil prices are going to

lead to very green places even if we don’t want to go there.”

During Suzuki’s speech, he explained that we have prized human constructs – such as capitalism and the economy – above the very world in which we live.

“This is the moment for all of us to ask, what is the economy for? Are there no limits to the economy? Are we happier with all of this stuff? We have to ask these questions because I think we stand at an absolutely catastrophic point in our relationship with the biosphere.”

According to Suzuki, human beings have become a force like no other the planet has ever seen.

“No other species has ever done what we are doing now,” he said. “We are now a geological

force, altering the world physically, chemically, and biologically. We have lost our understanding of our place on the planet.”

“We are like any other animal on the planet,” Suzuki continued, “in that our most fundamental needs are water, air, and the earth.

These are our most vital needs as humans, but what have we done?

We have elevated a human construct above the very world in which we live. Let’s go back to the real world we live in.”

When Schwartz asked Suzuki about the most important thing Canadians can do right now for the future, Suzuki immediately responded that we have to “take back democracy and show our leaders what really matters to us.”

6

NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Occupy Montreal celebrates first anniversary Activists reflect on movement’s legacy and future mobilization Carla Green News Writer

A

t 11 a.m. on Monday, October 15, Square Victoria was silent. The small park in the centre of Montreal’s financial district showed no signs of the revolutionary Occupy movement that had claimed possession of it exactly one year before.

Occupy Montreal had planned its anniversary celebration for noon on Monday. By 1 p.m., about 100 people filled the square.

“People are on anarchist time,” joked Occupy organizer Paul Bode.

On the Queen Victoria statue, someone wrote “Place du Peuple,” the name that the occupiers chose when they renamed the square during the occupation last October.

Koby Rogers Hall and Frédéric Biron Carmel were responsible for the installation of photographs of last October’s occupation that were mounted on red poster board throughout the square. The photos were placed according to their respective vantage points in the square. The installation was part of their collaboration on [P(re)]occupations: The Living Archives of Occupy Montreal, which is opening at the Skol centre of modern art on Friday.

Carmel said that his goal in mounting the installation was to bring people into the world of Occupy Montreal and make them think about the meaning of activism.

“There are multiple scenes that implicate the observer. For example, we have scenes that are very collective, or we have scenes that are much more intimate – two activists who are about to get evicted – and we see all the emotions that are behind that,” he told The Daily.

“Occupy’s one-year anniversary is just another opportunity to highlight what is an ongoing global mobilization, bringing attention to these longstanding struggles and overall injustice,” added Hall.

Simon Lussier, a journalist for OM99% Media, described the media outlet as one of a few “spin-offs” from the Occupy movement, which also include the Assemblées populaires autonomes de quartiers and La Chorale du Peuple, a group of activists who perform anti-oppression songs.

According to Lussier, Occupy Montreal’s greatest accomplishment is the mobilization that it subsequently inspired.

“I think [its future is in] the many movements that sprung from Occupy,” he said.

“The movement certainly outgrew its camp in many ways,” com-

The Chorale du Peuple sings anti-oppression songs. mented Hall. “It’s work that can probably be accomplished more effectively neighborhood-by-neighborhood, in the streets, rather than by having to engage in a power struggle with the authorities.”

Among the Occupy veterans

who came back to the square for the anniversary celebration was Alejandro, a Mexican activist and artist.

“I think gatherings like this are so beautiful, and I think it’s good to remember, to come and commemo-

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

rate,” he told The Daily in French.

“Just because we’re not still here doesn’t mean we don’t exist.”

According to the Canadian Press, three arrests were made under a municipal bylaw, but the protesters were released later that day.

Manfredi report on Free Expression and Peaceful Assembly released Recommendations on disciplinary and security procedures outlined Queen Arsem-O'Malley The McGill Daily

A

fter four open discussions and a half-day symposium, Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi released three recommendations in his Report of the Open Forum on Free Expression and Peaceful Assembly last week.

The report summarizes the discussions that took place from March to May and recommends that language in the Code of Student Conduct be clarified, that the James Protocol be less restrictive, and that Security Services review its training program.

Principal Heather Munroe-Blum mandated Manfredi to head the process of organizing the Open Forum on February 13.

The mandate originated from the Jutras Report on the events of November 10, 2011 – an internal investigation conducted by Dean of Law Daniel Jutras – which stated that “University authorities should provide and participate in a forum open to all members of the University community to discuss the meaning and scope of the rights of free expression and peaceful assembly on campus.”

Munroe-Blum’s announcement of

the Open Forum project immediately followed the release of the Provisional Protocol Regarding Demonstrations, Protests, and Occupations on McGill University Campuses and the fiveday occupation of Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson’s office.

Munroe-Blum announced in Senate yesterday that the Provisional Protocol would be reviewed and discussed during the November Senate meeting.

Open discussions The number of community members who took part in or watched the Open Forum discussions was not available. The Daily previously reported that the first discussion, which took place on March 1, saw a “handful” of attendees.

Students interviewed at that time expressed a lack of faith in the process. Manfredi’s report notes, “some students had engaged in a boycott of the process” due to “skepticism about the efficacy of the Open Forum and criticisms of both its style and substance.”

Manfredi wrote in an email to The Daily that he became aware of the boycott in a meeting with authors of the November 10 Independent Study Inquiry (ISI) “after the Open

Forum sessions were complete.”

ISI member Amanda Murphy said that she was not among those who boycotted, but described the environment of the second open discussion as “hostile.”

Murphy said she was among the few students present who were not members of Manfredi’s Advisory Committee or involved with SSMU Council. “[The discussion] was not conducive to dialogue at all, unless you were very certain of your viewpoint,” Murphy recalled.

The report also includes concerns about concealing identities during protests, a discussion that mainly revolved around the use of masks to preserve anonymity during #6party. After the occupation, several staff members in James brought up concerns that masks added to an atmosphere of intimidation and made them feel threatened.

Manfredi also notes the contrasting concern that easily-recognized students could be targeted by security and administrative personnel, discouraging on-campus demonstrations.

Another major discussion is that of public versus private space.

The report clarifies, “in strictly legal terms, McGill University’s campuses

are private property...and open to the public by invitation.”

It also states that differentiation of space – including restricting access to some locations such as those where research is conducted – is reasonable and done at other universities.

Recommendations Manfredi’s call to clarify language in the Code of Student Conduct hinged largely on the fact that the Code does not define the term “disruption.” Section 5 of the Code, which discusses disruption, was the basis of much of last year’s disciplinary action following the #6party occupation and several other incidents on campus.

According to the report, clarifying this term would “identify activity that is clearly exempt from disciplinary proceedings.”

The recommendation to review the James Protocol – the security procedure to enter the James building, which became very strict following #6party – has been addressed to some degree by the fact that Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa announced in September that the building would no longer be on card-only access, and that McGill community members would be allowed to enter the building during work hours as long as they signed in.

At yesterday’s Senate meeting, Munroe-Blum referred to an incident last week in which “two students went in and created a sense of intimidation in the [James Administration] building.”

Doug Sweet, director of Internal Relations, told The Daily that it was an isolated incident in which two students accessed the James Administration building and “reacted aggressively” to staff members who asked them to make an appointment.

Sweet pointed to the need to balance community building access rights with creating a safe environment for those working in the building.

Manfredi’s final recommendation is that Security Services “review their training program.”

The report discusses participants’ concerns about the securitization of campus and enhanced surveillance of public events, but does not factor these into the recommendation, which focuses more on the procedural recommendations such as, “security personnel must be well trained in the substance of University regulations and the preparation of incident reports.”

—with files from Juan Camilo Velásquez

Commentary

The McGill Daily Thursday, October 18, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

7

You are racist Even if you think you’re not Guillermo Martínez de Velasco The McGill Daily

W

hen most people think of racism, they think of the segregated southern United States, apartheid South Africa, maybe skinheads throwing bricks at brown people, or someone telling a joke about racialized minorities. Racism tends to be seen as isolated incidents, situated somewhere geographically and temporally removed from us. It is important to remember that these are examples not of racism but of its products and consequences; racism is a daily practice.

In a Western liberal context we tend to assume that as individuals we are not racist, and that as a society we have moved past racism, when this is not the case.

Racism is something that inhabits all humans. This means that no one is above racism, and, by extension, no human product can be extracted from the social relations that lead to racism. The state is not above racism; the law is not above racism; capitalism is not above racism. Confronting this is only the first step in realizing that racism cannot be eradicated, but can be prevented from going too far. How we speak, act, and reflect on racism can be in itself oppressive or emancipatory.

So what is racism? Racism is assuming anything about anyone based on a perceived deviation from a racial norm known as white. To put it simply, white is the unmarked and racialized bodies are the marked. Racism is assuming that white is the central node from which one departs to evaluate otherness.

How we speak about racial-

ized bodies reveals how we position ourselves in regard to them.

Speaking for racialized groups implies relationships of domination and privilege. “Why am I in a position to speak?” “Why is my voice perceived as more legitimate, even when speaking on behalf of groups that would rather speak for themselves?” Speaking about others implies a conversation of ‘us,’ with ‘us’ about ‘them.’ The ‘them’ is silenced because of systematic racist practices that deny agency to those deemed as deviating from the phenotypic norm.

On one side, racism is a systematic essentialization of others’ perceived cultural signifiers. And, on the other, it is an appropriation that denies an identity outside of these stereotypes. Racism is saying black people wear flashy jewellery; you yourself wearing flashy jewellery, describing it as black, and then asking someone that is black why they don’t wear flashy jewellery. Racism is dictating the terms by which one is deemed legitimately racialized.

Which brings me to my next point – the notion of a diverse society is racist. It presents us all as equal citizens in regard to the state and thus, on the one hand, wipes away the recognition of historical processes of oppression and domination and their effects (poverty, violence, disease, et cetera), and on the other presents only a ‘safe,’ ‘neutralized’ other as a viable form of identity construction. You can be black, as long as you’re not too black. You can be Muslim as long as you’re not too religious, you can be Latino as long as you speak English. Whoever does not conform to this idea of the diverse is deprived of the chance of the life of privilege that whites enjoy by default. A life where there is no

Illustration Bracha Stettin

continual reminder of the fact that you are and will be another.

Racism is asking someone that doesn’t look white where they are from as soon as you meet them.

Racism is saying “these people.”

Racism is assuming some people are more sexually available than others.

Racism is saying you’re not racist.

Racism is pointing out to your white friends that one of your friends is a racialized person. Racism is saying you’re not racist because you voted for Obama. Racism is interrupting me when I talk because all your life you’ve been taught that you have the right to talk. Racism is being offended instead of ashamed when someone calls you racist. Racism is assuming everyone has the same

choices you do.

Racism presses on different bodies differently, but for everyone subjected to it, it is an act of direct violence. And no, there is no such thing as reverse racism. Whites, and especially white men, are in a position of privilege. If there is a scholarship or an association that is reserved for racialized others, it isn’t racist against whites, because that implies that whites have no other place to turn to for these.

This is not the case.

And finally, asking someone to explain to you why you are racist is in itself racist because you are positioning yourself above that person.

You are illustrating the fact that systematic exclusion based on race

has put you in a position where you never had to develop the ability to recognize the symptoms of racism in order to survive.

Not everyone goes through daily processes of exclusion and identity deligitimization. To combat the effects of racism we must learn to recognize these acts of violence and call them out for what they are. Calling someone racist is not an insult, it’s a way of keeping everyone in check and making sure that nothing becomes normalized, accepted, and then acted upon.

Guillermo Martínez de Velasco is a U4 Cultural Studies student. He can be reached at guillermomdve@gmail.com.

The Daily is looking for a Reader’s Advocate The RA will write a twice-monthly column weighing student concerns against the RA’s assessment of the paper’s performance. Anyone who is not a member of The Daily’s editorial board can apply.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about The Daily and reader response, having an understanding of and/or willingness to learn about The Daily and its Statement of Principles (SoP). Possible tasks include reader surveys and interviews, thematic columns, critiques of how The Daily lives up to its principles, and judging the relevance of the SoP and The Daily to the student body.

Submit applications or questions to commentary@mcgilldaily.com

8

commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Have some faith in students Why departments need general assemblies Lily Schwarzbaum Commentary Writer

H

ere’s the thing about direct democracy: it’s messy, it’s long, it involves us being slightly uncomfortable for a couple of hours. It’s also the most meaningful way for students to directly challenge and create a society that is relevant to them, and in doing so, to form a real community. Departments, the ideal small-scale unit for representative participation, are currently limited to being fora for social events and academic dialogue – but this is not an intrinsic state of affairs. If we want to actually have departments exist in a way that will best reflect the way students want to be represented, we need to implement department-level general assemblies (GAs).

Here’s what (often) exists now: students in each department have a mini exercise in democracy on the day that they vote for their representatives. Afterwards, executives are only held accountable to students insofar as the executives want to be. There is no forum for students to actually mandate anything. There is also an understanding that departments are not a place for politics, but rather social and academic spaces. Other forums like SSMU (or the more recent AUS and SUS) GAs are seen as appropriate places to wrestle over stances on environmental practices, or war, or the student movement, while they at the same time receive constant criticism for not being representative or relevant enough to actually matter.

Let’s first establish that a lack of direct political participation is not an implicit characteristic of departments, but rather the system that exists now at McGill. You only need to look at our Quebec neighbours to see that departments serve both social and political functions, and in fact have developed a culture in which students actually prioritize this decision-making process in their academic experience (and still manage to do their midterms!).

You can also see it in the way that some departments at McGill, like Philosophy and Gender, Sexual Diversity, and Feminist Studies, are actively building a culture of participation. The argument that we shouldn’t have general assemblies because they are not explicitly outlined in department constitutions, or just aren’t what departments have “traditionally” existed for, ignores that the department is what we make of it. Actually, the choice is most often up to the discretion of the executive whether or not to hold a general assembly, because it’s often up to the (absolute) discretion of execs to define the department structure.

GAs themselves are important in a few instrumental ways.

At a political level, it’s important (if I’ve learned anything from McGill Political Science) to have a system of checks and balances in a government (our executives).

This isn’t an abstract judgment on a distant club; this is a body that has a constitutional mandate to represent students, using students’ money. We have a right to determine the direction of these resources, in a way that goes beyond the arbitrary selection of the exec to decide which propos-

al they are interested in.

Another reason to have GAs is for departments to take stances on political issues, after a real engagement and discussion with their students. This part is important: the absence of political stances does not mean that the department is able to better represent its students. Every decision made by an executive is bound to exclude some part of its constituency, and this is even more the case with the absence of GAs. More importantly, the decision to not take political stances is in itself a political stance: it both implicitly accepts the world around us, and limits our role as students to rumination and passive dialogue. It denies our role as the people who are going to be most affected by the decisions that are being made today.

But we also need to be clear that general assemblies only are successful – or even occur – when there is political will to make it an integral part of students’ experience. Pointing to the lack of student participation in general meetings does not mean that students are inherently apathetic, but rather that these forums are currently meaningless. Open discussions are often poorly advertized and hold no weight anyway precisely because of their consultative, unaccountable nature. In a similar vein, creating a political culture is something that requires practice and a real community of familiar people. If you are unsatisfied with the way SSMU’s decisions represent such a large number of people, then surely taking decisions in smaller forums with the people you see every day would be a better way to facilitate

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

decision making among students.

Ultimately, here’s why departments should have GAs: communities are best formed when its members are actively participating in the creation of something.

While social events are important in providing informal spaces for people to meet new people and maybe even make friends, they will never result in a truly unifying experience. The largest community you can form over free beer is the amount of people who can squeeze around a table, but the active wrestling and compromise over issues – real issues, which do affect all of us

– demand students to see themselves as stakeholders in a larger collective. And that is something that can best be accomplished in department GAs. If the department execs really do want to represent their members and connect people across their fields of study, they need to create spaces for people to actually build the department that is collectively desired.

Lily Schwarzbaum is a U3 Political Science and International Development Studies Student.

She can be reached at lily.schwarzbaum@mail.mcgill.ca.

Democracy wars The myth of the ‘engaged student’ Harmon Moon The McGill Daily

T

here seems to be an idea going around that general assemblies (GAs) are some sort of ideal forum where ideas are exchanged, discussed, weighed, and finally put to a vote by a brighteyed and newly-informed roomful of excited students eager to steer their student union into new waters where they can make a real change in the world. Mona Luxion’s October 15 column, “One click, one vote” (Commentary, page 8) does a good job of getting this idea across. If this is actually how the GAs work, I think I was in the wrong room on the day of the SSMU GA, where a room of

tired and jaded students quickly lost quorum and ended the night squabbling over motions that would have a vanishingly small effect on their lives, no matter which way the vote went.

The fact is, GAs are, and have always been, the game of small lobbying groups, who appear with such depressing regularity that one can almost recognize their members on sight. GAs are the arenas for political punch-ups in the name of whatever happens to be the latest banner cause – the student strike, Israel/ Palestine, corporate investment, et cetera. The name of the game is to get as many of your like-minded friends out so you can push your agenda over the unlucky sops that couldn’t gather enough of their likeminded friends, trading barbs all the

way, and then go home with a shiny new mandate to hang over the mantelpiece, be it from SSMU, a faculty, or a department. Certainly amendments can be introduced, but if the last SSMU GA was any indication, such actions are little more than political shell games, with opponents trying to ‘defang’ the motion or supporters trying to intensify it.

This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue; it stems almost entirely from the fact that nobody goes into a GA without an issue that personally affects them, and usually that issue is raised in the form of a motion that they have an interest in forcing through. Witness the fact that the highest rate of participation for a GA in recent memory – during the AUS strike vote – happened

only when a motion was raised that would affect most students equally, with the more than 1,000 in attendance evaporating as soon as the issue had been decided.

Yet still people defend the myth of the ‘engaged student,’ that fleeting beast that somehow finds time between its fifteen credits of coursework to go out with no preconceptions and spend hours listening to ‘debate’ (which usually consists of propagandistic screeds anyway) so that it can make an ‘informed decision’ and thus be grouped into the appropriate camp for the subsequent mud-slinging (“You damn hipster commie!” “You ****ing fascist!”). This student does not exist. Given the choice, most McGill students would rather stay

in the library for a few more precious hours of studying, letting the assorted factions squabble in the GAs over their pet issues. Yet often they find themselves punished for these priorities by the resulting mandates from these political cage fights, forced behind a policy that may even be directly harmful to them. Such is the need for online ratification. Until a way is found to make GAs genuinely open fora rather than ‘democracy wars’ between lobby groups, online ratification is the only way to ensure that SSMU serves the interests of the students, rather than the other way around.

Harmon Moon is a U3 History student. He can be reached at harmon.moon@mail.mcgill.ca.

commentary

Why we ride

Letters Varying degrees of competency I just wanted to write you with regards to an alteration you made in my article, “Locked In” (Features, October 11, pages 8-10). While editing, you changed the following passage: “And when each member of my family was given some time to talk with him, spend with him and then finally comfort him as he took his last breath, looked up and then retreated into himself, it was easier to accept because my father had been given, all things considered, the most comfortable death possible.” to: “And when each member of my family was given some time to talk with him and then finally comfort him as he took his last breath, he looked up and then retreated into himself. It was easier to accept this because my father had been given, all things considered, the most comfortable death possible.”

This revision changes the entire substance of that memory. It disrupts the conversational rhythm with an unnecessary transition and made my account emotionally inaccurate. I would like to share this article with my friends and family with whom that memory resonates.

However, I don’t feel like the crucial section – where I wrote for the first time about my dad’s death – is described in the way that I wrote it.

I’m taken aback by the oversight in making such a decision without my consent. While I recognize that you have the authority to make ad hoc decisions on edits, and exercised this a few times elsewhere in the piece with varying degrees of competence, this particular decision was drastic and, speaking frankly, hurtful. Unless you are 100% sure that you are more equipped than I am to describe my father’s death, and

9

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

I’m operating under the assumption that you aren’t, I think such a revision was unnecessary and unprofessional without clearing it by me.

—Nicholas Cameron U4 English Literature

Humour must die. Or was it already dead?

I’d like to think I was shocked that you printed Max Silverman’s overly facetious letter (Commentary, October 1, page 8) and ridiculous list of titles in this past issue. Does his “digestive disorder” also prevent him from stomaching sarcasm-less discourse? Especially juxtaposed next to Joan Moses’ commentary about Mendelson’s use (I won’t go as far as to say misuse) of McGill’s policy on arassment, Silverman’s piece comes off even more foolish. You’re making a mockery of yourself, Daily.

—Eitan Blander U4 Psychology

F-bomb, f-bomb, you’re my f-bomb...

Now that everything that can be said about Frosh has been said, allow me to initiate a new Great Debate: can y’all stop dropping the f-bomb, like, all the time, please? I know this is the 21st century, and few people are still offended or shocked by the word, but seriously. Inserting the f-bomb in an opinion piece may make the author sound more passionate, but also more flying-off-the-handle pissed and it undermines the article’s credibility and the paper’s professionalism.

—Akiva Blander U1 Geography

What I talk about when I talk about skateboarding Julien Dinerstein Commentary Writer

I

didn’t skateboard today. By the time I got home from school and play rehearsal and poured myself a drink and carved a piece of wood to give to someone as a gift, it was already hours too dark, and I hadn’t eaten yet either.

I wish I had skateboarded at some point. Today, I had to bike to school because I needed to go right from school to the aforementioned play rehearsal which was starting before my last class was even over. Today was all about time. I had things to do and only so much time, so I dealt with all that by being in a bad mood and hating the world.

Yesterday, I skateboarded to school, and I was in a great mood all day. Even though it is more tiring than either walking or biking, skateboarding is a special way to get around. Riding a skateboard is a treat.

That’s just it. For me, it is a treat.

Skateboarding exists outside

of time. It is faster than walking and slower than biking. It isn’t an efficient mode of transportation – you feel like you are always working hard, and if you have to go up a hill you have to abandon the board anyway. Skateboarding is a silly way to get around. But, when you coast – when you get to stop pushing but still move, bending space and time, and capitalizing on thousands of years of human ingenuity – all notions of efficiency disappear. The coast is the most beautiful thing in the world, right up there with Halle Berry, and the Mona Lisa, and the moment when a child is born.

Except the coast is even better because it has no ego, it isn’t locked away in a museum, and it doesn’t involve blood and fluids and screaming. The coast just is.

I’m not very good at skateboarding. I do it because it is a fun way to get exercise – more fun for me than going to the gym.

And of course I do it because it is sexy, and because skate shoes are cool and even cooler when you

use them for skating, and it feels good to feel good.

Not everyone should skateboard, but everyone should treat themselves. We deserve it, even if we are the most privileged generation living on the most privileged continent and our problems are not real. We are still real. And we deserve treats too, just like little puppies deserve treats for no reason other than that they shit in one place rather than another.

So I will make a point of skateboarding tomorrow. The forecast looks promising. Soon the ground will have snow and ice and I won’t even have the choice to skateboard at all. And then I can spend all winter, just like last winter, looking forward to skateboarding again.

Julien Dinerstein maintans a blog for the Red Baron Skate Crew, a non-violent, non-hierarchical skate crew for beginners. Check it out at redbaronsk.wordpress.com.

Contact him at redbaronskate@ gmail.com.

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

the literary supplement poetry prose (around 500 words) visual art due november 4 to litsup@mcgilldaily.com

10

features

The politics of laughter

“

So I was walking by a laundromat at 3 a.m. and there were these girls chirpin’ at each other. And then I get around to breaking it up and some chick spills bleach all over my nice new shirt. I guess they’d been fighting so long they didn’t notice it was 3 a.m. and the laundromat was closed.

I guess what they’d been fighting about was them all washing the same dress and feeling very embarrassed and feeling like only one of them should have the outfit, because Montreal is so small for a city, and they figured they’d all eventually be at the same thing and inevitably be wearing the same dress. I told them I thought it was ridiculous to assume anyone would throw out a perfectly good dress. I told them that now, in fact, I would have to throw out my good shirt. The prettiest of the bunch said her father owned the laundromat and if I came back tomorrow she would wash it for me.

She couldn’t then, you see, because it was 3 a.m. and the sign said closed.”

This was Shawn, and he was prone to great and grandiose monologues. At the bus stop, waiting for the 80, he would take long drags off a Macdonald and spit the smoke behind him.

He was a sort of half-groomed pet I’d acquired three years earlier at Bar Fly – one of those decrepit late night havens for the downtrodden and/or ironic. He was sitting on a stool. He was talking to a goo-faced bartender about his time growing up in rural angloQuebec, some sad conservative pit he felt above but not beyond, he was saying “why is it, whenever you’re in the country anywhere in Canada all of the accents devolve into some variation of a deep southern drawl?”

The bartender was distracted by a pile of filthy dishes and gave a half-pint response of “I dunno man, I dunno.” Shawn started to use his hands to accentuate his words, “it’s like, it’s like, it’s like you take a bunch of people

and you throw them into some stupid farming community and they become a bad imitation of what they think they ought to be, ya know? They act as if they’re in the fucking UNITED STATES OF FUCKING A-MER-IC-A,” he let each syllable have its own moment.

“And I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you this whole province is going to shit – call it globalization.

We got these young punks thinking ‘ooh la la, I’m just gonna change the world,’ but if we can’t stop goddamn poverty in goddamn…”.

It went on.

Somewhere between his tirade about nukes in Iran and the quality of life of the North Koreans, he caught on to my hearing him. I told him about my summer trip to Israel. He projected his own ideas onto my story until it was his story but I liked him and we became instant buds.

At the bus stop he stomped out his butt and added, “and I wouldn’t go back to that laundromat, not because of what that girl did, not because I’m an awful human being, but mainly for the fact of my rent costing several hundred big ones a month and, like I always tell my landlord, I expect to get what I pay for. So, long story short, that’s why I have both a washer and a dryer and don’t concern myself with the public laundry or its people.”

Unassuming middle age women were lined up behind us. Beneath tightly wound babushkas they spat filthy looks in Shawn’s direction but said nothing. Shawn probably wouldn’t have cared much anyhow. The 80 pulled up next to the faded STM sign, bent from various seasons, each with their own bad weather. Winter was coming, it was something I could always smell before it arrived.

We were going to pick up our friend, Aurora Bronson, and then hit up a party at a new bar called The Laundromat, hence his diatribe.

Inside the bus the light felt pickled and eerie. We took two stiff blue spots beside the back stairs. An angry-looking teen-

age boy sat adjacent, horking into the seat beside him repeatedly. There was a seriously underage anger in his eyes and each phlegm sac was projected with deliberate purpose.

“Goddamn animal,” said Shawn, audibly. We exited the bus around Van Horne, Shawn grunted something about wanting “to teach the kid a lesson about decency,” but his voice trailed off and into the sprawling, inaccessible rhythms of his mind. Aurora answered the door and let us in.

Aurora has many secrets. They are her enemies.

Sometime, a while ago, she had an original secret. She decided to put it in an empty cereal box. This first box was a bright Fruity Pebbles number featuring a jovial Fred Flintstone. Then I guess she acquired another secret, and another, and she needed somewhere to put them all, obviously.

Though the way she’d explain it was not in any lucid sense. She lived alone, she could have just held it on her person but she’d always had a hard time keeping secrets, even her own, so she needed to put it somewhere.

She didn’t even trust her possessions anymore – the ancient rumble of kitchen radiator and estranged light fixtures – they were all lurking and spying from the high Victorian ceilings and beneath the cracked kitchen tiles. “It was too much to handle,” she’d explained. She felt a certain creeping sensation at play there. It creeped from the bold brights of swiveling rips in decadent old wallpapers, now tinted with dust, too much. Perhaps it was unjustified, the idea that inanimate things could tell stuff to someone else, but it grew with each blink of the neglected bulbs until she couldn’t even trust the refrigerator. She felt terribly and so she took that big unspeakable and stuck it in the empty cardboard breakfast box and, for a moment, believed in its apartness from the other breathing, moving man-made’s

peeking and swallowing.

Cereal boxes had consumed the whole apartment. We were walking on boxes glued to the floor, we were walking into boxes dangling from strings and, behind each curtain, each window, was a series of cartoon characters consuming sugary snacks.

“I really appreciate your decor, Aurora,” laughed Shawn. She peaked from behind her box-clad bathroom door, “Oh yeah, it’s been a rough week.”

As we were about to leave, Shawn had to speak, “Are you going to take that with you?”

There was always one thing she felt very close to and couldn’t leave behind. “Yeah, what’s it to you?” Today she was carrying around the Fred Flintstone box, “Well,” said Shawn, “everyone will think you’re cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” – this was an ongoing problem. Aurora was very sensitive, before the boxes she’d collected stray pets, and before that she’d collected photos of people she didn’t know. With Aurora everything had a weight, and Shawn saw people as if they were on the other side of a brick wall. Their conversations always ended in Shawn punching something, Aurora crying into her knees and myself mediating from the middle.

“You have yours too, you just don’t know it yet,” she responded. As we closed the door and walked down her stairs I heard Shawn grumble “Aurora ‘TLC special’ Bronson,” because having the last word was always very important to him.

The bus arrived, conveniently enough, as soon as our feet hit sidewalk. As we stepped aboard our breath puffed out mist that circled behind our heads. We sat in the same spots as before, at the back, amidst a sombre girl quietly listening to her headphones.

There was also a middle-aged lady with a small buggy full of groceries reading the latest edition of The Gazette, and a skinny hipster chick with half-shaved/half-rainbow

11

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

A story from the 80 bus - fiction by Julie Mannell

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

hair, repeatedly yanking her sinking leg warmers up past her knees.

It took a moment, and a potent elbow jab from Shawn, but I was eventually alerted to the familiar scowl in the back left corner.

There he was, the misanthropic deviant, the spurned teenager – still spitting into the seat beside him, still shooting death stares toward strangers.

The most surreal people ride the 80, especially at night. There were certain regulars, the William H. Macy look-alike, the actor who danced with his shoulders the entire trip, a crew of similarly wigged Hasidic women with their multiplicity of offspring, cooing and crying. I had never seen the spitting boy before, and yet he’d punctuated the night. “Was he just riding the bus over and over again,” I wondered, and “why the spitting?”

I thought of his head as a cereal box and I thought of the little sugar pellets having been infested with maggots and moths and other grotesque critters. I thought of how a mind could be rotten, even the minds of the living, and I stared into his malicious slits for eyes; he stared back and spit with intent. A few people were laughing at the absurdity of it all, and it was a political sort of laughter.

We all felt self-conscious for him.

I touched Shawn’s arm and could feel it tense. He was biting his lip. He was violating his bodily desire to tear the kid a new one, trying not to cause a scene. His scenes always upset Aurora, who was making a scene herself, snuggling that fruity pebble box.

The bus slowed to a halt at Parc and St. Viateur. A man and his five animated young daughters entered, chatting loudly and in unison about an assortment of topics. So distracted by one daughter’s concern over her empty belly and another’s aggravation at her Barbie’s newly amputated limb, the earnest and overwhelmed father did not notice the

youngest, a toddler, wobble away from him, crawl up the stairs, and launch herself head first into the seat beside the angry teenager.

There must have been a pop, or a flash, or something because it was as if the whole bus awoke in organized chaos.

Shawn jerked to his feet. The movement of the wheels beneath us caused him to sway to the other side of his aisle and his pointed finger, meant for the teenager, tottered between the windows.

“Did you really just let a baby put its face in your spit? You’re goddamn crazy, you know that? What else ya gonna do? Ya gonna leave a razor blade in a park? Ya gonna piss in the public pool? Ya think your problems are fucking big, buddy?” He made sure to fully stress the consonants in “buddy.”

Aurora had put her hand in mine and I could feel each tremble of her nervous twitch. “I’ll tell ya, people got problems, I got problems, man. I got problems like war. I got problems like religion, like consumer culture, like god damn deforestation.” He was counting all of the world’s problems, which he saw as solely his problems, on his fingers, the way one might tally teaspoons of vanilla. The baby lifted its bulbous cheeks, strings of slime still connecting her to the chair. Shawn hammered on.

The middle-aged woman picked up the nameless infant and sat her on her lap. She pulled a bottle of hand sanitizer from her jacket pocket and massaged goop around its immature scalp and bloated face, mindful of the eyes, mouth, ears, and nose. The baby, too dumb for the polemics of Shawn’s lecture, gave a big-eyed and wondrous grin at the woman to show its gratitude for the impromptu bath. The whole place reeked of disinfectant.

At Laurier, the boy pushed passed Shawn, exited, and walked onto the street where I could see him waiting for the next bus.

“You’re an animal,” shouted Shawn through an open window. The woman handed the child to the clueless father who thanked her but did not know for what. She too left and disappeared behind a Presse Café.

There was a silence that followed, it was a look-around silence where everyone takes note of the changes in their surroundings. With all the shouting finished we could now see that the girl with the headphones was quietly crying. Tears curled around her freckles. I wondered if she had known the spitting boy, I wondered if she had mental problems.

Aurora could taste tears without them touching her tongue. This girl’s tears were so thick that they were in all of our faces.

What do you even say to a stranger crying on the bus? It was so radical, and so Aurora’s reaction was equally profound.

We didn’t say a thing, Aurora didn’t say a thing, but she reached into that conspicuous cereal box and pulled out a macaroni necklace. Without soliciting permissions, she hung it around the sobbing girl’s throat and laid a palm atop her head. The garish and chipped blues, greens, and reds of the painted pasta glowed against the brown of the girl’s sweater. Shawn and I had never seen the contents of any of Aurora’s boxes, and we knew better than to ask what it all meant. I don’t even think Aurora knew what it meant. Instead we accepted it as a sacrament unquestioned. The girl smiled and said “thank you,” then exited at Mont Royal, still toting the uncooked noodles around her neck like a rosary.

“I wonder what she was listening to, I wonder what song was making her cry that way,” said the hipster girl to us. “I thought maybe she knew that boy who was spitting, like maybe he was her boyfriend or something,” I responded. The hipster girl shook her rainbow head, “no, I think it was a song.

Art has a powerful effect on people.” We were nearing our destination, it had been a long bus ride full of secrets, yet this strange girl was insisting upon imparting her own, “I love crying. I love crying in public. I find it all so cathartic. It’s my favourite thing to do.

There is this video on YouTube, they call it ‘The Most Beautifully Tragic Things In The History Of The World.’ My friends and I have these crying parties. We get together once a month and watch the video – it has starving children, and abused puppies, and the aftermaths of natural disasters, and all sorts of crimes against humanity – and so we get together, and watch it, and just sob together, in each other’s arms, it’s honestly so beautiful. I love crying. I really do.”

We exited the bus at Avenue des Pins. I felt grateful the girl hadn’t invited us to one of her crying parties. It would have been met with the sort of awkward refusal that causes everyone to feel badly.

On the outskirts of Parc du Mont Royal, a crowd of a dozen had gathered to awe at a strange sphere obscuring the sky. “What is that?” asked Aurora. A man in a blue pinstriped suit replied, “That is the supermoon, it is the largest possible moon.”

A well-dressed young woman with long fingernails admitted, “I don’t get it. It’s not that great. It’s just the moon.” Shawn sighed and said to himself with a mind for other’s hearing, “we’re so cynical, we’ve even wrecked the moon.”

We left the group to walk further east to The Laundromat. There we would have filtered down drinks and not talk about the things we wanted to talk about. Three girls wore the same three dresses. A barmaid washed her hands every hour on the hour.

A drunkard spit into the streets outside. We had pockets full of stories but our patience was worn thin, and our minds shook with all of the nonsensical ringing of public sounds.

HEALTH&Ed

The McGill Daily Thursday, October 18, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

i2

Prescription K What once made you high may also make you happy

Tamkinat Mirza Ninth Life

T

here is a substantial, well -debated, and disputed list of recreational drugs which have been used to treat psychosocial illnesses in decades past, and now that list has a new addition. Ketamine, a horse tranquilizer often used as a party drug, has now found its own nook following the publication of a paper early this month in Science, a world-renowned medical journal.

Following over a decade of research by Ronald Duman and George Aghajanian, both psychiatry professors at the Yale School of Medicine, scientists have found that low doses of the compound may reverse signs of depression in patients in over just a few hours.

Ketamine – also known as K, Special K, and Vitamin K – has been classified as a Schedule I narcotic in Canada since 2005, but Schedule III in the United States since 1999. Despite this, it is FDA-approved for use as an injected anesthetic.

Ingested and injected, effects last an hour or two, producing varied levels of dissociation in the user. It manifests in varied levels of pleasant dream-like states, vivid imagery, hallucinations, and emergence delirium.

Besides these hallucinatory side effects, the drug’s real medicinal potential is only fully realized by looking deeper and in evaluating its specific effects on synapses. The paper states that ketamine is able to stimulate synaptic growth and promote their regeneration, to counter the loss of the same – which is symptomatic of depression.

“Depression is a neurodegenerative disease, and people long thought that it was very hard to reverse such a thing,” Aghajanian told the Yale Daily News. “That’s the amazing thing about Ketamine – it reverses the changes within 24 hours.”

“The idea that a drug could produce a rapid improvement, rather than taking several months to feel better is really an important idea and it really challenges the thinking about how anti-depressant medications might work,” Yale Chair of Psychiatry John Krystal told the Yale Daily News. “I think [it provides] a lot of hope for the future

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

for the treatment of depression.”

Comparatively, the SSRIs [Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors] that have been used to treat depression only begin to take effect over seven weeks of daily use, on average.

In treating depression, issues of timing can be crucial; the risk of potential self harm and suicide over the weeks it takes for SSRIs to kick in fosters a stressful environment for not only the person who

must continue to operate within the routines and responsibilities of their daily lives, but also stresses their familial and social spheres.

In the United States alone, 14.8 million people are afflicted with major depressive disorders yearly, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – that’s 6.7 per cent of the population.

Clearly, then, the promise of a (relatively) instantaneous cure brings interest.

While Ketamine therapy offers a tempting picture of a medical revolution, any dialogue following the publication of scientific studies like this necessitates a consideration of the flipside, one that seems vast and troublesome now.

For one, Ketamine has been associated with psychosis in high doses and prolonged use. With the drug’s widespread presence within the recreational sphere, a question must be asked regard-

ing its off-prescription use. Were Ketamine to gain acceptance as a prescribed medication, would there be an increase in recreational use that would create a larger black market?

Without insinuating that there is a current lack of supply, one can assume that supply would be greatly increased should Ketamine be prescribed. For patients, a black market could be tempting.

While Ketamine prescriptions have not emerged into mainstream medicine just yet, there have been reports of “off label” uses of the drug to treat depression given its FDA approval as an injected anesthetic.

The Yale findings come with another disclaimer that hints at some side potential failings of the drug. Their research shows that patients, taken off the medication, relapse between one and two weeks with all their corresponding improvement reversed.

Would this reversion be avoided with continued use? Perhaps more importantly, if patients relapsed, would they find their depression worse than it was before treatment?

Alongside these queries, there enters yet another factor, that of the addictive potential of Ketamine, as well as its realityaltering side-effects, which include the aforementioned dream-like states, hallucinations, immediate delirium, and irrational behavior.

It seems idealistic to assume that advantages could outweigh the destructive potential of the drug.

While this research clearly takes treatments for depression into a markedly different territory, there are many questions and considerations that remain unanswered. There is a need for further research before Ketamine is simplistically promoted as the new miracle cure for depression.

It will be essential to formulate a compound able to impact synapses without the detrimental side effects of Ketamine itself, a safer alternative that researchers are now working on. Rather than being seen as in support for swapping SSRIs with Ketamine, the paper should perhaps be taken as revolutionary for exposing the regenerative capabilities of a compound, and consequently providing a basis for formulating depression remedies that have side effects with less damage potential.

Ninth Life is a column by Tamkinat Mirza. She can be reached at ninthlife@mcgilldaily.com.

CULTURE

The McGill Daily Thursday, October 18, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

Label me (race goes here)

Culture HAPS

Great cultural expectations

I3

Invisible Waves: CKUT’s 25th Anniversary Party

October 18 Gerts Bar 7:00 p.m.

Free Our own campus-community radio station, CKUT, will be celebrating its birthday in Gert’s tonight, illuminated by the likes of local bands Dam Ships, Cinéma L’Amour, and Nubians. Come party with the CKUT crew and enjoy a free evening of great music on campus.

Carolee Schneeman, Then and Now

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily Anqi Zhang The McGill Daily

I

t wasn’t until high school that I was told for the first time: “You act so white.” Though I’d never heard that particular phrase before, delivered with a perplexed and slightly accusatory slant, I remember being unsurprised by the sentiment. Perhaps this was because it had been implied so often without the explicitness of words, or perhaps because I had conceded exactly that fact so many times before, with a feeling of equal parts sinking horror and quiet satisfaction.

“Acting so white” – what did that mean? To this day, I couldn’t give you a precise list of characteristics that exist in the “white” segment of the arbitrary behavioural Venn diagram society seems to use, that section that does not overlap with “Asian” or “African.” But somehow, I still knew what my friend meant when she made that observation.

And I felt a certain discomfort that bordered on shame – as I always did when the topic festered in my mind, as I would whenever the topic was broached in the future – as though I had been caught doing something profoundly wrong.

I laughed off her comment without asking what triggered it. But I think her remark arose, on the most superficial level, from signifiers such as a general lack of Korean pop music on my iPod, and an absence of self-deprecating shyness in my

manner of the kind that many of my Asian peers appeared to possess.

Such were the things associated with “being Asian” in my predominantly white school in suburban Ontario – being obsessed with Asian television and music, and a quieter manner than most were accustomed to. Even disregarding the obvious problems with such a reductionist and limited approach to culturally-linked behaviours, this comment bothered me, but not as much as the one that followed: “Do you do it on purpose?”

As though my personality was something I had chosen, some concrete decision I had made, rejecting one alternative in preference for another.

And then, either because my friends and I had reached a point of closeness where they felt comfortable saying such things to me, or because my “whiteness” had grown too obvious to ignore, I started hearing such comments everywhere, comments that assigned cultural significance to my behaviour. A boyfriend’s father said I was the “most American” non-American he had met. (I am Canadian, and to this day do not know what he meant.)

Countless friends have asked why I don’t “hang out with more Asians” or “like Asian things.” But of course, when I do something that is alien to them, I am being “so Asian.” But that is, at least judging from the infrequency of these comments, rare. At times it seems that my every behaviour – both commonplace and not – is tagged with some sort of simplistic cultural relevance; as a culmination of these individual labels, so does

my character become labelled.

I get this on both sides of the pond – the Pacific one, that is.

Relatives and family friends in China are surprised at my directness, and my slightly-annoyed default expression. When my cousin was preparing to travel to Canada with me, she was often told to act more like me, and “less like a Chinese girl.” An aside would then be directed at me, explaining that “Chinese girls are sweet and gentle.”

Had I, by behaving in the way that has been most natural to me for all of my adolescent and adult life, somehow managed to change my own ethnicity, and subvert my own cultural identity?

Of course, it would be ignorant of me to think that my environment has not influenced the way I behave – but in a different way from how so many of my peers seem to expect.

Living in a Western environment where bold confidence is more typically rewarded has no doubt allowed me to exercise that aspect of my personality. Participating in a culture in which deference is not emphasized has certainly kept me from incorporating it into my behaviour.

This Canadian influence that has come to define me dictates the moral path I take, and the angle through which I view the world, and the face I put forth when I address it.

So I take offense to the suggestion that my behaviour is a rebellion of sorts – a rejection of my own cultural background – when to me, it is so clearly a quiet acceptance of myself.

And I take offense when my actions,

everyday actions with no racial implications or ties, are localized on a scale of not-Asian-enough to Asianas-expected. To me, my behaviour is a reflection of my beliefs and outlook, however they have been shaped – and not a choice I have made to discern between the different sides of my cultural heritage.

I do not consider myself solely a victim of the assignment of cultural labels to actions that do not merit them; I have just as often thought the same thoughts to myself, wondering if my persona is just a misguided attempt to assimilate, or truly a liberation of self. The language used in society to refer to individuals who live at the intersect of multiple cultures does not help.

There is little more dejecting than having to consider whether you are a “twinkie” or “banana” – as though it’s not okay to have grown to identify with the community in which you were raised; as though it’s still so shocking when your appearance does not mesh with how you are expected to act. As though it’s a betrayal of a culture you have never identified with – a betrayal, judged by others, on the basis of ethnicity. There is little more dejecting, I think, than having to apologize for your choices, either through a self-conscious smile to your grandmother when she comments on your brashness, or through a reluctant silence to your friend when she asks why you don’t speak Chinese to all your Asian friends. There is little more dejecting than apologizing for who you are.

October 19 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 3:00 p.m.

Free This symposium will feature the artist Carolee Schneeman as well as luminaries from McGill, Concordia, and Stanford.

Schneeman is an influential feminist artist known best for her conceptual films that explore sexuality and gender. Active for the past five decades, Schneeman has had her work shown at MoMa and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Have an art history lecture at that time? I’m sure your professor will forgive you.

Scrivener Creative Review Launch

October 19 Librairie Drawn & Quarterly 211 Bernard West 7:00 p.m.

Free The Scrivener Creative Review is hosting a launch party to celebrate its first online issue – that’s right, you can now get your literary dose on whatever Apple will have managed to invent by the time you log onto the Scrivener website.

Get your cultural fix at this party with readings from the journal and wine.

Dollhouse

Festival du nouveau cinéma October 21 Excentris 3536 St. Laurent 5:20 p.m. $12.50 Dollhouse, an independent film from director Kirsten Sheridan, follows five teens over the course of a night as they break into a home. Largely improvised, the chaos and destruction the teens inflict on the house reflects their relationships with each other and the adolescent crash course with the outside world.

14

The McGill Daily | Thursday, October 18, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

culture

.-. .- -.. .. --- / -- ..- ... . ..- -Exploring St. Henri’s Emile Berliner Radio Museum Ceren Eroglu Culture Writer

W

hat used to be an RCA (Radio Corporation of America) communication and production building now looks like a great place to start filming season six of The Wire.

Surrounded by Home Depot on one side and an abandoned parking lot on the other, the Emile Berliner Radio Museum is a hidden jewel amongst the isolated buildings on Lacasse in St. Henri.

Let’s be honest, an abandoned white building with sketchy cars in front of it doesn’t immediately scream, “Come on in, museums are fun!” Thankfully, the search for the museum through deadend hallways of a warehouse is worth the effort.

Emile Berliner was a Germanborn inventor, piano player, father of seven, and merchant. Berliner dedicated his life to inventing and improving new technologies, and one of his most prominent inventions was the gramophone, which he later on connected to the radio.

Berliner, who is also known for initiating the recording industry, worked on the telephone shortly after its invention by Alexander Graham Bell, and improved its transmitter by installing a microphone.

Berliner is particularly significant to Montreal history because he

Illustration Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

worked at the Montreal branch of the RCA in the early 20th century.

Robert Bisson, a renovation technician at the museum, told me that Berliner lived in the building next door (which I understand to now be the Home Depot parking lot). The museum itself was one of the two RCA communication and produc-

tion centres, and played an essential role during World War II in communication and information delivery.

The museum is currently housed in a large loft-like room lined with wall-to-wall electronics for the current exhibition, From Morse Code to Text Messaging: The Technology Evolution of

Telecommunications. This ranges from the most primitive Morse code transmission machines to the military radios used to communicate with Eastern Germany after World War II, and from the first calculator to the first typewriter.

According to Bisson, all of the items in the exhibit are donations

except for one gramophone that the museum procured, which is not on display. Bisson and other technicians volunteer on Wednesdays to fix and renovate old radios, computers, phones, and other electronics, and give them to the museum for exhibitions. At night, the old radios can pick up certain signals. If ever you find yourself by Place St. Henri at unholy, dark hours of the night, head over for a quick listen to the radio that may have been a part of solving the Cuban Missile Crisis (you never know). Midnight gramophone session? So avant-garde.

The most interesting aspect was seeing how much technology has changed. In addition to the innovations I wasn’t alive to witness (the gramophone, the first telephone, typewriters), they have some appliances that will make you realize you’re older than you think. From ancientlooking 1990s landline telephones to the original, candy-coloured iMac, even Millenials will find something to be nostalgic about. Experiencing emotion toward obsolete electronics is one of the unexpected pleasures of the museum.

Regardless of what interests you, visiting the Emile Berliner Radio Museum will be a time well spent.

A haven for broke college students (there’s only a voluntary entrance charge), reaching new levels of hipness is inevitable. Pose among the retro electronics, and don’t forget to set your Instagram filter to Earlybird.

A private view of Private View TNC Theatre creates intimate and surreal setting Hillary Pasternak The McGill Daily

T

hese days, when masks are mentioned in conjunction with theatre, the average person will probably conjure an image of old-timey comedy and tragedy masks and leave it at that. If they’re thinking hard, something about ancient Greek drama might surface; certainly, nothing regarding modern mainstream theatre. We just don’t see masks on stage very often anymore. That’s why it’s a bit jarring to see them used in a play about something so quintessentially 20th century as life in the declining years of the Eastern Bloc.

In her directorial debut, U3 English major Gabriela Petrov seeks to use masked performance to add an extra dimension to Private View, a one-act play written by late Czech president Václav Havel back in his Soviet-era dissident days. The story, set in communist Czechoslovakia, is simple: writer Fred Vanek spends the evening with his friends Michael and

Vera. We watch in real time as the married couple endlessly extol the virtues of their middle-class lifestyle – Vera’s cooking, Michael’s recent business trip to Switzerland, their home renovations, and their parenting skills. As the night progresses, Petrov’s addition – the masked performers – act out the emotions simmering below the surfaces of each of Fred’s hosts.

“It’s a very unique skill,” Petrov says of masked acting, a discipline that draws comparisons to dance and Movement Theatre. “The interesting thing about masks is that you want [the actors] to lose themselves in it while being extremely disciplined and controlled. There are rules to mask: you have to keep your eyes open all the time, hugely open. You can almost never blink, because you can lose your audience when you do that. You have to move in a very deliberate way.”

All of that attention to detail certainly comes through in the performance. Under the influence of Petrov and stage manager/choreographer Nicole Rainteau, they appear entirely human in the emotions they

embody, but entirely animal in their mode of expression. The effect is by turns humourous and creepy.

Kimberley Drapack turns Vera’s subconscious into a fluid, feline creature, all superiority and self-satisfaction. Harry Burton literalizes and amplifies Michael’s cheerful machismo. Together, they seem to inhabit a dimension about one half-step outside the reality of the play. They flit in and out of the action, sometimes prowling the stage, sometimes sticking a head out to silently comment on the proceedings.

Fascinating as they are, one can’t help but wonder if the masks are strictly necessary. Ross Ward and Annie MacKay make for an exquisitely matched Stepford couple as Michael and Vera. They cajole, proselytize, make criticisms of Fred both covert and overt, and above all put on a show. They perform their lives with the frantic gusto of two people trying to convince themselves of something, rather than their audience. Vera’s brittle smile and fluttery, fidgety body language

don’t seem to have much to do with Michael’s earthbound, slightly naïve cockiness, but both performances allow for similarly exact proportion of artifice to transparency. There’s a palpable sense of folie à deux, like they’ve slipped down the rabbit hole wrapped securely in each other’s arms. Captivating as they are, the masks don’t convey much that couldn’t come from Ward and MacKay alone. We can clearly see when Michael is beating his chest, or Vera is purring with smug satisfaction. Does it need to be acted out?

Michael and Vera are linked by a shared desperation that makes more sense when the play is viewed in its proper context – pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia. “It was a tough place to live and be calm and feel a sense of community,” Petrov explains. “Everyone was spying on everyone else, there was a lot of suspicion, and if you had a tiny community, a three or four person community, people cherished that so much. They wanted that one more person, those two more people to share things

with, to share their real feelings with that they couldn’t do in a greater community, and by greater community I mean a block, a neighbourhood.” As she sees it, the couple is determined to welcome their “best friend” (as they frequently refer to Fred) into the refuge they’ve created, whether he wants to come or not.

This all makes for a rich, tense atmosphere, but the one character who we could use a little insight into, Fred, gets so little attention that he becomes an object of speculation.

Scott Leydon makes the character an effectively relatable audience entry point into the strange, claustrophobic little world that Michael and Vera create. He provides a much needed voice of incredulity during the play’s more absurd moments, but never seems to obtain a personality of his own, overshadowed as he is by his hosts’ myopic flamboyance.

Private View runs from October 18 to 20 at Morrice Hall. The show starts at 8 p.m., tickets are $6 for students.

EDITORIAL

volume 102 number 13

Bullying reaches farther than the playground

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

Queen Arsem-O’Malley

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com

coordinating news editor

Juan Camilo Velásquez news editors

Laurent Bastien Corbeil Lola Duffort Annie Shiel commentary&compendium! editors

Jacqueline Brandon Steve Eldon Kerr culture editors

Kaj Huddart Victoria Lessard features editor

Christina Colizza science+technology editor

Anqi Zhang

health&education editor

Peter Shyba sports editor

Evan Dent

multimedia editor

Kate McGillivray photo editor

Hera Chan Illustrations editor

Amina Batyreva design&production editors

Edna Chan Rebecca Katzman

copy editor

Nicole Leonard web editor

Tom Acker le délit

Nicolas Quiazua

rec@delitfrancais.com

cover design Edna Chan

contributors Akiva Blander, Eitan Blander, Nicholas Cameron, Julien Dinerstein, Ceren Eroglu, Carla Green, Jessica Lukawiecki, Julie Mannell, Guillermo Martínez de Velasco, Tamkinat Mirza, Harmon Moon, Hillary Pasternak, Lily Schwarzbaum, Bracha Stettin, Dana Wray

On September 7, Amanda Todd – a 15-year-old girl from Port Coquitlam, B.C. – posted a nine-minute YouTube video in which she described, using flashcards, the harrowing abuse she had faced over the past three years. Entitled “My Story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, and self harm,” the video went viral after she committed suicide on October 10.

In the wake of her death, politicians have focused on three issues. First, the lack of resources provided to victims: over a month elapsed between the date Todd’s video was uploaded and her death. Where were support services when she needed them most? Second, the nature of cyberbullying: the internet has led to the emergence of new forms of abuse, and perpetrators are able to access their victims and spread information with unprecedented ease. Third, the legal status of bullying: should the Criminal Code be extended to punish bullying and cyber-bullying?

A focus on these three points is valuable, but has one important flaw: it emphasizes “bullying,” but not abuse or oppression. Todd’s abuse began when men she met online – men who told her she was “stunning” and “beautiful” – sent topless photographs of her to her friends and family. Afterwards, she was called names like “slut” and even received death threats. If she had been a few years older, the media would have pronounced her a victim of “sexual harassment” or “hate speech.” If she were a thirty-year-old woman, the debate surrounding her death could not have begun without references to sexism and gender stereotyping. As Danielle Paradis noted in Flurt!, a website that works to empower young women, “the prevalent culture around [Todd] sends mixed messages, such as take your clothes off to get the affection you desire, but don’t do it in the wrong way or with the wrong people or you’ll be seen as a dirty, worthless whore.”

Yet the measure offered by NDP MP Dany Morin on Monday referenced bullying, not sexism or slut-shaming. Morin proposed building an all-party committee of MPs to study bullying and help build a national anti-bullying strategy. It’s a well-intentioned measure, but as soon as the word “bullying” is used, the schoolyard connotations of the word take over, providing a convenient way for politicians to dodge serious questions about social inequality, sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and gender stereotyping. Bullying is a pernicious form of abuse, but it cannot be treated separately from other forms of oppression. It is also not a static phenomenon; it is a learned social behaviour that happens in homes and workplaces, and is not confined to any particular age group. The victims of bullying often go on to become bullies themselves.

Going forward, any debate around bullying must consider the messages society sends young people today. How might a person feel obliged to conform to a stereotype? How might someone feel stereotyped? How does bullying relate to other forms of oppression, and how can victims be treated so that they both heal and do not become perpetrators themselves?

These questions cannot be considered in isolation, and we worry politicians are overemphasizing punishment. Liberal health critic Hedy Fry wants to add cyber-bullying to the Criminal Code, and earlier this year Ontario introduced the Accepting Schools Act, which would mandate schools to take a tougher stance with bullies, including expulsion. But does punishment and explusion stop the abuse, or just move it outside the school? As Wanda Cassidy, an expert on bullying from Simon Fraser University, notes, “Often what politicians do, because they don’t understand education, they think if you bring in legislation and punish...it will solve the problem….We know that just is not the case.” Rather, Cassidy says, “We have to have a model that is educative, more preventative, and is discussion based.”

With initiatives such as deal.org, bullying.org, and Bullying Awareness Week (which takes place from November 12 to 17), the Canadian government has done well raising awareness of bullying in schools, but these learning materials are clearly designed for children.

Bullying is prevalent on the playground – bullying.org estimates that high schools experience 282,000 incidents of bullying per month – but not because of the playground.

Like other forms of abuse, bullying concerns every single one of us – the behaviour and messages we each accept give power to the perpetrators. Politicians must think seriously, then, about the messages they send when they talk about bullying; we must approach bullying with the seriousness we approach racism and sexism.

Errata In the article “Committee searches for Mendelson’s replacement” (News, October 15), The Daily mistakenly referred to Haley Dinel as SSMU VP Internal instead of SSMU VP University Affairs.

In the article “McGill caters to Quebec students in advertising” (News, October 15), The Daily mistakenly stated that the University spent $2,318 million on advertising between 2009 and 2010 and $2,322 million from 2010 to 2011. In fact, the University spent $2.318 million and $2.322 million, respectively.

The Daily regrets the errors.

3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-26 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6790 fax 514.398.8318 advertising & general manager Boris

Shedov sales representative Letty Matteo ad layout & design Geneviève Robert Mathieu Ménard dps board of directors

Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Joseph Henry, Erin Hudson, Rebecca Katzman, Anthony Lecossois, Matthew Milne, Olivia Messer, Sheehan Moore (chair@dailypublications.org), Farid Muttalib, Shannon Palus, Nicolas Quiazua, Boris Shedov

All contents © 2012 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

Printed by Imprimerie Transcontinental Transmag. Anjou, Quebec.

ISSN 1192-4608.

CONTACT US NEWS COMMENTARY CULTURE FEATURES SCI+TECH HEALTH & ED SPORTS MULTIMEDIA PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS DESIGN&PRODUCTION COPY WEB

news@mcgilldaily.com commentary@mcgilldaily.com culture@mcgilldaily.com features@mcgilldaily.com scitech@mcgilldaily.com healthandeducation@mcgilldaily.com sports@mcgilldaily.com radio@mcgilldaily.com photos@mcgilldaily.com illustrations@mcgilldaily.com design@mcgilldaily.com copy@mcgilldaily.com web@mcgilldaily.com

For meeting times, check the “Contribute” tab at mcgilldaily.com

15

compendium!

The McGill Daily Thursday, October 18, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

lies, half-truths, and asbestos everywhere why do they lie?

i6

Physics named most misogynistic department Mechanical Engineering outraged Emmanuel Noether The McGall Twice-a-Weekly

T

he McGall Physics department, which won the Golden Pig award last week, was recently named “McGall’s most misogynistic department” in an independent survey. This marks the first year the award was conferred onto a department other than Mechanical Engineering since the highly chauvinistic prize was established in 1992.

Reactions in the Physics department have been mixed.

“We feel greatly honoured and humbled to have received this prestigious award,” Marcus Mitchel, president of the McGall Society of Physics Students (MSPS), said in an earlier phone

interview. “We worked incredibly hard around the year not only to create and foster an environment hostile to women, but also to encourage the denigration and objectification of women, both inside and outside the classroom.”

Some have criticized the prize committee’s decision.

Mario Curie, head of the McGall Association of Mechanical Engineers (MAME), said in an e-mail communication with The Twice-a-Weekly: “We are truly disappointed that the prize committee did not find us deserving of the Golden Pig this year. In Mechanical Engineering, we strive to deliver the worst possible experience to our female students. We don’t think we have ever fallen short of this goal and are chas-

Man starts smoking on doctor’s advice Turns out advisor was not a doctor

ing the women out of MechEng, one sassy bitch at a time.”

Others have expressed some degree of surprise with the decision to give the award to Physics. “I always thought that the problem with the boys in Physics was that they can’t look a woman in the eye without stammering and making Magic: The Gathering references, and not that they are disrespectful to women,” McGall Physics student Samantha Goeppert-Mayer remarked. “But then again, I don’t hang out in the undergrad lounge too much. There’s always the chance of getting hit by a stray foosball.”

The Physics department consists of roughly 20 per cent female students and is home to several highly accomplished female faculty members.

Illustration Brahmin Stompin’ | The Twice-a-Weekly

Boom city Explosion of MudPack armoury shakes Montreal Angel Eyes The McGall Twice-a-Weekly

A

Illustration Brahmin Stompin’ | The Twice-a-Weekly

Photo Hieronymus Chan | The Twice-a -Weekly

n undercover operation by the McGall Twice-aWeekly today revealed that last Wednesday’s 4.5 magnitude earthquake was actually caused by an explosion of munitions hidden in an underground base beneath Mount Royal.

The Twice-a-Weekly traced footprints back to an apartment in the Plateau, belonging to a member of the McGall MudPack. MudPack is the semi-non-fascist organization which last year distributed “white [power] squares” and halted the AUS from officially joining the glorious (and topless[!]) revolution against Premier Charest. The explosion is thought to have been caused by a dissident founding member of the group who goes by the name of Brayden “Blaze” Stephens; Stephens expected MudPack to purge him in the coming weeks.

MudPack had been collecting weapons since it gained notoriety on campus and pushed through a number of (not-so-muderate) reforms in AUS and SSMU referendum periods and declaring its support for various AUS and SSMU candidates – most of whom were elected.

Among the recovered weapons were AK-47s traced to Nicaraguan Contras and Lockheed Martin precision-guided munitions.

Stephens, speaking on the condition of non-anonymity, claims the weapons hoarding was in preparation of “Operation Bay of Shatner,” a student government coup. Upon the election of

its President, Derman Whom, as an AUS representative to SSMU. Because of the explosion and results of the election, MudPack’s plans have been reportedly pushed back by six months.